This page was created by Anonymous.
"Thompson Case," Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 5 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
1 2020-10-13T00:44:29+00:00 Anonymous 1 8 plain 2022-01-20T18:10:11+00:00 AnonymousAs part of related categories:
This page has tags:
- 1 2022-09-03T21:02:16+00:00 Anonymous Records of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia Anonymous 8 plain 2022-10-02T19:37:40+00:00 Anonymous
This page is referenced by:
-
1
2020-02-24T22:40:34+00:00
Assaults on police (9)
55
plain
2022-09-30T21:29:30+00:00
Nine police officers were among those reported as injured, six hit by objects thrown at them. One was attacked by an individual likely from the same crowds that threw objects at police. Two officers were injured making arrests, one hit by a shot from his own gun while attempting to apprehend a suspected looter, the other allegedly hit by a man who grabbed his baton. Assaults of police making arrests also occurred at other times in 1935; police being hit by objects did not. Six of the assaults occurred early in the disorder, two in front of Kress' store, two at the store's rear entrance, and two when police tried to establish a perimeter around Kress’ store. Only two assaults occurred after 10:00 PM, when the crowd broke up and smaller groups spread north and south on Harlem’s avenues, suggesting that the later disorder did not involve the same violence directed at police. There is no evidence of when the other assault, rocks thrown at a detective's car as he drove along 8th Avenue, took place. (This total excludes an incident in which newspapers reported four men allegedly shot at an unidentified police officer on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street as the men were charged merely with "annoying" not any form of violence and acquitted of even that charge).
Most of the assaults on police occurred when the disorder was focused on Kress’ store and 125th Street, where large crowds gathered and police struggled to disperse them and protect the avenues on the streets. Although police several times succeeded in moving crowds away from Kress’ and off the roadway of 125th Street, there were too few officers to hold and control the crowds until after 10:00 PM. As 125th Street and 7th and 8th Avenues were major thoroughfares accommodating buses and streetcars, they had wide roadways, with two lanes of traffic traveling in each direction, as well as wide pavements. That created significant distances between police and crowds when officers set up cordons in front of Kress’ store and at the intersections of 125th Street and the avenues. As a result much of the violence directed against police came in form of objects thrown at them. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a stone behind Kress’ store around 7:00 PM, where police had followed a crowd drawn there by the appearance of a hearse. Kelly's injury was serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and observation. Detective Charles Foley was hit on the left shoulder, possibly suffering a fracture, a few minutes after the assault on Kelly, also at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street. This incident was the only time police and crowds clashed off a major thoroughfare, on a narrower cross street that exposed officers to objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level. Two hours later, around 9:00 PM, Detective William Boyle was treated on 125th Street for injuries “received while attempting to rescue an unknown white man being assaulted at scene of riot.” None of these officers suffered the head injuries that predominated among the civilians who sought medical treatment during the disorder.
Two other officers were assaulted several hours later, around 10:00 PM, after additional reinforcements arrived and police tried to establish a cordon and disperse crowds on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock allegedly thrown by James Hughes as he stood in front of Kress' store just after police had cleared 125th Street. Unusually, Roge’s partner claimed that as there were no other objects being thrown at the time he was able to see who threw the rock and apprehend the man, James Hughes. Roge himself had been hit in the head, and was bleeding profusely. The New York Evening Journal published two different photographs of a bleeding Roge being helped by a uniformed officer, the only images of injured police published. While Hughes later pled guilty to misdemeanor assault the presiding judge believed his target had been the store windows not the police officer, and sentenced him to only three months in the workhouse.
Around the same time someone hit Patrolman Charles Robins over the head with an iron bar, or a brick in some accounts. Being hit by a weapon not a thrown object involved an assailant in close proximity. Treated at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, Robins had likely been involved in efforts to keep crowds from 125th Street. Images of police trying to hold back crowds show officers moving into the midst of groups of people, potentially exposing themselves to attacks such as Robbins suffered – and allowing their assailants to disappear into the crowd before they could be apprehended. However, it should be noted that in both the images, it is police officers who are wielding weapons or moving against the crowd, not the other way around. The caption to one photo also indicates that objects were thrown from the crowd at such moments: a New York Daily News photographer was hit on the head soon after taking the photo.
One of the two arrests in which a police officer was allegedly assaulted came at the very beginning of the disorder. When Patrolman Irwin Young and several other officers arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man, after he tried to speak to the crowds in front of Kress' store, Young alleged Gordon grabbed his grabbed nightstick and hit him with it. Gordon denied he assaulted Young, claiming instead that Young beat him; Louise Thompson also told a hearing of the MCCH she saw Young beat Gordon. Gordon also told a MCCH that Young beat him on the journey to the station and again later while he was in custody. Violence during arrests was nothing out of the ordinary in 1935. The outcome of Gordon's prosecution is unknown. The second officer allegedly during an arrest was also injured with his own weapon, in that case a revolver, at the very end of the disorder. According to the arrest report and police blotter, as James Thompson fled a grocery store where he had allegedly been discovered looting, he knocked Detective Nicholas Campo, causing the officer's revolver to go off and a bullet to hit him in the hand.
Once the crowds broke up and spread, the police response changed and officers do not appear to have been targets of violence to the extent they had been. While police maintained a cordon around 125th Street, and guarded some stores, their presence in other parts of the neighborhood took the form of mobile patrols in radio cars or emergency trucks. On one occasion a police vehicle was targeted in the same way that other vehicles driven by whites were, with the Daily Mirror reporting “Harry Whittington, an emergency policeman, was "sniped" off of the emergency truck he was riding at 8th Ave. and 123rd St. by a rock that felled him unconscious.” Cars driven by whites were frequent targets of rocks and stones. The attack on Detective Lt Frank Lenahan as he drove his car along 8th Avenue may also have occurred away from 125th Street; there is no evidence of its timing. According to the New York Herald Tribune, which provided the only description of the incident, Lenahan’s car “was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered.” Apparently the officer himself was unscathed, as he does not appear in lists of the injured.
A widely reported incident of alleged “sniping” at police at the very end of the disorder is not included in the count of assaults on police as there the evidence that police were actually targets of a shooting is limited. Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did report that a bullet whistled past the air of Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street, after which he saw the four men on the roof of the six-story building at 101 West 138th. Soon after police reinforcements arrived and rushed to the roof to arrest the men. But in the Home News story Brennan is not the target of the shooters but one of the police who responded after hearing shots. He appeared as the arresting officer in the Magistrates Court. This story provided the key detail that no guns were found on Alston and his companions, explaining both police charged them with the lesser charge of disorderly conduct, annotated in the docket book as "annoy" and their acquittal, and giving the story some more credibility than other accounts.
More officers may have been assaulted during the disorder. The New York Evening Journal reported bandaged officers as well as prisoners in court the next day. However, while news photographs confirm the presence of bandaged prisoners, no injured officers appear in those images.As Part of Related Categories:
-
1
2020-02-25T17:59:47+00:00
James Thompson killed & Detective Nicholas Campo shot
40
plain
2022-06-30T20:20:33+00:00
Around 5.30 AM James Thompson, a nineteen-year old Black man, was shot and killed by Detectives Campo and Beckler.
The officers claimed that while driving on 8th Avenue they heard breaking glass in a damaged grocery store on the southwest corner of West 127th Street. Investigating, they interrupted Thompson allegedly looting the grocery store, a branch of the James Butler chain at 2391 8th Avenue, which was across the street from his home at 301 West 127th Street. Press reports offered a variety of different accounts of what happened next. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported a gun battle between the officers and Thompson, during which he was shot in the chest and Officer Campo in the hand. The New York Evening Journal sensationally reported an even larger gunfight in which "other rioters" returned the officers shots. The New York World-Telegram reported a struggle between Thompson and Campo, during which Thompson was shot; the officer then dropped his gun, causing it to go off and a bullet to hit his fingers. The New York Amsterdam News reported, several days later, that the officer’s gun went off accidentally, hitting Thompson.
The arrest report and police blotter make no mention of Thompson having a gun or struggling with the officers, merely colliding with Campo as he tried to flee the building, causing Campo’s gun to go off. As Thompson fled both officers fired at him, apparently hitting him in front of his home as he stumbled down the street. Campo and Beckler's shots also struck a white man, Stanley Dondoro, walking on the west side of 8th Avenue, in the leg. The Home News and New York Post added the detail that the bullet had passed through the trousers of a man with Dondoro without injuring him. A note at the end of the hospital admission records indicated that Thompson died at Harlem Hospital at 9:30AM, four hours after the shooting, a time of death that led to him being listed as the only fatality of the disorder in newspapers published on March 20. Campo appeared in lists of the injured published by the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American.
Police investigated the shooting after the disorder, according to the records gathered by the MCCH. A police blotter record of Captain Mulholland’s investigation identified the detectives as responsible for shooting Dondoro, specifying that Campo had shot twice at Thompson and his partner Detective Beckler had shot three times, as well as twice in the air, a warning to stop that was required police practice. One of the bullets struck Thompson in the chest, killing him. The blotter also recorded Captain Mulholland’s conclusion that Campo sustained his injury “in proper performance of police duty and no negligence on the part of the aforesaid detective contributed thereto." Campo and Becker also appear to have not been disciplined or charged for killing Thompson. Asked in reference to the killing of Thompson and other Black men killed during the disorder in a hearing of the MCCH, “Has anyone been arrested, charged with using deadly weapons with which these men were killed?", Captain Rothengast replied, "Some of the detectives were exonerated."
Although the World-Telegram story reported Thompson as saying at the hospital that “he was hungry, “that others were stealing, anyway,” and that he was “long out of work,” there is no record of an admission in the report of the police investigation. It did include an interview with Thompson’s aunt. She reported hearing from Thompson’s landlady that he had brought home canned goods during the disorder, with the implication that he had been looting prior to the shooting. However, she also reported that he worked at a barber’s shop, in contradiction of the admission reported in the World-Telegram.
-
1
2020-08-20T20:52:05+00:00
Stanley Dondero injured
15
plain
2022-04-19T20:06:25+00:00
Just after 5.30AM, Stanley Dondoro, a thirty-four-year-old white chauffeur, was shot while walking on 8th Avenue near 127th Street. Two police detectives pursuing James Thompson, a nineteen-year-old black man they allegedly found looting a grocery store, fired multiple shots as he fled out the rear exit onto 127th Street. One of those shots struck Thompson in the chest, while another hit Dondoro in the left leg. Thompson died four hours later. Dondoro’s own injury, however, was superficial, as hospital records indicate that he was not admitted to Harlem hospital. All the other men shot during the disorder had been admitted to hospital except for one of the detectives who shot Dondero, Nicholas Campo, who had accidentally shot himself in the finger when struggling with Thompson. The Home News and New York Post added the detail that a bullet had passed through the trousers of an unnamed man with Dondoro without injuring him.
A transcript of the police blotter record of Captain Mulholland’s investigation of the shooting among the records gathered by the MCCH identified the detectives as responsible for shooting Dondoro. The police record specified that Campo had shot twice at Thompson, and his partner Detective Beckler had shot three times, as well as twice in the air, a warning to stop that was required police practice. The blotter also recorded Captain Mulholland’s conclusion that the injuries Campo sustained his injury “in proper performance of police duty and no negligence on the part of the aforesaid detective contributed thereto.”
Newspaper stories and lists did not attribute Dondoro's shooting to police. The New York American, New York Herald Tribune, Home News and New York Post described an exchange of shots between Thompson and the detectives that did not happen; neither did “other rioters” shoot at police, as the New York Evening Journal reported. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply listed Dondero among the injured. Dondero also appeared in lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and New York American. The hospital record described him as having been shot in “some unknown manner during an arrest at 126th St. and 7th Ave..” (The MCCH's transcript of the hospital record had the time Dr Payne attended Dondero at Harlem Hospital as 4.00 AM; that was likely a mistaken transcription of 6.00 AM).
Dondero lived across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey. It is not clear why he was on the streets of Harlem. By the time of the shooting there was little disorder in the neighborhood, and police cars patrolled the streets - Campo and Beckler were traveling in one when the sound of breaking glass in the grocery store caused them to stop. The avenue on which the shooting happened was not a major thoroughfare like 7th Avenue to the east, and while an area of black residences, was near the western boundary of Black Harlem, only three blocks from a white district. Dondero may have been walking to or from the elevated train station on 8th Avenue and West 130th Street. He may have worked as a taxi-driver in Harlem, a job still largely held by white men.