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

Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Claudio Diabolo arrested

Around 6 PM, five members of the Young Liberators arrived at the front of Kress’ store and began picketing. An organization with ties to the Communist party, the Young Liberators had an office nearby, at 262 Lenox Ave near 126th Street. Four of the men, Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Harry Gordon were white and allegedly college students; Claudio Diabolo was black. They carried signs that read “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child.” <<photographs>>.

At some point the men set up a stand in front of the store and began to speak to the crowd. One eyewitness reported that Diablolo, the black man spoke first, introducing a white speaker, identified in most reports as Harry Gordon, and in others as Daniel Miller. Shortly after he began to speak, someone threw a rock through the store window. Police then moved to arrest the speaker, pulling him down from the stand, and the other members of the group. In one account, a second member of the group climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd after the first arrest, before himself being dragged down and placed under arrest. Police hurried the men into waiting cars and took them to the local precinct. There officers charged Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Claudio Diabolo with inciting a riot, and the fifth man, Harry Gordon, with assaulting one of the arresting officers, Patrolman Irwin Young.

This incident assumed outsized prominence in the reporting of the riot as Hearst newspapers and ADA Dodge alleged that Communists had instigated the riot.

<<What exactly did the men say to the crowd?? Young Liberators also distributed a pamphlet, but it did not appear on Harlem’s streets until several hours later, around 7.30 or 8.30 PM>> <<Photographs of pamphlet as well as signs, and of the group of men>>

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Harry Gordon arrested Around 6 PM, Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man, was arrested in front of Kress' store on West 125th Street for assaulting Patrolman Irwin Young. Newspaper reports offer a wide variety of contradictory accounts of the circumstances of Gordon's arrest; some identified him as speaking to the crowd, others as caught up when police moved in to arrest the man who was speaking, another white man identified as Daniel Miller. He was charged with grabbing Young's nightstick and hitting him with it. Gordon denied assaulting Young, charging instead that the officer had hit him from behind with the night stick. A witness to the arrest, Louise Thompson, confirmed Gordon did “nothing” while being “brutally beaten by two large Policemen.” Police arrested Miller, two other white men, Samuel Jamison and Murray Samuels, and a black man, Claudio Daibolo at the same time, charging them with inciting the crowd.

After police arrested Gordon, they threw him in a patrol car and drove him to a police station. Interviewed by a Daily Worker journalist a week after the riot, Gordon alleged he was "kicked on the legs and knocked around" before being put in a cell. Police later put four Black men in the cell with him, one who Gordon described as "very badly beaten, his whole face and head swollen terribly, and covered with blood." When police took the group upstairs for questioning, and later fingerprinting, the beatings continued, with police officers calling them "vile, unprintable names" and threatening to shoot them. At the MCCH hearing on May ??, the Atlanta World reported that Gordon alleged that police officers continued to beat him around the shins as was being booked. After placing Gordon in a cell, Young allegedly later returned and took him to a room upstairs for a further beating with a club. While being held, Gordon testified, he was not allowed to contact a lawyer or his family and was not fed until he had been in custody for more than twenty-four hours, after being arraigned in the Magistrate's Court. [Does the transcript record him testifying with the same details as reported in the DW?]

Gordon was among the group of ninety-six arrested put in a line-up in front of reporters downtown at Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20 before being loaded into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. While Gordon stood on a "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned Gordon about his role in the disorder, an exchange reported in three newspapers. The briefest mention appeared in the Daily Mirror, which reported the details of the platform, but only that "under the grilling conducted by Acting Capt. Edward Dillon" declared "I am a student at City College of New York" and "refused to answer further questions." The reporter described Gordon's manner as "defiant." Other reporters conveyed a similar judgment in their portrayals of Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune described Gordon as "a tall, lanky youth [who] thrust one hand in his pocket and struck an orator's attitude" during the questioning; the New York Sun described his pose as "Napoleonic." Neither of those stories mention Gordon identifying himself as a student; they instead quote him as refusing to answer questions until he saw a lawyer; the Sun reported Gordon as saying:
"I have no comment to make until I see my lawyer. I understand that anything I might say would be used against me."

"If you are not guilty why do you want to see a lawyer?" he was asked.

"I know all that," he replied with a wave of his hand "But I won't talk until I see my lawyer."
The Daily Mirror decided that Gordon, in responding as he did, "had practically declared himself the inciter of the night's rioting" and the leader of the four Young Liberators arrested at the beginning of the disorder. However, in reports of Gordon's appearances in court offer his relationship to these four men is less clear.

Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the three other white men and a Black man, ?, arrested at the start of the disorder. The clerk initially recorded the charge against him as felonious assault, but later struck that out and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." Magistrate Renaud remanded him to reappear on the March 25, and then again to March 27, before transferring his case to the Court of Special Sessions. (add more details - and raise here question of whether he was Communist - he does not mention others in interview or testimony, and they are not mentioned in the line-up story, but newspaper accounts grouped him with others arrested)

[That court later discharged Gordon].