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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

"Riot Looting Brings a New Indictment," New York Times, March 29. 1923, 9.

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Harry Lash's 5 and 10c store looted and set on fire Around 11.15 PM, Harry Lash closed his 5c & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 130th Street. He likely then went home to his residence at 536 West 178th Street, north of Harlem in Washington Heights. Wherever he was, Lash apparently got news of the disorder in Harlem and returned to the store around two hours later, at approximately 1.20 AM, according to the affidavit he gave later that day in the Magistrates Court. He found the store windows broken, fixtures damaged, and "general merchandise" valued at $1000 missing. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store on West 130th Street, as well as those facing Lenox Avenue, can be seen smashed in the Associated Press photograph published in the New York Sun. Significant damage to the window displays is also visible, but so too are large amounts of merchandise still inside the store, indicating the limits of the scope of the looting. Lash's store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street where reported looting was concentrated. Disorder continued in this area after the time Lash returned to his store.

The rear of Lash's store on West 130th Street had also been set on fire, by a "group of 35 blacks.. soon after midnight," according to the New York Herald Tribune. That crowd "tried to prevent policeman from sounding an alarm - 'let it burn' they shouted," the report continued. "When firemen came, they hindered them too, bustling about hydrants and shoving hose lines about - when firemen threatened to turn the hose on them, they dispersed." Some of those details also appear in the New York Evening Journal, but its story combined the fire and those at at 429 and 431 Lenox Avenue two blocks to north: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. "Let them burn. Let them burn." The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd are larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeats the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn," giving it more prominence. Where the New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters, with actions that seem to involve individuals pressing forward to see the fire getting in their way, the New York Evening Journal characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations are in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds. An Acme agency photograph published in the New York Daily News shows flames in the last section of the store window on West 130th Street, part of which is visible on the left edge the New York Sun photograph. Firefighters can be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the New York Daily News). They appear to have quickly extinguished the fire; the visible fire damage is limited to the area immediately around the rear windows. There are no other newspaper stories or photographs of this fire, but it attracted the attention of newsreel cameramen. Some of the limited footage from the night of the disorder shows the fire burning in the store, with firefighters crossing in front of the camera. No bystanders are visible. Cameramen returned the next day, shooting footage of the burned section of the building both from Lenox Avenue, and, in the Universal newsreel, West 128th Street by the fire-damaged section looking toward Lenox Avenue. Debris is visible on the sidewalk in front of the fire-damaged section in the footage from Lenox Avenue, and several Black men and women walk by the store in the footage from West 128th Street.

Lash's store is misidentified in several sources, including the caption to the Associated Press photograph in the New York Sun: headed "Harlem Rioters Break Every Window in Radio Store," it read "Not a pane of glass was left unbroken in this West 125th Street establishment. The Harlem Church of the Air on the second floor escaped raiders." The New York Herald Tribune also described the store as a Raffer's Radio store. Some of the confusion resulted from the large sign on the store advertising Raffer's Radio Service, which by the time the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941 had been changed to read "Harry's 5 and 10c Store." The details of the windows and the shape of the sign in the Associated Press photograph match those in the Tax Department photograph. Signs for the You Pray for Me Church of the Air visible in the second story windows confirm that match. Sister Rosa Horn's Pentecostal Church occupied the upper floors of the building spanning 392-400 Lenox Avenue by September 1932, remaining for several decades. Additionally, the Acme agency caption and the caption published by the Afro-American identify the store as being on Lenox Avenue. The New York Daily News and New York Herald Tribune captions of the photograph of the store on fire mistakenly located it at 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, but the windows match the distinctive details of Lash's store, as does the presence of the Hope Wo Chinese Hand Laundry next to the store. A Chinese laundry appears in the MCCH Business survey at 68 West 130th Street, and the sign visible in the newspaper photograph can be seen in the Tax Department photograph.

Around 1.50 AM, an arrest for looting the store was made five blocks to the east, on the Third Avenue Bridge connecting the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Patrolman Louis Frikser, observed a Black man, nineteen-year-old Arnold Ford, "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation. Ford was likely going home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large; it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted being part of a group of men who had entered Lash's store and stolen goods. Later, he made clear that he had not broken the store windows, but only joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." "A few minutes later" the officer stopped a second man crossing the bridge from Harlem, Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, and also arrested him for looting Lash's store. None of the reports of this case detail what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Like Ford, Moore was likely returning home; he lived next door to Ford, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx. Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).

Police charged both Ford and Moore with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Ford pled guilty to petit larceny, while Moore was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defence lawyers who appeared for him. Ford was the only individual of the ten men convicted in the Court of General Sessions as a result of the disorder placed on probation rather than incarcerated, remaining under supervision under April 1938.

Police also arrested a third man for looting likely also for allegedly taking merchandise from Lash's store. Lash is recorded as the complainant when Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." It seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred the story, especially given that Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store and Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There is no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.

Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court on March 25, when the charges against him were dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury, and he was held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, where Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither of the sources for that outcome, the 28th Precinct Police blotter or the New York Times, provided any explanation for the judge's decision.

While the store bore Lash's name, he does not identify himself as owning the business to either a census enumerator in 1940 or in his draft registration two years later. The enumerator recorded his occupation as manager of a general merchandise store, while the draft registration names his employer as A. Goldfarb, and gives the store at 2530 8th Avenue, not the branch on Lenox Avenue, as his place of employment. A thirty-seven-year-old who had arrived from Russia in 1913, Lash had been the proprietor of a hemstitching store in 1920 and 1930. Lash had insurance for his store, but as of early April 1935, when he spoke with a Probation Department investigator, his insurers refused to pay his claim. Despite that problem, Lash appears to have been able to remain in business, as the store appears in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, with a large sign identifying it as "Harry's 5 & 10c Store." (The store does not appear in the MCCH Business survey, although there is a business recorded as "Apt Supplies" at 400 Lenox Avenue that may be Lash's store).
James Hughes arrested Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the twenty-four-year-old man, and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted the stones were to defend himself, and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.

Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th St and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue, before returning home for supper, and then heading out again at 9.30pm to go drinking. When he set out for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets, and heard people calling out “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a show repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the Probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked.

The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being returned to have their original charges dismissed so they could be rearrested and new charges brought. (The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded only that the charges against Hughes had been dismissed, not that he had been rearrested). Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.

When Hughes appeared for sentencing the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from minister named Haynes received by Mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”

Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.

Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5ft 6 inches, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the Probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to who he became apprenticed. The Probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.

Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."
Vacant store windows broken (2314 8th Avenue) The windows of a vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue were broken sometime during the disorder, perhaps in the first hours of the disorder, when crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. The vacant store was in the block between 125th and 124th Streets, where four other stores had windows broken, including two other empty stores at 2320 8th Avenue and 2324 8th Avenue, the Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue and Andy's Florist on the southeast corner of 125th Street. Those other damaged stores were all included in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked west along 125th Street and and up and down 8th Avenue a block north and south of the intersection on the day after the disorder. It is possible this store was not on that list because it suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

Officer St. Louis of the 28th Precinct arrested Viola Woods, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, for allegedly smashing the store window with an umbrella. There is no information on when during the disorder the arrest took place. Only a New York Amsterdam News story identified the store as vacant; a list in the New York American and stories in the Home News and New York Times provided only the address. After being charged with disorderly conduct in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Woods was ordered held on bail of $100 by Magistrate Renaud. When she was returned to the court on March 28, Magistrate Ford discharged her, the New York Amsterdam News reporting that she "was freed for lack of evidence."

By the second half of 1935, when the MCCH business survey was conducted, a white-owned restaurant was located at 2314 8th Avenue. The Tax Department photograph shows a one-story building constructed after 1935.
Milton Ackerman arrested Officer Brown of the 40th Precinct arrested Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, some time during the disorder. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." Harry Lash is recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book, so it seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred to in the story. Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store and Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There is no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.

Ackerman appears in the lists of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, and was held until March 25. When he returned to the Magistrate's Court the charges against him were dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury, and he was held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, an appearance reported only in the New York Times. Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither that story nor the 28th Precinct Police blotter provided any explanation for the judge's decision.