This page has tags:

1. 1 2023-06-22T19:47:00+00:00 Anonymous King, Shannon. Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era (New York: New York University Press, 2015). Anonymous 4 plain 2024-01-27T23:00:15+00:00 Anonymous

This page is referenced by:

• 1 2023-04-12T15:07:26+00:00 Prosecuting police (March 20-June 14) 19 plain 2476 2024-02-15T18:32:45+00:00 Despite evidence of police assaulting people on Harlem's streets with clubs and firing guns at crowds, killing two Black men, only one case involving a police officer appeared in the legal system — although the officer himself never took part in a legal proceeding. Twice Assistant District Attorney Saul Price presented the case of Patrolman John McInerney shooting and killing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black boy, to the grand jury. McInerney alleged that the boy had been looting a store and when told to halt had failed to stop running from the scene. Hobbs' brother Russell had been with him at the time of the shooting and contradicted the officer's claim that Lloyd had been looting an automobile supply store. Seven witnesses testified that McInerney did not call on Hobbs to halt before he shot him, as he claimed, and that the boy did not drop the car horn and socket set that the officer said he had picked up from next to him after he was shot. While the evidence against McInerney persuaded the MCCH and the Black press, the grand jury did not even want to hear testimony from McInerney, who waived his right not to testify, before deciding not to indict the officer. While outraged by those decisions, Black residents and the MCCH were not surprised. The patrolman was a white man, his victim was a Black boy, and all seven witnesses were Black men. For a grand jury consisting entirely of white men to not see a crime in those circumstances was completely predictable given the history of police brutality in Harlem.
  
  The failed effort to prosecute the killer of Lloyd Hobbs is not a topic addressed in any of the existing studies of the racial disorder in Harlem. In fact, the death of Lloyd Hobbs has rarely been mentioned. Thomas Kessner and Nicole Watson did recount McInerney killing the boy (both misidentifying him as Heineray following the mistaken transcription of his name in the Arno Press edition of the Final Report of the MCCH). Marilynn Johnson referred only to "the fatal shooting of a young looter" as one of the examples of police behavior that drew criticism at the MCCH hearings, ironically reproducing the mischaracterization of Hobbs that McInerney used to justify shooting him even as she highlighted critiques of the police. Recognizing the police violence that marked March 19 and 20 contributes to recasting those events to include interpersonal violence as part of the complex mix that characterized the racial disorder. The sustained lack of accountability for that violence fed into Black residents' longstanding anger at the police department, helping it intensify and feed further racial disorder in subsequent years.