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

Robert Tanner arrested

Around 3:00 AM, Officer Charles Necas of the 28th Precinct saw Robert Tanner, a seventeen-year-old Black student, put his hand in the broken window of Jack Garmise's cigar shop at 1916 7th Avenue and take a pipe, according to his Magistrates Court affidavit. Necas then arrested Tanner. The store window had been broken a little over an hour earlier by a milk can thrown by a member of a group that had gathered in front of the store. Police nearby arrested two men allegedly involved in the attack and subsequent looting, Thomas Jackson and Raymond Easley. Most of the $100 of pipes, clocks, watches, razors, and other goods that Garmise reported stolen had likely been taken before Tanner allegedly reached through the window. While it did not appear that police officers guarded the damaged store, as they did on West 125th Street, it was in a likely location for police to be stationed: on the corner of West 116th Street, the business district south of West 125th Street, and Harlem's busiest avenue. Tanner lived on West 116th Street only three buildings west of 7th Avenue, at 218 West 116th Street. He was likely one of the many Harlem residents drawn to the streets by the disorder and may have been on the street for some time before allegedly taking advantage of the damage others had done. Giles Jackson was injured by "falling glass" around the same time near the intersection so other businesses may have been attacked.



Tanner was one of only two of those arrested identified as a student, along with John Henry, and one of only four under eighteen years of age. His name was in the lists of those arrested for burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal. When he was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrate Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on $1,000 bail, according to the Magistrates Court docket book. The Home News published the only story that mentioned Tanner's arraignment. It grouped him with Thomas Jackson, one of the men arrested for the earlier attack on Garmise's shop, who the docket book indicated had been arraigned shortly before Tanner. The story mistakenly reversed the timing of the men's alleged crimes described in the legal records and reported that Tanner smashed a side window an hour before Jackson broke the front window. A grand jury indicted Tanner on a charge of burglary on March 22. Three days later the New York Sun reported that he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, but unlike the other men who appeared with him, Tanner had not accepted a plea bargain and the judge continued his bail. When Tanner appeared again in the court, he pled not guilty. By April 4, he had agreed to plead guilty to petit larceny. That plea went unreported in the press but was noted in the district attorney's case file and the 28th Precinct police blotter. The district attorney offered that plea bargain to most of those indicted for burglary. The blotter provided the only evidence of his sentence to the New York City Reformatory, the result of being a youthful first offender.
 

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