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Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 43, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2023-06-14T14:54:24+00:00
The MCCH investigation of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs
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2023-12-19T17:50:05+00:00
The MCCH learned of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs from the New York Urban League. His father, Lawyer Hobbs, went several times to the 28th Precinct police station on West 123rd Street trying to get the name and shield number of the patrolman who had shot Lloyd, which the family had been too upset to get when they encountered him at Harlem Hospital. He also wanted to file a complaint against the officer. Although Hobbs "was told by the inspector that he could not file a complaint because he did not witness the affair, and knew nothing about it," no one at the precinct mentioned that Detective O'Brien was investigating the shooting. As police kept him "running up and down with no satisfaction," Lawyer Hobbs also went to the offices of the New York Urban League on West 136th Street. The Urban League was a social work and civil rights organization focused on the social and economic conditions of Black residents. James Hubert, the executive director, told Hobbs that they would look into it and to come back later. Although Hobbs did not mention it, someone at the Urban League also recorded his statement. Hobbs recounted what his son Russell had told him, that the boys had stopped to see what a crowd was looking at when a patrolman appeared telling them to "break it up." The boys joined everyone else in running; the patrolman then shot Lloyd. Hobbs also added the exchange he and his wife had with the patrolman at Harlem Hospital, when he told them he had shot the boy because he had not stopped when told to. Lawyer Hobbs returned on Monday, March 25, to find that Hubert had no results for him. However, three days later, on March 28, the Urban League sent a letter sent to the MCCH, which enclosed the statement by Hobbs and asked for ”cooperation” and “assistance.” The MCCH had appealed for information in the statement it gave the press after its first meeting on March 25.
The MCCH responded to the information from the Urban League by including “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family" on the list of eyewitnesses asked to give testimony to the first public hearing on March 30. Near the end of the day-long hearing, as Captain Rothengast was being questioned about who had been shot during the disorder, the chairman, Arthur Garfield Hays, asked did he "know anything specifically about a boy by the name of Hobbs?" Hays then had Mrs. Carrie Hobbs stand up, to ask her if her son Russell was present, and called the boy up to testify. Rothengast knew nothing beyond what was in the arrest report, so Hays excused him so Russell could be questioned. His testimony, or at least as recorded by the stenographer, was a somewhat garbled version of what he had told his parents. He talked of stopping on 125th Street, not 7th Avenue, and the patrolmen running up on the pavement on a horse, not in a patrol car. Few newspapers stories about the hearing mentioned Russell's testimony, even as they reported Lloyd's death later that night. Hays, however, did pay attention to the testimony, not only because Lloyd had died. Hays made investigating deaths during the disorder and victims of police brutality the next focus of his subcommittee's hearings.
On April 1, Hays wrote to the MCCH's secretary, Eunice Carter, telling her to have the Hobbs family attend the next hearing, on April 6, and to "have our investigators find out all they can about [the Hobbs case]." He also had an attorney at his law firm assisting him, Hyman Glickstein, write to Police Inspector Di Martini and the superintendent of Harlem Hospital to obtain their records relating to Lloyd Hobbs. Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, one of the staff who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. He did what Detective O'Brien had not; he interviewed the Hobbs family "as the first source," having the advantage of knowing that Russell had been with Lloyd when Mcinerney shot him. Tartar complied a "social and economic history of the family" and took statements from Russell and his mother. He also learned from Lawyer Hobbs that he had been contacted by two eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore.
Tartar met with the men at 213 West 128th Street, the apartment building in which they both lived, and recorded "their story." Malloy said he had walked past the automobile store almost two hours before McInerney alleged he had heard the window breaking and Hobbs taking items and the windows had been entirely broken with no merchandise remaining inside them. Not long before the Hobbs brothers arrived, he and Moore had come out to get ice cream for their wives, who were in the Moores apartment. As they arrived at the northwest corner of 128th and 7th Avenue, they saw a "commotion" on the block of 7th Avenue to the south. As they watched, people began to move toward them, breaking into a run. When Lloyd Hobbs turned west on 128th Street, they saw the patrolman shoot the boy without calling on him to halt. Nothing fell to the ground when the shot hit the boy. They also contradicted the officers' claim that objects had been thrown at them, saying that seeing both men had guns caused people in the area to stay away.
On April 2, Tartar also spoke with ADA Saul Price, who told him "that the officer had not been exonerated, due to the fact that he was waiting to hear the story from the Hobbs family, particularly Russell Hobbs." An interview with the police department's ballistic expert produced no information as he had not received the bullet that hit Lloyd. Tartar's visit to Harlem Hospital was more successful, as Dr. Steinholz shared the boy's chart, which the investigator copied. An additional interview with Inspector Di Martini not mentioned in Tartar's report allowed him to make a copy of a report to Commissioner Valentine from commander of the 28th Precinct, Captain George Mulholland, on the subject of "The shooting of prisoner by Patrolman." It described McInerney observing Hobbs leaving the store window "with several objects in his hands," giving that evidence a far more prominent and specific place than they had in O'Brien's reports. Threats to the patrolman also received more attention, with allegations that "the colored people in the immediate vicinity threw bottles and other objects from the windows with the intent to strike the officer” and that the officers "dispersed a large crowd of colored men and women who had threatened them" before they could leave the scene.
Tartar was among those who testified at the MCCH's April 6 public hearing, with Russell Hobbs and both his parents, Malloy and Moore, and a third man who had been with them when Lloyd Hobbs was shot, Samuel Pitts. Pitts' name was added in pencil to the MCCH's typewritten witness list, indicating they had not known he would be present. He likely came with Malloy and Moore, although he lived some distance from them, at 112 West 127th Street. Pitts witnessed the shooting from the same corner as those men, where he had been since about 10:00 PM, "looking after people and cops shooting[, and] talking about the riot." Russell's testimony was more in line with his statement than the previous week. Having continued to run up 7th Avenue fearing a beating by police, he had not, however, seen his brother shot. His parents testified that when they found Lloyd in the hospital, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” McInerney, guarding the boy, said "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" Malloy, Moore, and Pitts, who all had seen the shooting, described the same details. Arthur Garfield Hays had also expected Patrolman McInerney to testify, but although he was at the hearing, District Attorney Dodge had refused to allow officers involved in cases in the legal system to give evidence. The police officer who did testify, also not on the MCCH list of witnesses, was Detective Thomas McCormick, the stenographer who recorded Lloyd's statement at Harlem Hospital. He read that statement, which echoed what the boy had told his parents when they found him in the hospital: he had done nothing but run when the patrol car pulled up but McInerney had shot him. The hearing also heard from medical staff from Harlem Hospital. The case of Lloyd Hobbs was the first about which Hays asked them. All Dr. Arthur Logan could tell him was the nature of the boy's injuries; he had not said anything in the doctor's presence and no items had been found in his clothing. While the Black press (except for the New York Amsterdam News) highlighted the testimony on the case, among white publications only the radical Daily Worker and New Masses gave it similar prominence in reporting the hearing, and only the New York Times and Home News among the mainstream white press even mentioned Lloyd Hobbs.
Hays announced plans to continue hearing evidence about the killing of Lloyd Hobbs at his subcommittee's next public hearing, in two weeks, the New York Times, New York Age, and Afro-American reported. However, Detective O'Brien delivered subpoenas to the three eyewitnesses after they appeared before the MCCH. Two days later, ADA Saul Price drew the men into the police investigation.
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2022-06-22T13:13:29+00:00
Police deploy beyond 125th Street
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2024-01-29T16:23:34+00:00
“As they arrived, the police were distributed through 125th Street from Lenox to St. Nicholas Avenues from 125th to 135th Streets,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Disorder spread beyond 125th Street sometime before police were deployed in those areas. Windows were reported broken on 7th Avenue north of 127th Street not long after 8:30 PM with no indication that police were present until around 9:45 PM, when an officer from the 40th Precinct in the Bronx arrested Leroy Brown at 7th Avenue and 127th Street. After 10:00 PM police began to appear on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street. There is no evidence of when police deployed on 8th Avenue, but it seems likely it occurred around the time they moved on to 7th Avenue as officers were concentrated on that block of 125th Street. It was over an hour later that the sources mention police on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, an area east of where they had been concentrated. Crowds had been attacking stores on Lenox Avenue since at least 10:30 PM. Those crowds were not concentrated as they had been on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. Officers attempted to guard damaged stores that might be looted or patrolled blocks and intersections on foot as they had on 125th Street to respond to any crowds that gathered. Between twenty and thirty radio cars patrolled larger sections of the avenues, pulling over when they encountered incidents of disorder. It is not clear if Emergency trucks also patrolled the avenues; they are mentioned in the press only taking up fixed positions. There is no mention of mounted police anywhere but 125th Street. The New York Times, Home News, and New York Sun also reported that patrolling police saved white men and women from assault, with the New York Evening Journal and New York American reporting specific incidents that might have occurred in this time period, although no arrests were made in such circumstances to provide evidence to confirm either the general or specific claims.
The area over which disorder spread was too large to occupy or cordon off, and officers appear to have spent much of their time reacting to attacks on property. They succeeded in stopping those attacks only for as long as they were present. And even then, the range of their protection was limited to one side of the street. In Harlem, 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue were major roadways, with two lanes of traffic in each direction, and an island planted with trees in the middle of 7th Avenue. The time it took officers to cross that distance often gave crowds times to disperse and avoid arrest. Unlike on 125th Street, police were not involved in the clashes with large crowds that saw officers injured; three police suffered injuries, one making an arrest and two driving on 8th Avenue. As they deployed across Harlem, police appear to have more often fired their guns than they had when establishing a perimeter around 125th Street. Newspaper reports of that shooting generally attributed it to the outbreak of looting, a legally more serious crime that police practice treated as justifying firing at suspects. The two Black men killed by police gunfire were both alleged to have been looting. However, five unattributed shootings of Black men suggest that police fired more indiscriminately at crowds. Police also appear to have continued to have hit those they arrested with their nightsticks and revolver and rifle butts. Police also appear to have made more arrests during this period of the disorder than earlier; almost half of the arrests with information on timing occurred between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. Arrests for looting are a large part of that total; as a more serious crime, police may have been more likely to make arrests for looting than for breaking windows or other activities.
The timing of arrests provides one source of evidence of when police began to deploy beyond 125th Street. However, Lt. Battle later told his biographer Langston Hughes that arrests were not an option early in the disorder as police were too outnumbered. An arrest required officers leaving the street to take their prisoner to a station house. Stories in the New York Evening Journal pointed to the need to guard damaged stores as an additional constraint on police. Furthermore, information on timing and location was available for only forty-seven of the 128 arrests (37%), with information on location but not timing for an additional thirty-two arrests (so 62%, 79 of 128, of arrests can be mapped). Consequently, the lack of arrests, particularly before 11:00 PM, was uncertain evidence of the absence of police.
The first recorded arrest away from 125th Street does not appear to result from the dispersal of officers across Harlem. The patrolman who intervened in an attack on a white man by a group of Black men on St. Nicholas Avenue and West 127th Street around 9:00 PM and arrested Paul Boyett was likely in a radio car going to 125th Street from the 30th Precinct not sent from where police were gathered. The next arrest, of Leroy Brown on 7th Avenue and 127th Street at 9:45 PM, offers clearer evidence of police deploying. Patrolman Edward Doran came from the 40th Precinct, directly across the river from Harlem in the Bronx. He testified to seeing a crowd gather in front of the store, and Brown then throw a tailor’s dummy through the window. While Doran arrested Brown, the other members of the group he heard and saw break windows further up 7th Avenue were not arrested. Twenty-five minutes later, Patrolman Irwin Young, who had earlier arrested Harry Gordon on 125th Street, made the second arrest on the same block of 7th Avenue, across the street. Although the first arrests south of 125th Street did not occur until after 11:00 PM, officers were reported to have clashed with crowds at 121st Street around 10:30 PM. That those officers made no arrests likely indicates that there were too few of them to control the crowd. A New York Evening Journal story sensationalized the incident in those terms: “Policemen attached to the West 123rd st. station were surrounded by men and women. Guns were drawn but the mob refused to disband and in the ensuing exchange of shots Lyman Quarterman, 34, 306 W. 146th St., was shot in the abdomen,” almost certainly by police. By 12:30 AM when Fred Campbell drove by, there were “an unusual number of patrolmen and policemen out with riot guns” at that intersection. Officers made arrests as far south as West 116th Street after midnight, but the number of damaged and looted businesses suggests a limited presence and concern with the Puerto Rican neighborhood centered on 116th Street.
Police likely deployed along 8th Avenue around the same time as they did along 7th Avenue as police had gathered at that intersection with 125th Street as they had at the other end of the block. There was no evidence of the timing of any of the arrests made on that street, which took place both north and south of 125th Street, although there are no arrests north of 135th Street as there were on 7th Avenue.
The first arrests on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street came after 11:00 PM, but in that area there was not any indication of a police deployment earlier. Most of the arrests after midnight occurred on those blocks of Lenox Avenue, where police took people into custody as far north as 135th Street. Those blocks also saw the most extensive looting, a combination that suggests that the number of arrests reflected the scale and changed character of the disorder rather than indicating that police more effectively controlled the people on the streets. There was only one arrest recorded on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, an area with relatively few businesses, and not until 2 AM. That arrest was of a man carrying goods allegedly stolen from a hardware store, not damaging or looting a store. Around the same time police made arrests on the same sections of 7th Avenue.
After 3:00 AM there is a lull in both arrests and reported events. Earlier, when Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, in charge of uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, had been driven through Harlem just before midnight, he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that “thousands of persons were staying in the streets late,” although he judged that “most of them appeared to be spectators.” Although Lt. Battle told a hearing of the MCCH that “there was no excitement” when he went on to Harlem streets at 2:00 AM, there was evidence of violence and arrests on Lenox and 7th Avenues on both sides of 125th Street at that time. However, when McAuliffe toured the neighborhood again at 4:00 AM, he “reported that all was quiet,” according to a story in the New York World Telegram. That assessment was likely why police called from precincts outside Harlem were sent home at that time, according to the New York Evening Journal. By that time it appears that police were relying on radio cars to patrol the avenues. The final arrests of the disorder came around 5:00 AM, made by officers in radio cars patrolling 8th Avenue and Lenox Avenue.
The combination of arrest and continued violence in the first arrest beyond 125th Street prefigured the results of police activity for the remainder of the disorder. The MCCH report summarized the situation as one in which “Crowds constantly changed their make-up. When bricks thrown through store windows brought the police, the crowds would often dissolve, only to gather again and continue their assaults upon property.” The New York World Telegram offered a similar picture: "Whenever the police succeeded in scattering them, the mobs reformed to continue their outbreaks." Predictably, the New York Evening Journal offered a sensationalized version of that narrative, in which "[mobs] disappeared, though, only to turn up at some other corner to wreak vengeance again on all whites and the police." In the Times Union's narrative, the violence, while not ephemeral, was as discontinuous as those newspapers, with "sporadic and small riots [breaking] out in various parts of Harlem." The Daily News focused on the dispersal of the crowds, describing how "armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem," "too scattered for police to corral." So too did the New York Herald Tribune's narrative, in which "outbreaks spread to other parts of Harlem, with smaller groups here and there." In the New York Times "roving bands of Negro men and women" forcibly resisting "500 policemen patrolling streets in an area of more than a square mile," later becoming "marauding bands." In the New York Sun it was "small roving mobs which prowled through the city throughout the night," although most of its narrative attributed the violence to a single "frenzied and race-crazed mob...who tore through the streets." The dispersed nature of the violence is less clear in the narratives of other publications. The New York Post described a "tidal wave of rioting" that "surged through the district," and "recurring waves" of rioting. The Home News offered little sense of the location of the disorder, noting only that "the disorder spread to adjoining streets," and making one mention of "roving bands of colored men." So too did the New York American, which mentioned only that the outbreak "spread with disastrous results over an area of several blocks," and the Daily Mirror, in which the description was more dramatic and vaguer: "It was a wild night of melee with mob violence spreading as the night wore on.... The “battlefield” was no longer W. 125th St. It was spreading. It was Harlem."
Storeowners seeking police to protect their businesses reported that telephone calls and visits to the stationhouses failed to bring officers. Even when they arrived, police could often offer limited protection. After officers who fired their pistols in the air to disperse a crowd near Lenox Avenue and 132nd Street succeeding only in moving them from one side of the street to the other without interrupting their attacks on business, the frightened staff of William Feinstein’s liquor store locked up and fled. Several hours later police failed to stop the store from being looted, only arriving in time to arrest one of a group who took bottles of liquor. After the disorder, Feinstein joined more than a hundred business owners who successfully sued the city for failing to protect their property. Representing approximately a third of the businesses reported damaged or looted during the disorder, that number suggests a widespread scenario. However, the litigants and evidence of looting are concentrated on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets. Those blocks also saw significant numbers of arrests. By contrast, 7th Avenue north of 129th Street saw very few reported incidents and only two arrests, although at least half of the eighteen arrests for which they are no details could have been in that area.
The gunfire that frightened Feinstein’s staff was a more frequent feature of the police response beyond 125th Street. The New York Times attributed that shooting to officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as occurred around Feinstein’s liquor store. So too did the New York Herald Tribune, until midnight, when “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” That account fitted claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns, according to the New York Evening Journal: “But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns—were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks.” Sensationalized stories of violence against white men and women was the focus of that white newspaper's narrative of the disorder. In another story the New York Evening Journal presented police as using guns in response to crowds starting two fires on Lenox Avenue. (While firefighters extinguished those blazes, the claim in the Daily Mirror that they were “also pressed into the work of taming the mob"” appears to be an invention. There is no other evidence that “Fire engines were placed at advantageous positions in the side streets of the riot zone prepared to 'wet down' the more heated.” To the contrary, Inspector Di Martini told an MCCH hearing that he did not "call upon the fire department" as the crowds on 125th Street were not large enough to require them.)
Both the incidents in which police shot and killed Black men, Lloyd Hobbs on 7th Avenue and James Thompson on 8th Avenue, involved alleged looting. No one was identified as responsible for shooting and wounding an additional five Black men; all those incidents took place after 1:00 AM, in the areas where at that time looting was most prevalent. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police, presenting police as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob": ”The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during an MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” Rothengast had earlier told the hearing that "several shots were fired from roofs and windows at us. I saw the fire from a pistol as it was shot from a roof on 129th Street.” Several white newspapers reported incidents of police being shot at that other evidence suggests did not happen. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported James Thompson shot at the detectives trying to arrest him, while the New York Evening Journal sensationally reported an even larger gunfight in which "other rioters" returned the officer's shots. However, police records make clear that only the detectives fired weapons, hitting Thompson and a white passerby, while one also shot himself in the hand. Similarly, a sniper attack on police reported by New York World Telegram, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Times Union, and Home News appears not to have happened. The four men police arrested were charged with disorderly conduct for “annoying,” a charge that would not have been made had they actually shot at police. If anyone did shoot at police, they failed to hit their targets.
Only two police officers were injured away from 125th Street, in large part because the situations in which officers had been injured around Kress’ store did not occur when the disorder was not concentrated on a single location. Patrolman Whittington of Emergency Squad #9 was reportedly hit by a rock on a truck at 8th Avenue at 123rd Street around midnight. That location was close enough to the perimeter which police established around Kress’ store and 125th Street that the truck may have been part of that response to the disorder rather than involved in efforts to control crowds in the wider neighborhood. (A car driven by Detective Lt. Frank Lenahan on 8th Avenue was also hit by rocks, perhaps also away from 125th Street. Cars and buses driving on 7th Avenue were also attacked with rocks, including one with a Black driver, so Lenahan may not have been targeted as a policeman.) The second officer, Detective Nicholas Campo, was shot with his own revolver while trying to make an arrest; Irwin Young allegedly had also allegedly been assaulted during an arrest at the beginning of the disorder. Otherwise, the clashes between police and crowds that occurred around 125th Street did not happen when the disorder was not concentrated on Kress store: rather than attacking police guarding stores, crowds drew them away or waited until they moved away; and rather than resisting police efforts to disperse them, crowds scattered and reformed when police moved on.
With police killing Lloyd Hobbs the only incident beyond 125th Street to which the MCCH gave attention, information on the police response came from newspaper stories and legal records. When the disorder spread beyond 125th Street, reporters appear to have remained there, where police were concentrated, at the police stations on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street, and at Harlem Hospital. In reporting this period of the disorder they relied on police accounts of the incidents in which they made arrests. The narrow focus of arrest reports, which mentioned only the arresting officer, obscured the details of the police deployment. In a small number of cases, arrests by officers patrolling in radio cars were identified; however, radio cars were likely involved in additional arrests. -
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2020-02-24T23:43:11+00:00
Assaults by police (?)
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2024-01-17T20:11:06+00:00
There are no reported victims of assaults by police officers during the disorder aside from Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, the two men police officers shot and killed. Four additional Black men arrested by police appeared in lists of the injured, one shot, three with injuries that may have resulted from being beaten. Harry Gordon, a white man arrested trying to speak at the beginning of the disorder, claimed he was beaten while in custody. Generalized reports of violence by police suggested that some unattributed incidents of violence and injuries may have been the work of police officers.
The uniformed patrolmen who responded to the disorder carried both nightsticks and pistols. Detectives did not typically carry nightsticks but were issued them to deal with the crowds, according to the New York Evening Journal. Emergency trucks carried rifles that were used by the patrolmen who crewed those vehicles. All those weapons were evident in photographs of police taken during the disorder. Officers first resorted to nightsticks and pistols used as clubs. A Daily News photograph of the arrest of Charles Alston showed one of the officers holding his pistol by the barrel so the butt could function as a club, a detail to which the newspaper’s caption drew attention. The Times Union story on the riot noted that “Police night sticks accounted for almost as many minor injuries as the shower of stones thrown from rooftops, windows and hallways by rioters.” Officers used nightsticks when they sought to move or contain crowds. One can be seen in the hand of the officer pushing into the crowd in a Daily News photograph; that one of the Black men to his right appears to be reaching for the officer’s arm confirms he is swinging into the people in front of him.
One Afro-American journalist reported that while mounted police had been "somewhat rough" early in the disorder, violence by other officers only came later in the disorder, "early Wednesday morning, as the news that fellow-officers had been wounded with bricks increased, [when] other officers 'got even' by 'mussing up' whoever came into their hands." Further evidence of that more indiscriminate use of nightsticks appeared in a New York Herald Tribune story about the “best joke” doing the rounds at the West 135th Street station after the disorder. It involved Detectives McCane and Teed chasing a group of Black residents into a hallway near 130th Street and Lenox Avenue. Although that area saw the most concentrated looting of the disorder, the officers were not seeking to make an arrest. Instead, after Teed went into the hallway, McCabe waited outside. As Teed caused each of the black individuals to flee back to the street, McCabe “hit them over the head with a nightstick” as they went by. It became a joke when his “zealousness” led him to hit his partner when he too exited the hallway. Similarly, police responded to a crowd attacking the car in which Betty Wilcox sat, she related, "with big clubs swinging,... and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air."
A Black man named James White suffered a “laceration of the scalp…during an altercation with an unknown white man” just a block away from that incident, at 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. He reported that assault only to the hospital staff from whom he sought treatment. White did not identify his assailant as a police officer, perhaps indicating the man was not in uniform. Detectives who wore plainclothes like McCabe and Teed would have made up a significant proportion of the white men present at the heart of the disorder. Andrew Lyons, a Black man who suffered a fatal injury to his skull during the disorder, may also have been hit with a nightstick. Two newspapers reported he had been injured on 125th Street, at different locations on the police perimeter. However, medical records indicated he did not receive medical attention until the evening after the disorder, by which time he was described as "stuporous" and unable to tell doctors what had happened to him.
The only photograph of an arrest being made, published in the Daily News, did not show, but suggested, violence by police. Two officers were visible, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, with one standing over a Black man seated on the ground (none of the arrests with locations identified in the sources occurred at the corner). The patrolman was “dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison,” according to the caption, although the image did not offer a view of the patrolman's hands. That kind of treatment could produce some of the injuries reported in the press. More serious injuries would have come from being hit with a nightstick. One officer in the photograph had his nightstick under his arm, while the other, in the foreground, had a revolver in one hand and a nightstick in the other. As they had those weapons at hand, they likely employed them in apprehending the man. He may have fallen, but it seems more likely that the officers knocked him down during the arrest. His face was obscured by his hat so there were no visible signs that he was beaten. (In the background several Black women are visible walking past the scene along 127th Street, one looking back over her shoulder at the police.)
Black men arrested during the disorder displayed further evidence of police violence. The New York Post reported that many of the prisoners who filled the West 123d and West 135th Street police stations before midnight were “slightly injured,” while the New York Sun described "groups of prisoners battered and bruised." Descriptions and published photographs of the appearance of prisoners the next day in line-ups and being transported to court confirmed those reports. Many had bandaged heads and visible bruises. The New York Sun unambiguously attributed those injuries to the men’s “furious battles with the police.”
Four Black men and a white man arrested by police were also among those reported injured. Patrolman Conn hit Paul Boyett in the shoulder when he shot at the crowd around a group of men assaulting Timothy Murphy. A doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. When James Smitten was arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz, the “lacerations to the scalp he received in some unknown manner” were severe enough that doctors were also called to the 28th Precinct to treat him. Isaac Daniels had contusions on his arm and Hashi Mohammed internal injuries, with no description of the circumstances in which they were wounded. In addition, Louise Thompson reported to the MCCH the “severe beating” that she saw Patrolman Irwin Young and his colleagues administer to Harry Gordon, a white Communist, when they arrested him on 125th Street. ILD lawyer Isidore Englander did not see police beat Frank Wells, but saw the results when he found him at the Harlem Magistrates Court. "His head was bandaged, his shirt was red with blood, he could not stand on his feet," Englander testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH by the Communist Party, Wells was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street, again at the police station, and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20.
While few reports of the disorder showed any concern about the indiscriminate use of nightsticks by police, officers' use of their guns was another matter. No one disputed that guns were fired, beginning almost as soon as police faced crowds. The officer in the foreground of the Daily News photograph of an arrest above has drawn his revolver, ready to fire it, not use it as a club. However, newspaper stories emphasized that prior to midnight, officers fired those shots into the air, not at any individuals. The Daily News reported very precisely that the detachment of police trying to clear crowds from 125th Street after someone broke the first window in Kress’ store fired five shots into the air. The shooting of Lyman Quarterman around 10:30 PM was to be at odds with that claim: he was part of a crowd police were attempting to disperse on 7th Avenue at 121st Street, firing their weapons, supposedly only in the air. However, there were no reports of anyone else other than police firing guns during that incident.
After midnight, when looting and damage to property increased, whatever restraint police had shown in using their guns disappeared, notwithstanding one Afro-American journalist who claimed that police "did not fire into crowds." It was during this period that officers shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, and that Patrolman William Clement shot at a crowd pursuing B. Z. Kondoul, a white man, allegedly in order to protect him from assault. Four other Black men suffered gunshot wounds from unidentified shooters in the same period, all but one in the area in which looting was concentrated. It was likely that at least some were shot by police. Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” There was little evidence of Black individuals firing guns; there were two arrests for possessing a gun. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots around 130th Street sometime during the disorder that "apparently came from some roof or window on the side streets," but he did not actually see that himself. Despite the evidence of police firing at crowds, the New York Post reporter compared the fatalities and injured favorably to "the long lists of deaths that might easily have resulted," indicating that "the police handled the crisis so carefully." A journalist for the Afro-American agreed that "the police, on the whole were restrained," but saw a different consequence, that the "crowd would not have been downed if colored bodies were scattered here and there felled by police bullets."
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1
2020-02-24T23:10:53+00:00
Shot and wounded (7)
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2023-12-11T03:04:19+00:00
Seven individuals were shot during the disorder (and two others shot and killed). The targets of five of the seven shootings were Black men, whereas those hit by objects were mostly white men and women. Few details exist of who shot the Black men or the man of unknown race. The police officer was shot by his own gun in a struggle with James Thompson during his arrest. No one was arrested for the other shootings. (Not included in that total was an incident in which four men allegedly shot at, but did not hit, a police officer. The men were not charged with assault, only disorderly conduct, and were acquitted.)
The shooting of Lyman Quarterman attracted the most attention largely because newspapers initially reported that the thirty-four-year-old Black man had been killed, but also because his shooting occurred early in the riot, around 10:30 PM, in the midst of a crowd at 7th Avenue and 121st Street. The remaining men were shot in unknown circumstances, with no details in either hospital records or in the lists of the injured published by newspapers, where their names were accompanied only by brief descriptions of the nature of their wounds, about which different publications rarely agreed.
It is likely that police were responsible for most of these shootings. Officers assigned to control the disorder carried pistols and the crews of emergency trucks carried “riot guns” — rifles. Images of armed officers are a staple of the photographs that accompanied newspaper stories. That some police fired their guns in the air as part of their efforts to disperse crowds was widely reported. The New York Times reported officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as did the New York Herald Tribune and Afro-American. That narrative fit claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). However, the shooting of Lyman Quarterman was an awkward fit with that narrative. Police were struggling with the crowd of which he was part, but the white press overwhelmingly chose to address the possibility that an officer had shot him only obliquely. Those stories offered conflicting details, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting that no officers fired their weapons, the Times Union that many had, but only into the air, and the New York Evening Journal that they had exchanged gunfire with the crowd. An exception was the headline the New York Times published for its story on the disorder on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself only reported that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot."
By later in the disorder, police were shooting at people on the streets according to a variety of sources. The New York Herald Tribune reported that around midnight, “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns according to the New York Evening Journal: “But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns-were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks.” That was the time period in which the other shootings, and the two additional fatal shootings by police, took place; after 1:00 AM, and with one exception in areas where looting occurred. The exception was De Soto Windgate, who was shot while walking on West 144th Street, six blocks from any other incident in the disorder. Details of his shooting appeared only in the 32nd Precinct records of individuals aided by officers. The only connection to the disorder was the timing of his shooting, so it may be unrelated. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police by presenting officers as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob" "The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” If these Black men were hit by police bullets, they may not have been the targets of those shots. When officers shot at James Thompson as he fled a building on 8th Avenue, stray bullets hit two white men on the other side of the street. Police firing into crowds to disperse them could also have hit bystanders.
One incident of Black men firing guns was reported by white newspapers and the Associated Press as involving a group of men firing on police from a rooftop on 138th Street and Lenox Avenue at the very end of the disorder. But the fullest account of those events, in the Home News, did not offer clear evidence that a shooting took place: the officers who made the arrests responded to the sound of gunshots rather than seeing a shooting, and found no guns on the four men they arrested — “During the chase they are said to have thrown away their pistols.” Police clearly had no other evidence that the men had fired at police as they chargedthem only with disorderly conduct, annotated as "annoy." And evidence of even that charge was clearly not presented as three of the men, Albert Yerber, Edward Loper, and Ernest Johnson, were tried and acquitted in the Magistrates Court, and the fourth, Charles Alston, whose injuries suffered trying to escape police delayed his appearance, discharged. Similarly, while Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots fired around 130th Street at some point in the disorder, he could not establish who fired them: "I tried to see where they came from. Apparently they came from some roof or window on the side streets." Those shots were more likely fired by police.
Two men arrested in the disorder were charged with possession of a firearm, one white and one Black. No stories about the circumstances of their arrests appeared in the press, as you would expect had they been involved in shootings.
In two striking examples, white newspapers reported gun fights that did not happen. When Stanley Dondoro was hit by shots fired by two detectives pursuing James Thompson, a New York Evening Journal story reported Dondoro had been hit by “other rioters [who] returned the fire.” The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported a gun battle between the officers and Thompson, who was unarmed.As Part of Related Categories:
- Assaults on Black men (5/13)
- Assaults on police (1/9)
- Assault in the courts (1/9)
- Injured in assaults (7/49)
- Assaults by police (?)
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2023-07-02T17:39:13+00:00
Frazier's report
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2023-12-17T16:55:08+00:00
Frazier’s account of the events of the disorder was one of the first chapters circulated to MCCH members on January 2, 1936. It had a different form and tone than the report of the Subcommittee on Crime, as Frazier had told his Howard University colleague Alain Locke that the preliminary reports were “inadequate to represent his final conclusions." While it began with the same narrative of events in the Kress store as Hays and Villard had in the subcommittee report, Frazier’s chapter extended to events beyond 125th Street not covered in that document and recast the character of those involved in them. While finding the antagonism that police had generated throughout the events of the disorder, Frazier tempered the tone of the criticism of police in the subcommittee report except in regard to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. He was also less critical of the role of the Young Liberators and Communists, going as far as praising them for helping limit interracial violence.
The disorder after Rivera was grabbed resulted from a “fortuitous combination of subsequent events,” in Frazier’s narrative, rather than the being driven by the attitude of police towards Harlem residents that the earlier report had highlighted. The actions of officers in the Kress store “tended to infuriate the crowd,” while their quick and violent arrests of Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon when they tried to speak “only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd.” Those reactions were examples of “a lack of confidence in the police and even hostility toward these representatives of the law...evident at every stage of the riot.” Frazier's assessment fell short of the “intense hostility” toward officers seen as “lawless oppressors who stop at no brutality or at the taking of human life" described by Hays and Villard. Only in his discussion of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs by Patrolman McInerney did Frazier match the judgment of the earlier report, not only echoing it in labeling the shooting “inexcusable” but describing it as “brutal.”
The actions of groups affiliated with the Communist Party received even less criticism from Frazier than had been directed at them in the subcommittee report. That document had described their distribution of leaflets suggesting that Rivera had been beaten as “highly censurable,” while simply noting that those leaflets did not appear until after the disorder had begun. Frazier couched his judgment of those actions in lesser, if more ponderous terms, as “exhibiting a lack of due regard for the possible serious consequences of acting on more rumors.” In addition to directly stating that Communists were “not responsible for the disorder,” he also redirected some of the blame toward one of their greatest adversaries, the Hearst press: “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that race riot was going on in Harlem.”
More strikingly, Frazier endorsed a Communist claim not mentioned in the earlier report that tied directly to the party’s focus on interracial organizing in pursuit of worker's rights: “that they prevented the outbreak from becoming a race riot.” While not granting them “full credit,” he asserted that Communists “deserve more credit than any other element for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks.” The only evidence Frazier offered was that police arresting and beating two white men, Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon, for trying to “take the parts of the indignant Negro crowds” in front of the Kress store had “changed the complexion of the outbreak.” Louise Thompson had presented those events in similar terms in her testimony to the MCCH, but her ties with the Communist Party predisposed her to that view. The change to which Frazier alluded was to “an attack upon property and not upon persons.” Even if those events had the impact claimed on those on 125th Street at that time, the people there made up only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder. Moreover, as the MCCH had not taken up either violence that did not involve the police or attacks on property in its investigation, it was not clear on what Frazier based his claim. In fact, there was evidence of multiple attacks on white men and women that complicated if not contradicted Frazier’s characterization. Nonetheless, historians writing about the disorder have adopted his occlusion of interpersonal violence alongside his emphasis on violence against property.
In a departure from the focus of the Subcommittee on Crime, Frazier’s narrative extended beyond the outbreak of the disorder on 125th Street to events throughout the evening and across Harlem. While he followed the MCCH members in limiting the crowd to “a few thousand” including the “many unemployed” on the streets, he was not as content as they had been to report that “those who looted stores obviously belonged to the hoodlum class who made use of the opportunity." That “criminal element” formed only part of the crowds in Frazier's account, alongside “many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals [who] joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure.” Their presence among the participants had been mentioned in the testimony of Captain Rothengast and Inspector Di Martini but omitted by Hays and Villard. Frazier also included “some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but had suffered years of privation, [who] seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property.” He also introduced a fluidity to the behavior of those crowds; they formed “here and there as the rumors spread,” “constantly changed their make-up,” dissolved and reformed, “showed various needs and changed their mood from time to time.” Jarringly, straying close to racist stereotypes, Frazier claimed, “Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key.” Only Captain Rothengast had briefly mentioned such behavior in the public hearings, noting, "I don’t believe they were indignant about the rumors. I saw a number of them yelling and laughing about things that were being done." If the crowds were not all criminals in Frazier’s account, neither was their behavior a significant threat to “the safety and welfare of the community,” and certainly not a sufficient threat to justify the beatings and arrests Black residents experienced during the disorder.
Frazier vaguely attributed these details of the events of the disorder to “available sources of information” and the “testimony of observers.” Again, the MCCH hearings had not taken up those events, which had been only briefly mentioned by a handful of witnesses. Although it was not a topic in his proposal for the survey, Frazier and his staff had taken statements from several individuals and collected information from the police about some of those arrested and hospital records for some of the injured. However, none of those sources characterized the crowds and events of the disorder in the terms Frazier did. That picture had more in common with the accounts published in the press. Back issues of eighteen white and Black newspapers from the days of the disorder and its immediate aftermath were also among the material gathered by MCCH staff, in September, 1935, when Frazier directed their work. For all Frazier dismissed the value of the press accounts of the public hearings — "a sociologist is supposed to be a better reporter than a newspaper reporter" — it did appear that he took a different approach to reporting on the events of the riot.
Whatever their basis, some of Frazier's departures from the subcommittee report would prompt objections from MCCH members and changes to the chapter. Lindsay Lupo, the only historian who has written about the details of the MCCH report, argued that this text was not Frazier's draft but a version rewritten by MCCH members. However, correspondence between Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard not examined by Lupo detailed changes that MCCH members agreed to make that are revisions of this text, establishing it as Frazier's draft. -
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2022-11-11T22:47:08+00:00
Hays' "rough draft" of the subcommittee report
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2023-12-17T19:01:36+00:00
The ”rough draft” Hays wrote shaped the testimony in the public hearings into a narrative. Villard would reorganize that material, create a section devoted to “The Conduct of Police,” and add interpretations and judgements of the events that Hays had described.
Hays' narrative focused on events in the Kress store and on 125th Street and the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, making only passing mention of the rest of the disorder. He began with Hurley and the store detective grabbing Lino Rivera, included Patrolman Donahue and Officer Eldridge becoming involved and police called to the store being unable to convince shoppers no harm had come to Rivera, and ended with the arrest of speakers on 125th Street and the distribution of leaflets by groups affiliated with the Communist Party after the disorder had begun. That narrative followed the testimony the MCCH had heard with only a handful of minor discrepancies. Hays omitted how Hurley's intention to charge Rivera with assault for biting him led to Eldridge leaving and Donahue having to make the decision about how to release the boy. Omitted also was the later arrest of the three picketers. Hays' narrative also mistakenly had the window in the Kress store broken after Daniel Miller was arrested, not as causing the arrest.
Hays followed that narrative with an extended discussion of what happened to Lloyd Hobbs that summarized the accounts offered by Russell Hobbs, the eyewitnesses, and Patrolman McInerney and his partner before offering some assessment of each in turn. The report highlighted that the items Hobbs had allegedly stolen were not seen until McInerney brought them to the DA's office on April 1st; it did not mention the additional week before the patrolman turned them into the property clerk. Hays also pointed out that the police testimony was "wholly out of line with the testimony of many other witnesses and with the character and standing of Lloyd Hobbs."
Events beyond 125th Street received only brief and general mention. “The disturbance spread along 125th Street and in nearby avenues. Windows were broken and in many cases stores were looted. There were many arrests. The police were out in great number. Their effort was to keep crowds from gathering. Radio patrol cars sped from place to place. The police arrested about a dozen men who were charged with larceny, burglary and other crimes.” At the end of the report, Hays returned to those events to dismiss the claim that crowds had focused on stores owned by Jewish merchants. Instead, “such looting as there was was indiscriminate and seemed to have been indulged in chiefly by the hoodlum element.” (Hays characterized the hoodlums as "not the kind of people who would be influenced by such leaflets" as those distributed by Communists but who "may have used the rumors and leaflets as an excuse.") Most of the crowd that Hays put at “only a few thousand people” were “orderly.” He also asserted that “There was no element of a race riot involved in any way shape or manner, a fact which is greatly to the credit of both our colored and white citizens.”
In characterizing the events the disorder spread beyond 125th Street in that way, Hays was following police testimony in the hearings. Only Captain Rothengast used the term hoodlums to describe participants. Both he and Inspector Di Martini claimed the number of participants was small, smaller in fact than Hays reported, a few hundred rather than a few thousand. Di Martini mentioned they included the unemployed. Hays did not identify the participants as mostly young, aged in their late teens and early twenties, as both Rothengast and Di Martini did. It was Di Martini and Lieutenant Samuel Battle who described the looting as indiscriminate. Both Battle and Rothengast answered in the negative when asked if the events had been a race riot. Just what damage was done during the disorder was not addressed in the draft, leaving the impression that police largely maintained order. Nor was there any mention of assaults, injuries, or deaths. To the contrary, the assertion that the events were not a race riot implied that there had been no violence between Black and white New Yorkers during the disorder.
Hays enumerated seven topics raised by the narrative, which he called “a rather cursory statement of facts.” The identity of the boy in the store, which he concluded had been established as Rivera; that the Communist leaflets were false; that those leaflets were distributed too late to cause the disturbance; that Gordon had been mistreated by police after his arrest for trying to speak to the crowd; that Donahue was mistaken in his decision to release the boy out the back of the store, but “we do not feel he is to be condemned for this”; that police were concerned to “suppress any excitement” rather than providing information to the crowd; and that the “repressive treatment” of police had antagonized Harlem residents and contributed to causing the disorder. (He also criticized the Assistant District Attorney who appeared at a public hearing for being unwilling to testify.) The first and last of those topics, the boy's identity and the actions of police, had been introduced in the hearings by questions from the audience and their reaction to testimony rather than being on the MCCH's program. Police officers failing to provide crowds with the information they sought was primarily the testimony of Louise Thompson, the only witness quoted in the report, and L. F. Cole, as was the conclusion that the leaflets appeared after the disorder had begun.
The remainder of the report described incidents of police brutality as examples of the behavior that had antagonized the community, covering the cases of Thomas Aikens, Edward Laurie, and Robert Patterson. The "general condition" that Hays concluded was illustrated by police actions during and around the disorder was the view asserted by the audience at the hearings: "The rights of Negroes are not respected by police, nor is the law generally observed in police dealings with Negroes." The final section offered two recommendations, for a committee and that the district attorney should take action against police officers who allegedly broke the law.