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1. 1 2022-06-25T19:09:43+00:00 Anonymous Arthur Garfield Hays Papers Anonymous 2 plain 2022-06-25T19:12:11+00:00 Anonymous

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• 1 2020-02-25T18:03:35+00:00 Lloyd Hobbs killed 47 plain 2022-08-01T20:35:39+00:00 Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was shot and killed by Officer John McInerney, who claimed Hobbs had been looting an auto supply store.

  Around 7:30 PM, Hobbs and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell had made the short trip from their home on St Nicholas Ave to the Apollo Theater on 125th Street for a show, not emerging until 12.30 AM. When they stepped back onto 125th St, they saw crowds down the block at the intersection with 7th Ave, and went to investigate. They followed as police pushed the crowd north on 7th Ave. As people milled in front of a damaged auto parts store at 2150 7th Avenue near 128th Street, two officers in a radio car pulled up and called on the crowd to ‘break it up.’ Fearing that they had been mistaken for rioters, the boys ran in separate directions, Russell up 7th Ave, and Lloyd diagonally west on to 128th Street. Officer John McInerney then drew his gun and shot Lloyd. McInerney claimed that the officers had seen Hobbs throw a stone through the window of an auto supply store and steal goods, and that he called on him to halt before opening fire.
  
  Several witnesses watching events from the corner of 128th and 7th Ave testified to seeing the crowd moving up the avenue, and Hobbs rush from the crowd as police pulled up, but not any looting, any goods on Hobbs, or any call for him to halt before McInerey shot him. The storeowner's complaint to police described the store window as having been broken, and looting starting, several hours earlier, at 10 PM. After the shooting, the officers loaded Hobbs into their car and drove him to Harlem Hospital.
  
  Russell Hobbs reported what happened to their father, Lawyer Hobbs, who tried several times to identify and make a complaint against the officer who had shot his son. He also appears to have gone to the MCCH: an undated statement by Hobbs in the Commission's files describes Lloyd's shooting and his failed efforts to get police to investigate the case. According to a story in the New York Amsterdam News, after enlisting Fred Moore, the former alderman and editor of the New York Age, Hobbs succeeded in getting the police to agree "they would look into the case."
  
  Hobbs did not die until the evening of March 30, so he does not feature in the initial newspaper reports of those killed during the disorder, but instead in all seven lists of the injured, published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
  
  Hobbs was the fourth of those killed in the disorder to die. A few hours earlier, his brother Russell testified before the first hearing of the Mayor’s Commission. While the New York Times, New York Age, and New York Amsterdam News referred to that testimony in reporting Hobbs' death, the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American and Chicago Defender reported the death in their stories on the hearing without mentioning Russell. He would testify again at a later hearing, together with his father and two eye-witnesses.
  
  The Grand Jury twice heard the case against McInerney. The first hearing took place on April 10, after the Mayor's Commission hearings. McInerney testified before the grand jury, but it is not clear who else they heard from before they voted not to indict the officer. The MCCH nonetheless continued to gather evidence, hearing testimony from  further witnesses to the shooting, including McInerney's partner and another officer, at subsequent hearings in late April and mid-May. Angry crowd members interrupted the police officers, leading the Commission to hold a closed hearing to take the testimony of McInerney, his partner, and the detective assigned to investigate the case, according to the World Telegraph. As a result of the MCCH investigation, the District Attorney present the case to the grand jury for a second time on June 10. Sixteen witnesses gave testimony, after which the grand jury declined to hear from McInerney and again voted not to indict him.
  
  Notwithstanding that outcome, the MCCH gave a central place to McInerney killing Hobbs in its report on the events of the disorder, first released on August 10, 1935.
  
  Police Commissioner Valentine's written response to the draft report on April 30 covered six typewritten pages, including sections on six cases of police brutality. He devoted only six and a half lines to the "Case of Lloyd Hobbs," significantly less than any of the other five. The killing was simply "the outcome of Hobbs burglarizing premises 2150 7th Avenue," an interpretation confirmed by the Grand Jury who, after hearing from McInerney, "exonerated him."

  
   
• 1 2021-04-28T15:57:46+00:00 Greenfield Auto Equipment store looted 32 plain 2022-07-12T18:14:19+00:00 Around 9.00 PM, Louis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished up putting new merchanduse and sign cards in the windows of his store, Greenfield Auto Equipment, at 2150 7th Avenue, and began cleaning up inside the store. They "heard a terrific crash at the front door and saw angry crowd surging into the store," he told the MCCH in a private interview. Eisenberg and his staff fled out the rear of the store, and on to the street, where they hailed a cab to take them away from the crowd. The timing of that escape varies in different sources. In police records, Eisenberg and his staff fled out a rear window, into the back yard of the store, where they remained until around 11.30 PM, when they avoided the "mob" on the street by jumping in a passing taxi. In his interview with the MCCH, Eisenberg describes going from the yard to the neighboring "tailor shop" (the cleaning store) and hailing a cab from there. There is no mention of spending time in the yard, and from the cab he saw only one broken window, suggesting they left soon after fleeing the store. That statement contradicted what Eisenberg told James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH, that five windows were broken between 8.30 PM and 9.00PM. Tartar also recorded information from the white owners of four of the six other occupied stores on this block of 7th Avenue, between West 127th Street and West 128th Street, who reported windows broken sometime between 8.45 PM and 11.00 PM. The owner of the cleaning store neighboring Eisenberg's store specified that the windows in the auto equipment store were broken before those in his store, four of which targeted between 8.45 PM and 9.30 PM.
  
  When crowds that had been focused on the block of West 125th Street housing Kress' store began moving to other parts of Harlem, the blocks immediately north on 7th Avenue were among their first targets. As they had on West 125th Street, people threw objects at the windows of white stores, at whites on the streets, and around 11.00 PM, at a passing Fifth Avenue Company bus, and later looted stores. The time the crowds appeared was early enough in the evening that most of the stores would still have been open for business, or at least still staffed, as Greenfield Auto Equipment was. That all the neighboring storeowners interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. The Black-owned Cozy Shoppe at 2154 7th Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street, was undamaged; someone from that store had written "Colored Shoppe" on the store window. Tartar included the "Cozy Shop" on his drawing of the block, together with a Black-owned beauty parlor to the left of the auto equipment store, but neither appear in his list of looted businesses, suggesting the beauty parlor may also have been undamaged.
  
  The storeowners also provided the value of the stock stolen from their stores. Eisenberg put the value of stock stolen from his store at $850; when he reported the theft to police he provided a two-page list of merchandise without information on its value. While Eisenberg's account of men rushing into his store implies that goods were stolen as soon as the window was broken, the more fragmentary responses Tartar recorded from the other store owners suggest that looting may have happened later, as more general narratives in the press relate. The owner of the saloon on the corner of West 127th Street, the Harlem Grill, reported one window broke around 9.00PM, and two more at least an hour later. Crowds smashed windows in stores on the opposite side of the street apparently without looting them around 9.45 PM, when a police officer arrested Leroy Brown for urging a group of people to follow his lead after he threw a tailor's dummy through a window. Whenever the looting started, by around 11.00 PM, when Howard Malloy passed the store, all the goods in the display window had been taken, he told Tartar in an interview on April 5. On March 20, Detective O'Brien visited the store and reported that he found "five (5) windows of the store broken and merchandise strewn about the floor and window. Also noted that the street in the immediate vicinity was littered with broken glass, bricks, stones and other heavy objects."
  
  Information on the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, and those store neighboring it, appears in the records of the MCCH because of what happened after the looting, or at least after the looting had started. Around 12.55 AM, two police officers in a squad car traveling south on 7th Avenue reported hearing smashing glass, and seeing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black student standing in the store window passing merchandise to a crowd of people on the street. They stopped their car and chased after the crowd. As Hobbs ran across west across 128th Street Patrolman McInery shot the boy in the back. Although the officers transported him to Harlem Hospital, Hobbs died on March 30. He and his younger brother had been at a show at the Apollo Theater until 12.30 AM, when they emerged to find "general disorder and many broken windows." Russell told Tartar that they wanted to "see and hear what was going on," so walked along 125th Street and up 7th Avenue, passing a crowd in front of Eisenberg's store at the time the police car arrived. Both boys denied they had looted the store; they had simply joined the crowd in running when the police car stopped, and McInerny had shot Lloyd without warning when he split from the group and turned west on 128th Street, back in the direction of the family home. Three Black eye-witnesses, including Howard Malloy, confirmed that account. Police insisted Hobbs had stolen goods from the store, but they did not produce the items they claimed to have found on him - a horn and socket set - until several weeks after the shooting. The grand jury twice declined to indict McInnery for shooting Hobbs, accepting his claim that it was justifiable homicide. The MCCH did not agree, and Hobbs became a central part of their report on the events of the disorder.
  
  No other people were arrested or charged with looting the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, or the other stores on this block of 7th Avenue. Eisenberg "was on the point of closing after the riot but was persuaded to stay on," he told a MCCH investigator who visited the store on June 25. He had been in business for sixteen years, with a staff of four, two of whom were Black men. A white-owned auto supply store is recorded in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 (mistakenly located at 2152 7th Avenue rather than 2150 7th Avenue). By 1939, however, the store was gone, with a billiard parlor in its place in the Tax Department photograph.