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1. 1 2023-07-05T20:55:35+00:00 Anonymous Investigations of the events of the disorder Anonymous 34 plain 2024-01-27T03:28:43+00:00 Anonymous

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• 1 2020-10-22T02:15:56+00:00 Harry Lash's 5 and 10c store looted and set on fire 80 plain 2024-05-29T21:27:22+00:00 Around 11:15 PM, Harry Lash closed his 5c & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 130th Street. He likely then went home to his residence at 536 West 178th Street, north of Harlem in Washington Heights. Wherever he was, Lash apparently got news of the disorder in Harlem and returned to the store around two hours later, at approximately 1:20 AM, according to the affidavit he gave later that day in the Magistrates Court. He found the store windows broken, fixtures damaged, and "general merchandise" valued at $1,000 missing. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store that faced West 130th Street, as well as those that faced Lenox Avenue, could be seen smashed in the Associated Press photograph published in the New York Sun. Significant damage to the window displays was also visible. However, large amounts of merchandise could be seen still inside the store, indicating limits to the scale of the looting. Lash's store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street where reported looting was concentrated. Disorder continued in this area after the time Lash returned to his store.
  
  The store windows were likely broken and merchandise taken starting around 11:30 PM and continuing until Lash returned to the store. The rear of Lash's store on West 130th Street had also been set on fire, by a "group of 35 blacks...soon after midnight," according to the New York Herald Tribune. That crowd "tried to prevent policeman from sounding an alarm - 'let it burn' they shouted," the report continued. "When firemen came, they hindered them too, bustling about hydrants and shoving hose lines about - when firemen threatened to turn the hose on them, they dispersed." Some of those details also appeared in the New York Evening Journal, but its story combined the fire and those at 429 and 431 Lenox Avenue two blocks to north: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. 'Let them burn. Let them burn.' The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd were larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeated and gave more prominence to the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn." The New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters because some individuals who pressed forward to see the fire got in their way. The New York Evening Journal more sensationally characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations were in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds.
  
  
  
  An ACME agency photograph published in the Daily News showed flames in the last section of the store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters could be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the Daily News). They appeared to have quickly extinguished the fire. Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. A Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great” fit that image. There were no other newspaper stories or photographs of this fire, but it attracted the attention of newsreel cameramen. Some of the limited footage from the night of the disorder showed the fire burning in the store and firefighters crossing in front of the camera. No bystanders were visible. Cameramen returned the next day to shoot footage of the burned section of the building both from Lenox Avenue, and, for the Universal newsreel, West 130th Street by the fire-damaged section looking toward Lenox Avenue. Debris was visible on the sidewalk in front of the fire-damaged section in the footage from Lenox Avenue. Several Black men and women walked by the store in the footage from West 130th Street.
  
  Lash's store was misidentified in several sources including the caption to the Associated Press photograph in the New York Sun: headed "Harlem Rioters Break Every Window in Radio Store," it read "Not a pane of glass was left unbroken in this West 125th Street establishment. The Harlem Church of the Air on the second floor escaped raiders." The New York Herald Tribune also described the store as a Raffer's Radio store. Some of the confusion resulted from the large sign on the store advertising Raffer's Radio Service. By the time the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, that sign had been changed to read "Harry's 5 and 10c Store." The details of the windows and the shape of the sign in the Associated Press photograph matched those in the Tax Department photograph. Signs for the You Pray for Me Church of the Air visible in the second story windows confirmed that match. Sister Rosa Horn's Pentecostal Church occupied the upper floors of the building spanning 392-400 Lenox Avenue by September 1932, remaining there for several decades. Additionally, the Acme agency caption and the caption published by the Afro-American identified the store as being on Lenox Avenue. The Daily News and New York Herald Tribune captions of the photograph of the store on fire mistakenly located it at 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, but the windows matched the distinctive details of Lash's store, as did the presence of the Hope Wo Chinese Hand Laundry next to the store. A Chinese laundry appeared in the MCCH business survey at 68 West 130th Street, and the sign that was visible in the newspaper photograph could be seen in the Tax Department photograph.
  
  Around 1:50 AM, an arrest for looting the store was made five blocks to the east, on the Third Avenue Bridge connecting the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Patrolman Louis Frikser observed a Black man, nineteen-year-old Arnold Ford, "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation. Ford was likely going home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large as it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted being part of a group of men who had entered Lash's store and stolen goods. Later, Ford made clear that he had not broken the store windows but only joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." "A few minutes later" the officer stopped a second man crossing the bridge from Harlem, Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, and also arrested him for looting Lash's store. None of the reports of this case described what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Like Ford, Moore was likely returning home; he lived next door to Ford, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx. Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  Police charged both Ford and Moore with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Ford pled guilty to petit larceny. Moore, however, was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared for him. Ford was the only individual of the ten men convicted in the Court of General Sessions as a result of the disorder placed on probation rather than incarcerated. He remained under supervision under April 1938.
  
  Police also arrested a third man for looting who likely also allegedly took merchandise from Lash's store. Lash was recorded as the complainant when Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." It seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred to in the story, especially given that Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store. Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There was no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.
  
  Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court on March 25, when the charges against him were dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury, and he was held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, where Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither of the sources for that outcome, the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the New York Times, provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
• 1 2021-08-07T18:20:54+00:00 Charles Saunders arrested 75 plain 2024-02-12T20:30:49+00:00 Around midnight, as Detective Jeremiah Duross of the 6th Division drove a police car on 7th Avenue, the sound of breaking glass drew his attention to a group of people in front of Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store at 1985 7th Avenue, according to a Probation Department investigation report. The store windows had been damaged earlier, between 11:30 PM and midnight, the superintendent of the apartments above 1985 7th Avenue, Mr. C. T. Berkeley, reported. As the detective pulled his car up next to the store, the crowd in front of it scattered. He jumped out of the car and claimed he saw Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator, jump out of the store window and run down the street. Duross gave chase and arrested Saunders, who he claimed had been drinking and had a fresh cut on his hand, which he implied had resulted from breaking glass in the window. While the report stated that the arrest took place at 2:00 AM, that appeared to be an error as the remainder of the narrative referred to events between 11:30 PM and midnight.
  
  
  
  Saunders offered a different account than Duross, according to the Probation Department investigation report. He lived nearby, in a furnished room at 1967 7th Avenue, a block south of the store, with his wife Anna Gregory. Around midnight, Saunders left home to buy cigarettes. Walking toward a crowd in front of Sirico's store, he saw shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window on to the street, where people in the crowd were picking them up. Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those around him, and picked up a pair of shoes, cutting his hand on glass on the street in the process, and headed home. At that point Duross arrested him. Saunders denied having been drinking; the detective said Saunders did not have a pair of shoes in his hands when arrested. Berkeley supported Saunders' account to the extent that he said he was not "one of the two men who went through the broken window" of the store. The building superintendent said he could identify those men.
  
  None of stolen goods were recovered, according to the Probation Department investigation report. Nonetheless, Saunders appeared to have been charged with taking all the goods that Sirico reported had been stolen: "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces," with a total value he estimated as $66.75. While the District Attorney's case file was missing, the Probation Department investigation report summarized the indictment against Saunders as accusing him of taking merchandise worth $66.95. The Home News and Daily Worker reports less specifically reported Saunders was charged with stealing "several pairs of shoes."
  
  Saunders was included in the lists of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, at which time Magistrate Renaud held him on $1,000 bail to reappear, an outcome recorded in the docket book and reported only in the Home News. When Saunders was brought back to the court on March 22, detectives presented bench warrants that indicated that the grand jury had already indicted him as a result of witnesses presented by District Attorney Dodge as part of his investigation of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud consequently dismissed the charges against Saunders so the detectives could rearrest him, as happened that day with two other men, James Hughes and Isaac Daniels, an appearance reported in the Home News and New York Post. On April 1, Saunders appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to petit larceny. That plea was at odds with the statement in the report that none of the stolen property had been recovered. A district attorney generally offered such a plea bargain to those indicted for burglary after the disorder found with stolen goods in their possession; those found with nothing in their possession, as the Probation Department investigation report implied Saunders was, generally pled guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful entry.
  
  Immediately prior to Saunders' appearance for sentencing in the Court of General Sessions on April 12, the Probation Department notified the judge of a letter from the Savannah Juvenile Court. Saunders' older sister Vable Greatt had offered to provide a home for him in Savannah, Georgia, and the Juvenile Court Probation Department would assist in his supervision, should the judge place him on probation. After a delay, presumably to confirm those arrangements, Judge Nott gave Saunders a suspended sentence and placed him on "indefinite" probation on the condition he go to Savannah (the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only the suspended sentence, not the probation). Of the nine other men sentenced in the Court of General Sessions, only Arnold Ford was also placed on probation. Both men remained under supervision for the maximum period of three years, until 1938.
  
  Saunders told a probation officer that he had been born in Dublin, Georgia, the youngest of six children. His mother died when he was five years of age, and around that time he and his family moved to Savannah. After leaving school at age thirteen, Saunders did odd jobs and worked with his father, a carpenter. In 1929, his father remarried, and Saunders decided to go to New York City, where his brother Albert and sister Lola lived. After eighteen months living with Albert at 215 Edgecombe Avenue and working as a porter in a barber's shop at West 135th Street and 7th Avenue, ill health forced him to return to live with his sister in Savannah for six months. Returning to New York City in 1931, Saunders lived with an aunt at 162 West 143rd Street until May 1933, when he met and then moved in with Anna Gregory. The Probation Department investigation report described her as "separated from her husband"; a letter in the file from the Brooklyn Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, to whom the Family Court had referred Gregory in 1922, said her husband had abandoned her, leaving the state with funds provided by his mother. Saunders and Gregory were "known as man and wife," the probation officer reported. In the fluid marriage patterns still practiced in working-class communities such informal relationships were not uncommon but the Probation Department did not recognize them, instead describing Gregory as Saunders' "mistress" and "sweetheart." Dr. Charles Thompson of the Court's Psychiatric Clinic also saw a problem in Gregory being ten years older that Saunders, labeling him as immature for looking to her "for direction." In response to questions by a probation officer, Gregory described Saunders as a good provider and their life as "harmonious."
  
  Gregory worked as a laundress, Saunders in a barber's shop at 142nd Street and 7th Avenue, then part-time for a moving company based at 143rd Street and 7th Avenue, and beginning in September 1934 as an elevator operator at 385 Edgecombe Avenue. After living for two years at 268 West 146th Street, the couple moved to 1967 7th Avenue in December 1934. Two months later, Saunders lost his job after a dispute with the new building superintendent; the management company fired the superintendent soon after and told a probation officer that they saw him, not Saunders, as at fault. That fit with the opinions of Saunders' employers and coworkers, which the probation officer summarized as considering him honest, industrious and dependable; he and Gregory were similarly "well regarded" by their neighbors. The Probation Department investigation report followed Dr. Thompson's examination report in attributing his alleged looting to "mob spirit." Thompson explained that concept as being "in company with several others under the influence of prejudice and aggressiveness," in the case of events in Harlem against "a background of racial antagonism, occasioned largely by the present lack of employment." Saunders' sister Vable Greatt explained his alleged looting, according to a letter from the Savannah Juvenile Court, as probably a result of him becoming "pretty well discouraged in his search for work," a "spiritual condition [that] caused him to fall to the temptation to steal."
  
  While a good reputation and steady employment would have helped make Saunders a candidate for probation, Judge Nott's decision appears to have been largely a response to an offer from his sister and Savannah Juvenile Court Probation Department to supervise him. His sister Vable followed through on that offer, sending funds for Saunders' railway fare to Savannah; the Juvenile Court Probation Department did not do their part. Saunders' probation officer's letters to his Georgia colleagues went unanswered for six months. During this time, the only news the probation officer received of Saunders were reports Saunders himself mailed weekly, using a form and stamps sent to him by the department. Soon after Saunders arrived in Savannah, his sister became very sick, causing him to move in with his brother. In perfunctory answers to the questions on the form, he reported being unemployed, and involved in no education or social activities other than attending weekly services at a Protestant church.
  
  As an alternative to the Juvenile Court, the Probation Department secured the help of the Savannah Family Welfare Society. Their worker's investigation in February 1936 solicited a very different picture of Saunders' life in Savannah from his sister and sister-in-law than he provided in his reports. Both complained he "never stayed home at night," was "drunk most of the time" and had become "lazy and shiftless," not willing to "keep a job when given one." The caseworker did not interview Saunders himself. The Probation Department responded by writing directly to Saunders, warning that his behavior was in violation of the terms of his probation, and the judge could take "disciplinary action" against him unless he improved his conduct and made "diligent efforts to obtain employment." They also requested the Savannah Family Welfare Society let Saunders report to them in person. In August 1936, Mrs. Mamie Belcher, a caseworker, began countersigning Saunders' reports. The Society reported "no further complaints" about his behavior, which the Probation Department took to unambiguously mean Saunders had changed his behavior. In June 1936, Saunders relocated to live again with his sister Vable. It took six more months before he found work, at a box manufacturing company. Nothing else changed in his answers on the report form until after a lapse in reporting in May 1937, when he wrote that he had moved to live with his sister Lois, who had returned from New York City. Only in Saunders' Discharge from Probation did the probation officer mention that this change in circumstances came after his sister Vable was killed in a car accident. By the end of 1937 Saunders had moved back in with his brother and begun working irregularly as a stevedore.
  
  Throughout his time in Savannah, Saunders appears to have remained in contact with Anna Gregory. She came to the Probation Department at the end of 1935 concerned that he had been warned that his sentence could be reviewed if he failed to report regularly and seeking to have him return to the city. When Gregory applied for Home Relief, she described Saunders as her husband, prompting the Emergency Relief Bureau to contact the Probation Department in May 1937, who in turn sought information from Saunders about whether the couple had formally married. In the Discharge from Probation, the probation officer described Saunders as "discontented as he missed New York, and Mrs Gregory, his mistress," information apparently passed on by the Savannah Welfare Society. Their caseworker also reported in January 1938 that Saunders' sister Lois "was anxious to have Charles return with her to New York." The Probation Department wrote to the Society, to Saunders, and to his brother immediately before the end of his probation in April 1938 urging that "his best interests will be served" by remaining in Savannah. They also asked Saunders to advise the department of his plans. He did not reply. There is no evidence of what Saunders chose to do.
• 1 2021-04-08T15:59:19+00:00 Arrests for looting away from the scene (9) 65 plain 2024-02-11T03:51:21+00:00 While police arrested most of those they alleged had been looting at the scene, having witnessed their actions, one third (9 of 27) were arrested at other locations at least several blocks from the business that had been looted. (For just over half of the arrests (33/60) the sources do not provide a location of arrest, although the looted store is identified in fourteen cases). Two of those arrests occurred the day after the disorder; the other seven are on the map below.
  
  
  
  What caused police to stop these men is not made clear in any sources. The most likely reason is that they were carrying goods that police suspected might have been looted, but photographs in newspapers of police reportedly searching Black men for weapons suggest that officers more indiscriminately stopped people on the street. Certainly police treatment of Black residents of Harlem at other times indicates that they would not have felt any need to have a justification for stopping and searching those they encountered during the disorder. Such policing extended to vehicles as well as pedestrians. Police had stopped a car to search its occupants for weapons in an image taken by a New York Evening Journal photographer, and one of those arrested for looting, Edward Larry, had been observed in a taxi. 
  
  Two photographs of men arrested for looting show individuals carrying large amounts of merchandise that would have attracted the attention of police on the lookout for looters. The men are not identified. The two men in a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal are carrying shopping bags from the Rex Food Market at 348 Lenox Avenue, one of the businesses whose owner sued the city for damages, so could be two of the sixteen men arrested for looting an unknown location.
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  The man in the second photograph, also published in the New York Evening Journal, carrying a tall bin containing at least four or five pots of various sizes, with perhaps more merchandise not sticking out of the top, might be James Williams. One of three men arrested away from looted stores who allegedly had a quantity of goods in their possession, the affidavit recorded Williams was carrying four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box and a cloth lamp. Edward Larry had a box containing eight shirts (although the police officer may not have been able to see them as Larry was in a taxi). Jean Jacquelin had two ladies’ suits and two pairs of trousers in his possession.
  
  However, police evidently also stopped others they had not allegedly seen looting who had nothing obvious in their possession. Arnold Ford had a package that cannot have been large; it contained three cakes of soap, a can of shoe polish, two pairs of garters, six spools of thread, a jar of Vaseline, and three packets of tea, with a value of $1.15. John Henry and Oscar Leacock between them had $75 of jewelry, most likely watches and rings rather than anything more bulky. The relatively indiscriminate nature of police arrests for looting is also evident in a comment reportedly made during the line-up of those arrested before they were taken to court. “One Negro woman still had in her possession five milk bottles,” a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote. “Police were doubtful that she drank as much milk as all that.”
  
  Storeowners claimed to be able to identify the goods found in the possession of eight of the nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged looting. Those statements are more credible in the case of jewelry and clothing than more commonplace items such as pans or soap — although identification of such items might have been helped if they were in shopping bags like those being carried by the men in the New York Evening Journal photograph. In the case of Larry, the storeowner also identified him as one of the men who had robbed his store.
  
  None of the reports of the arrest of Joseph Moore mention what items, if any, he had in his possession when Patrolman Louis Frikser arrested him. A few minutes earlier Frisker had arrested Arnold Ford, who was carrying a small package. The two men were prosecuted together, charged with taking merchandise from Harry Lash's 5c and 10c store, although the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against Moore as "Acc'd stolen goods during the riot" not "Burglarized store during riot" as in Ford's case. The first charge suggested Moore had not obtained whatever goods he had allegedly stolen directly from the store, a version of events not mentioned anywhere else. Prosecutors erased any distinction in the charges against Ford and Moore in the Harlem Magistrate Court, charging both with burglary.
  
  Frisker arrested Ford and Moore on the Third Avenue Bridge, a distance from store. It is not clear if the patrolman had been deployed on the bridge in response to the disorder or the location was a part of a regular patrol. Both men lived in the Bronx, near to the bridge, which was one of five thoroughfares between 127th Street and 155th Street connecting Harlem to the Bronx. 
  
  Police arrested six other men on the major avenues running through Harlem; Henry and Leacock and Williams on Lenox Avenue, Larry on 7th Avenue, and Jacquelin on 8th Avenue. Williams was the farthest from the store he had allegedly looted; Henry and Leacock were the closest. Police arrested all three, and Edward Larry, in areas which saw clusters of attacks on stores and violence, bringing numbers of police who the men would have had to pass by. All four, and Ford and Moore, may have been on their way home as they were arrested between the stores they allegedly looted and their homes. Police arrested Jacquelin on Eighth Avenue at the very end of the disorder, when cars were patrolling the avenue. Ten minutes earlier officers in a patrol car on the avenue a block north had shot and killed James Thompson while trying to arrest him for allegedly looting a grocery store. Jacquelin lived close by, several buildings to the east on West 127th Street, so was leaving home rather than returning there.
  
  The remaining two men police arrested without witnessing their alleged looting were arrested in the late afternoon of March 20, after the disorder. Detective Mark Redmond of the 28th Precinct first arrested arrested Clifford Mitchell at his home, 362 Lenox Avenue, although the address the Magistrates Court clerk recorded for Mitchell, likely in error, is 363 Lenox Avenue, a building across the street. An hour later, Detective Frank McKenna, also from the 28th Precinct, arrested Daughty Shavos at his home at 40 West 119th Street. Between them, Shavos and Mitchell allegedly had $50 of clothing in their possession, which Louis Levy identified as coming from his store. What led police to the men's homes is not mentioned in any sources. They may have attracted police attention trying to sell the clothing. It is also possible that Mitchell gave police Shavos' name.
  
  Judges in the Court of Special Sessions convicted two of these men, Henry and Leacock, and acquitted two others, Williams and Jacquelin. Shavos was also tried in the Court of Special Sessions, but there is no record of the outcome. The grand jury dismissed the charges against Mitchell, and indicted Moore, Larry, and Ford. The later two pled guilty in the Court of General Sessions, while the judge dismissed the charges against Moore.
• 1 2020-02-25T02:58:46+00:00 Timothy Murphy assaulted & Paul Boyett shot 63 plain 2024-02-10T22:00:26+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, as police reinforcements tried to disperse the large crowds that had gathered on 7th and 8th Avenues around 125th Street, a few blocks northwest on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, a group of around Black men allegedly attacked Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller, on his way to his home at 44 Moylan Place. Murphy alleged that the men knocked him to the ground and then hit and kicked him. The men told him “they were beating me because I was a white man,” the Daily Mirror reported Murphy as saying. What they actually said was “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now," according to his affidavit in the Magistrates Court. As a result of the beating Murphy suffered “lacerations, contusions [about his head, face and body], a broken nose and loss of hearing in his left ear.” Press reports simply said he received a broken nose.
  
  
  
  The men beating Murphy allegedly attracted the attention of Patrolman George Conn from the 30th Precinct, immediately west of Harlem. He may have been in a radio car on his way to 125th Street, as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." His Magistrates Court affidavit described the crowd as numbering around ten men, a number reported by the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other newspapers described larger crowds, twelve men according to the Daily Mirror, twenty men according to the Associated Press, and forty to fifty men in the sensationalized narrative published in the New York Evening Journal. The New York Times and New York Sun simply reported that several men had attacked Murphy. As Conn ran toward Murphy, newspaper stories and legal records agreed that he shot Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker who lived only a few buildings away, at 310 West 127th Street. The New York Sun and New York Times reported Conn's statement that he had first fired a shot in the air to disperse the crowd and then ordered Boyett to halt and shot him only when he continued running. The Daily Mirror and Home News reported those details without making clear that Conn was the source of that information. The New York Evening Journal reported Conn fired two shots, one "in the air and then a second shot which struck Boyett in the back." A brief account in the New York Herald Tribune and Associated Press simply had Conn shooting Boyett, one of the group attacking Murphy. Several other newspapers did not mention that anyone else but Boyett had allegedly been involved in attacking Murphy: the New York American had Conn shooting Boyett "when he tried to flee," the Daily News "as he was about to strike" Murphy, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply reported that Conn had shot Boyett. This incident was the most widely reported assault in the disorder, both because it occurred early in the evening, and because it fit the sensationalized narrative of racial violence which the Hearst newspapers and white tabloids employed.
  
  Boyett testified at his trial that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance,” and “struck no one at that time,” the New York Amsterdam News reported. In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. While the newspaper stories on March 20 give the impression that Conn arrested Boyett where Murphy had been assaulted, testimony at the trial revealed that Boyett continued running back to his home, apparently pursued by Conn, who arrested him in the building's hallway. A trial jury accepted Boyett's account and acquitted him of assaulting Murphy. The only source on the trial, the story in the New York Amsterdam News, did not mention what evidence was presented. One issue may have been how Conn claimed he picked Boyett out of the crowd; only the Daily News explicitly mentioned that he saw Boyett beating Murphy, although the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as "kicked complainant." A likely alternative scenario to that offered by Conn was that he simply fired at the crowd rather than singling out Boyett and calling on him to halt, and that his shot hit Boyett, whose injury consequently led Conn to arrest him.
  
  The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder, the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated a wound to Boyett's right shoulder before he was placed in a cell. Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Both Murphy and Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American. Only Murphy appears in the list of injured published in the Home News and New York Post and only Boyett, in a list of those shot, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune.
  
  
  
  Groups of Black men allegedly targeted at least three other white men around this time, all, unlike Murphy, in the area where crowds were clashing with police. William Kitlitz reported being attacked by James Smitten in front of Kress’ store, Maurice Spellman being assaulted at 125th Street and 8th Avenue, and Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All those white men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street, to shop, seek entertainment, or access public transport, on this evening caught up in the disorder. The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue would continue to be the location of alleged assaults on white men and women for at least the next three hours, with three men and two women targeted. However, the assault on Murphy represented the western boundary of the disorder, the only event west of 8th Avenue. That section of Harlem was still an area of Black residents.
  
  Murphy was one of four white men and women allegedly rescued from assaults by the intervention of police officers (with some press reports suggesting that this happened more frequently). Only in this case did police also make an arrest. In one of those other cases, an officer also fired shots at the crowd, but in that instance no one was reported as being injured. Police did shoot and kill two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, in the latter case also injuring two white bystanders.
• 1 2020-09-30T19:34:09+00:00 James Hughes arrested 60 plain 2024-09-06T19:26:54+00:00 Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10:00 PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the man and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted that the stones were to defend himself and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.
  
  Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th Street and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue before returning home for supper and then heading out again at 9:30pm to go drinking, according to details in the probation officer's preliminary investigation that were not included in the report to the court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets and heard people saying “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a shoe repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked; in the preliminary report, the probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.
  
  The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested.) Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.
  
  When Hughes appeared for sentencing, the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from a minister named Haynes received by the mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later, Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”
  
  Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes' participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.
  
  Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to whom he became apprenticed. The probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr. Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year, he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later, he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.
  
  
  
  Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."
• 1 2022-02-13T21:48:02+00:00 Margaret Mitchell arrested 57 plain 2024-01-28T05:59:21+00:00 Officer Johnson of the 6th Division arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, inside Kress’ 5, 10 and 25c store, sometime around 5:00 PM on March 19. Police alleged that she was “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. Pots and pans and glasses were knocked off counters and women screamed, after the store was closed and police tried to clear out those inside, Jackson Smith, the store manager, Patrolman Timothy Shannon, and Louise Thompson all testified. Only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise, most fully in an article in New Masses. After a woman she could not see screamed, Thompson joined part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed that crowd back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store left once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. Thompson remained with the woman she described knocking over pots and pans, who was not arrested, but she was clearly not the only person who knocked over merchandise in efforts to remain in the store until they had information about Rivera. Mitchell could also have been the woman whose scream drew Thompson and others to the rear of the store.
  
  Margaret Mitchell appeared in many newspaper stories about what happened in Kress’ store, but almost all truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, in the process mistaking what Mitchell was alleged to have done and when she was arrested. The Home News reported that Mitchell “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth.” La Prensa also reported Mitchell trying to intervene. Although the Home News went on to claim that Mitchell was arrested at that time, neither Charles Hurley nor Patrolman Donahue mentioned a woman being part of their struggles with Rivera, and Donahue testified he did not arrest anyone while at Kress’ store. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, New York Evening Journal (and the New York Times on March 24) reported that Mitchell was arrested after she screamed when the boy was being beaten. However, the New York Times, Daily News, New York American, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker did not specify when she screamed (or spread rumors in the New York Times story, or was “a leader of the disturbance” in the New York Herald Tribune story) — although the Daily News, New York American, and New York Post did elsewhere in their stories mention an unnamed woman running into street screaming at the time Rivera was grabbed. The New York Sun alone specified that Mitchell’s actions came later: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she was “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.” Inspector Di Martini's report, while containing few details of events in the store, did distinguish Mitchell from the woman who reacted to Rivera, whose actions he located slightly later than the newspaper stories, "upon the arrival of the ambulance [to treat Hurley and Urban]," when the "unknown female screamed that the boy had been seriously injured or killed and otherwise caused a commotion which attracted a large number of persons." Mitchell's arrest came later, after which "this commotion was soon quieted."
  
  The more specific allegation of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect” was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as “Disorderly in Kresses 5 & 10c Store.” That language echoed the offense with which the prosecutor charged Mitchell, disorderly conduct. She appeared in lists of those arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily News. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Mitchell was found guilty by Magistrate Renaud, who remanded her until March 23 for investigation and sentencing. The Times Union reported that she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” No other newspapers included that scene.
  
  Mitchell returned to the court on March 23, telling Magistrate Renaud she was "sorry," according to the Home News and New York World-Telegram. In passing sentence, Renaud commented that “he did not believe the girl acted maliciously,” those two publications and the New York Times and New York Age reported. The sentence reflected that assessment: three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10. The New York American reported only that outcome, obliquely reporting Renaud's comment by describing her as having "unwittingly started Tuesday's outbreak." A brief mention in the New York Amsterdam News gave the opposite impression by describing Mitchell as having been "found guilty" of "stirring up the mob." The Daily Worker pointed to what its reporter saw as the implications of her sentence, that it "beating of Negro children by Harlem white storekeepers of the police, as frequently has been the case." Mitchell was one of only three people convicted during the disorder who paid a fine. She was also one of only eighteen of those arraigned represented by a lawyer, in her case Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney.
  
  The lawyer was likely obtained with the help of Mitchell’s father, Thomas E. Thompson. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. He and his family were among the earliest Black residents of Harlem, recorded in the 1910 census living in 55 West 137th Street. While not featuring on the social pages as Sidney Christian did, Thompson would have had the resources and the standing in the West Indian community to have known of and involved the lawyer. Mitchell, one of the youngest of Thompson's twelve children, had married in April 1934, and at the time of the disorder lived with her husband, David Mitchell, a handyman in an apartment building, at 287 West 150th Street. That she was in a store twenty-five blocks south of her home indicated the distance from which the businesses on West 125th Street drew their customers.
  
  
  
  As the only person arrested in Kress’ store, and named in newspaper stories about the disorder, Mitchell was one of the few identifiable sources of information about the beginnings of the disorder for the MCCH. However, when Lt. Battle called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing on March 30, “she refused to come.” Asked again about her testimony three weeks later, Battle reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing."
  
  Margaret Mitchell and her husband still lived in the same apartment when the census enumerator called in 1940. In January 1945, she joined 200 family and friends celebrating her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, photographed alongside her siblings in an image published in the New York Amsterdam News. Her husband David was not part of the celebration; he was a sergeant in the US military serving overseas, as were two of Mitchell’s brothers and four nephews.
• 1 2020-10-22T01:27:23+00:00 Thomas Jackson arrested 57 plain 2024-02-12T20:36:56+00:00 Around 1:45 AM, Patrolmen Kalsky and Holland of the 28th Precinct saw a group of people around Jack Garmise's cigar store at 1916 7th Avenue, and then a milk can thrown through the plate glass windows. In the Magistrate Court affidavit, Kalsky alleged that he saw Thomas Jackson, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, throw the milk can. Jackson denied throwing anything at the store, or being part of an attack on it, when questioned by a probation officer. Instead, he claimed he was drunk and had been walking along West 116th Street on his way to visit a prizefighter named Leo Williams to collect money he was owed when he had become caught in a crowd moving toward the store. Someone in the crowd then pushed him through the smashed window. Throwing such a large object would have been more difficult for Jackson than most in the crowd; after an accident in 1930, his left arm had been amputated above the elbow. Kalsky claimed Jackson was sober. He also alleged he saw him reach his hand through the smashed window and take merchandise from the display. He later told a probation officer that as he approached, Jackson threw “some of the merchandise” back in the window. That phrasing suggests Jackson may not have had any merchandise on him when Kalsky arrested him, as does the district attorney's decision to offer to let him plead guilty to unlawful entry, rather than petit larceny, as others arrested for looting who made plea bargains did. The other officer, Holland, arrested Raymond Easley, a twenty-one-year-old Black man. He allegedly took cigars from the store window, according to a report in the Home News, wording that suggests the officers reported seeing him reaching into the window and found cigars in his possession. Holland also found a razor in Easley's possession. (Easley is not mentioned in the affidavit in the district attorney’s case file in which he and Jackson are co-defendants, nor does the file include an examination of him. The only document in the case file referring to Easley is a criminal record; he had no previous prosecutions.) Two arrests at the same incident of alleged looting was unusual during the disorder, suggesting that the officers were closer to the store than in other instances, perhaps only having to cross West 116th Street rather than 7th Avenue.
  
  In addition to legal records, Jackson appeared in newspaper reports of different stages of the legal process, few of which offered any details. His name was listed among those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and in the New York Evening Journal. Only the Home News reported his arraignment in the Magistrates Court, where the magistrate sent him to the grand jury. Indicted on March 22, his appearance in the Court of General Sessions to have his bail continued four days later was reported in only the New York Sun. Jackson's reappearance a few days later to plead guilty attracted more coverage, in the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, New York Times, and New York Amsterdam News. The New York Times, New York Evening Journal, Daily News, and Times Union reported his sentencing to six months in the Workhouse two weeks later, information also published in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Age, and Afro-American, and recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  
  
  The Probation Department investigation conducted prior to Jackson's sentencing offers information on his life before his arrest. Born in Manhasset, Long Island, Thomas Dean was five years old when his mother left his father to live with Jonah Jackson. When they married, Thomas took Jackson as his last name. At age ten, Jackson's truancy resulted in his committal to a juvenile asylum in Chauncy for two years. After his release, he returned to live with his mother and finish his schooling in Corona. Soon after leaving school at age sixteen, around 1917, Jackson moved to Manhattan. He found work first for a moving company, and then as a driver for a bottle company on West 35th Street for eight years, before switching to driving a taxi. He told a probation officer he was twice fined for speeding in 1923, and in 1928 served two days in prison for another traffic offense, offenses that did not appear in his criminal record and did not prevent his ongoing employment. During this time, from around 1920 until 1932, Jackson lived with Rose Repologo, an Italian woman, who the probation officer claimed was "an unwed mother who had been a former inmate of St Barnabas House," and who Jackson's sister described as "too good" for him. The couple lived downtown, at 414 West 36th Street, likely when Jackson worked nearby, information only in a second Probation Department investigation in 1940. He also reported being stabbed with a butcher's knife in a fight on West 36th Street in 1924, a detail in the probation officer's preliminary investigation not included in the report.
  
  In 1930, Jackson was injured in a street car accident that required the amputation of his left arm below the elbow. Unable to find a job after the injury, Jackson, Repologo, and her son were briefly on relief in 1932, by then living at 247 West 115th Street, until the New York Railway paid him $7,800 in compensation for his injury. Sometime soon after, Repologo left Jackson. His sister told a probation officer that after receiving the compensation, Jackson "completely ignored" his family and "mistreated" Repologo, as a result of which Repologo left him for another man. The Home Relief Bureau reported Jackson told them that he had deposited $2,500 in a bank account in the name of Rose Jackson, and that she had taken the money and disappeared. Early in 1933, Jackson invested $1,200 in opening Tom's Confectionary Store in the basement of 270 West 115th Street, down the block from his residence. Setting up a small business was a strategy followed by many other residents of Black neighborhoods in the 1930s when faced with unemployment. Jackson also joined many other small business owners in taking the opportunity to participate in Harlem's largest business, numbers gambling. In August 1933, he was convicted for collecting bets on numbers, the result he told a probation officer in 1940 of having been found in his store with fourteen slips in his possession, sufficient only to result in a fine of $50. By the end of 1933, Jackson's business had failed. A probation officer reported the cause as Jackson's "neglect," recording in the preliminary investigation that Jackson claimed his "employees robbed him." The preliminary investigation also notes that the balance of Jackson's compensation payment had been spent on merchandise for the store. Jackson also said "he 'clowned' his way through life and spent most of his money having a 'big time'" in poolrooms, according to the Probation Department Investigation Report.
  
  Soon after being forced to sell his store, Jackson moved in with his half-sister Beatrice Cooper and her family, and applied for Home Relief as part of that household. In 1934 the family lived in a series of apartments on West 118th Street, West 121st Street, and finally outside Harlem on West 99th Street. At the beginning of March 1935, Beatrice's husband John obtained a Work Relief job, and according to the Home Relief Bureau, refused to support Jackson. Jackson and his sister did not get on; a probation officer reported that he said that she was "too strict," while she described him as having "treated them with scorn." Relocating back to Harlem, Jackson moved into a furnished room in an apartment at 217 West 121st Street, and then, a day before the disorder, relocated to another at 253 West 121st Street. Unusually for the men arrested for involvement in the disorder, the report from the Psychiatric Clinic offered no explanation for Jackson's participation. Dr. Sylvan Keiser described him as a "talkative, cheerful pleasant type of person" "of Average Intelligence."
  
  Information survives on Jackson's life in the five years after his release from the Workhouse in 1935 as a result of a subsequent conviction in 1940, which led to him again being investigated by the Probation Department, and that report being added to the file created in 1935. A few days after his release from the Workhouse, in October 1935, Jackson was assigned work as a laborer by the Works Progress Administration. That job lasted almost three years, during which time Jackson lived in a furnished room in 154 West 121st Street and then in a rooming house at 2053 7th Avenue. He had little contact with his family; his sister told a probation officer that "he has always desired to live alone without restriction." Around 1937 Jackson contracted syphilis, he claimed from a prostitute. In August 1938 Jackson lost his WPA position, according to the Probation Department report, after he returned drunk having left the project without permission and swore at his supervisors and coworkers. A few weeks later, Jackson was arrested for slashing the tire of a taxi, and sentenced to a month in the Workhouse. A year later he was back in Workhouse, for ninety days, after pleading guilty to perjury and election fraud after being paid to fill in false affidavits related to a primary election. Following his release he worked briefly as an office cleaner and later as a watchman, while receiving relief payments, except for a period when an agent discontinued payments because Jackson supplied false information about his residence. He had left the rooming house for a furnished room in 135 West 119th Street. In October 1940, Jackson was charged with rape. He and two other men allegedly abducted a twenty-nine-year-old Black woman from a bar at West 119th Street and 8th Avenue and took her to his room at 152 West 119th Street, where they assaulted and robbed her. Jackson pled guilty to third degree assault. Examined again in the Psychiatric Clinic, this time Dr. John Cassity found Jackson still an "adjusted personality," although "on a low cultural level in recent months," but also "quite an aggressive individual [who] reacts with violence upon provocation." Judge Jacob Gould Schurman sentenced Jackson to the penitentiary. He had been released by April 1943, when he registered for the draft, and was living with his sister Dorothy at 37 West 99th Street.
• 1 2021-08-19T17:29:52+00:00 Lafayette Market looted 56 plain 2024-05-30T17:28:47+00:00 The Lafayette Market at 2044 7th Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 122nd Street, was looted at sometime during the disorder. The Daily News published a photograph of the damaged store on March 21. All the market's display windows were missing in the photograph, although there was no glass and little other debris visible. It was likely that store staff had cleaned up and swept the street before the photograph was taken, sometime the day after the disorder given that the image was taken in daylight and published the next day. The window displays had been emptied of goods, but the photograph did not offer a clear view of the extent of the looting of the store's interior — although it did indicate that the store could have been accessed through the corner window display. The caption's phrasing also left ambiguous the extent of the looting; the statement that "windows were smashed and contents looted" could refer to the contents of the windows or the store more broadly. (The caption of the photograph in the Afro-American described the business as a "poultry store." The signage, cropped out of that version of the photograph, indicated it sold a wider range of groceries.) Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, lived in the building next to the Lafayette Market, at 203 West 122nd Street. Interviewed there after the disorder by E. Franklin Frazier, he mentioned that "there was not a whole window in this store right here" after the disorder, likely a reference to the market.
  
  
  
  Crowds pushed off the block of West 125th Street around the Kress store toward 7th Avenue later moved up and down the avenues, leading to multiple reports of assaults, broken windows, and looting in the area around the Lafayette Market. When some of that violence took place was not specified in the sources, but a cluster did occur between 11:00 PM and 12:30 AM, including the assault of a white man a few buildings west of the market on 122nd Street and rocks thrown at Fred Campbell's car as he sat stopped at the traffic lights at the intersection across the avenue from the market, as well as the looting of a delicatessen a block north. Campbell described considerable disorder in the area around Lafayette Market, crashes and shots being fired, store windows shattering, and police trying to disperse crowds. Channing Tobias, awake in his home in the next building, heard "smashing of glasses [sic] and the firing of guns" between midnight and 1:00 AM. The gunshots he heard suggested that looting of the store began around midnight, the time observers noticed such attacks intensified.
  
  Almost as many Black-owned as white-owned businesses operated on the block on which the Lafayette Market was located. The stationery store visible in the storefront next to the market was one of those Black-owned business, according to the MCCH business survey. It was a "[n]eat store, carries full line of cigars, cigarettes and candies" according to the investigator who visited it. That store did not appear to have been attacked or looted, as the windows visible in the photograph were intact, offering evidence that crowds avoided Black-owned businesses during the disorder.
  
  Although the caption described the police officer standing in front of the market's doors as "guarding" the store, he was more likely to have been patrolling the area monitoring passersby, or stationed at the intersection, behind where the photographer stood to take the image. There were far too many damaged and looted businesses in Harlem for police to be guarding them individually the day after the disorder. Police officers featured in several other photographs of damaged buildings taken after the disorder (and some taken during the night).
  
  Albert Bass, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man, was likely arrested in the vicinity of the market during the disorder sometime after midnight. Salvatore Marrone, with his address recorded as 2044 7th Avenue, was the complainant against Bass in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book. While both the list published in the New York Evening Journal and the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against Bass as burglary, when he was arraigned in the Magistrate's Court he was charged with Disorderly Conduct. That change indicated that police had encountered Bass been on the street in the area of the looted store but had no evidence he had either broken windows or taken merchandise. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bass and ordered him to pay a $50 or spend five days in the Workhouse, according to the docket book. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the sentence as a fine of $25, which suggested he took that option.
  
  The Lafayette Market continued to operate after the disorder. The store was included in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935, categorized as a white-owned meat market. The investigator's notes described it as "Very neat - hires one Negro as clerk." It was also visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2020-10-22T02:18:54+00:00 Arnold Ford arrested 54 plain 2024-01-12T17:55:53+00:00 Around 1:50 AM, Patrolman Louis Frikser arrested Arnold Ford, a nineteen-year-old Black man, on the Third Avenue Bridge, which connected the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Frikser reported that he had observed Ford "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation. Ford was likely going home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large; it contained three cakes of soap, a can of shoe polish, two pairs of garters, six spools of thread, a jar of Vaseline, and three packets of tea, with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted being part of a group of men who had entered Harry Lash's 5 & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, five blocks west of the bridge on the corner of West 130th Street, and stolen goods. Later, in court, Ford stated that he had not broken the store windows, but only joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." Eighteen months after the disorder, Ford told his probation officer that he "found the goods in the street."
  
  
  
  Patrolman Frikser stopped a second man crossing the bridge from Harlem, Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter "a few minutes" after Ford, and also arrested him for looting Lash's store. None of the reports of this case detail what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Like Ford, Moore was likely returning home; he lived at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx, a building next door to where Ford resided. But Ford did not know Moore, according to a note on the preliminary investigation in his Probation Department file
  
  Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).
  
  Police charged both Ford and Moore with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court on March 20. Subsequently, they were indicted by the grand jury and tried in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Ford pled guilty to petit larceny, while Moore was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defence lawyers who appeared for him (that story made no mention of Ford). Eighteen months later, Ford told his probation officer that he pleaded guilty "because he was told to do so and that as a matter of fact he is not guilty and did not take part in the riot and that he found the goods in the street." The officer described Ford as "brooding over his conviction," suggesting he regretted the plea.
  
  Ford (and Moore) appear in newspaper reports only in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, a list published in the New York Evening Journal, and stories in the Home News and New York Sun. The Home News story included brief summaries of the charges made in the Magistrates Court; in this case, it grouped Ford and Moore together, arrested at the same time for looting the same store, but confused the $1,000 of goods stolen reported by Lash in his affidavit before the Magistrates Court for what the men were found carrying, also mistakenly identifying it as clothing. The New York Sun likewise mistakenly alleged the men had stolen $1,000 of property, but did correctly identify those goods as "general merchandise," in reporting the men's pleas in the Court of General Sessions, on March 25, after their indictment by the grand jury on March 22.
  
  Of the ten men convicted in the Court of General Sessions as a result of the disorder, judges placed only Ford and Charles Saunders on probation rather than incarcertating them (the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded this outcome as a suspended sentence). Ford remained under supervision under April 1938.
  
  The judge's decision to place Ford on probation likely owed much to the interest shown in him by Dr. Mason Pitman, superintendent of the Colored Orphan Asylum, located north of Manhattan at Riverdale, West 261st Street. Pitman expressed surprise that Ford had been arrested, writing to the Probation Department, "I do not understand why Arnold got into this trouble but I suppose that is something none of us understand, as we have never been put on the spot," and asking for leniency — going so far as to appear at the sentencing hearing. Ford and his younger brother and sister had been placed in the institution in 1927, when a judge committed them as neglected children. His mother Susan had turned to the court saying she had been deserted by her husband, Arnold Josiah Ford, a prominent Black Hebrew rabbi. However, the Big Sisters informed the Probation Department that the couple had divorced, with Josiah marrying again and Susan having children with another man. At the hearing, Josiah agreed to contribute to his ex-wife's support but "would not claim the children." (Arnold's social security record identified his father as Donold J. Ford, whose name does not appear in the Probation Department file). Ford remained in the Asylum until 1933, spending the last two years at its boarding home in Jamaica, Queens, before being discharged back into his mother's care. The summary of his records at the Colored Orphan Asylum noted "He was found to be a nice boy in every way and was well liked by all who came in contact with him." Ford and his mother lived together at several addresses before moving to 246 East 136th Street two months before the disorder. Susan worked a few days a week as a domestic servant for a household on West 77th Street, while Arnold occasionally worked as an itinerant bootblack.
  
  During his three years on probation, Ford frustrated the efforts of the Probation Department to supervise and direct his life. He reported far less frequently than required, blaming a lack of carfare for the trip, took up few of his probation officers' suggestions for vocational training, and refused to apply for aid from the Home Relief Bureau because it required answering invasive questions. His mother did not share his objections, as she began receiving Home Relief in September 1935 and cut back her hours of domestic work. Ford did enroll in the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936, seeking an assignment to one of the rural work relief camps, but was rejected when the medical examination revealed he had a hernia. For several months, Ford traveled to Morrisania Hospital for treatment, during which he was bedridden at home for at least two months. Around his illness, Ford briefly worked as an errand boy for a grocery store on Amsterdam Ave and West 79th Street, let go because his employer did not think he was physically able to carry heavy bundles, then two days a week as a cleaner and porter for a synagogue in the Bronx at Gerard Avenue and 161st Street, and then as an errand boy for a millinery firm on West 37th Street. Soon after he got that position in March, he moved out of the apartment at 258 East 148th Street that he and his mother had moved to in June 1936, and in with the mother and a cousin of the woman he had married a month earlier, Gwendolyn Jordan, a twenty-year-old housemaid, at 134 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. He did not pass on that news to his probation officer, who learned of the marriage from a Home Relief investigator who had visited Ford's mother.
  
  In August 1937, Ford lost his job, fired for making an error in delivering a package. The next month he found a job as a pin boy at Williamsbridge Bowling Alley at 225th Street and White Plains Road, working from 1 PM to 1 AM for two-thirds of his previous wage and requiring a journey of more than eighteen miles. But the next month Ford was again looking for work; when his probation officer urged him to apply for Home Relief, he recorded Arnold and Gwendolyn as refusing and saying “they did not want to answer so many questions as the Home Relief Bureau wants to know too many personal questions which they refuse to answer and they would feel like slaves to this bureau and they believe that the clients of this bureau are treated like slaves.” Gwendolyn took a similar position on medical care for her pregnancy; when the probation officer urged her to visit the hospital, she refused. He wrote, “because they ask too many questions and also because free service is no good and that the patients are ill-treated and neglected.” Instead, she planned to have the baby delivered at home by a local physician whom the family went to for care; the couple had saved about $40 for the expenses. Tragically, that doctor was not in attendance when Gwendolyn went into labor in December 1937, and the baby presented in breech position. Although an ambulance was called, the child died. The probation officer's assessment of those events is jarring in its callousness: “It seems that the probationer, his wife and his mother-in-law are ignorant and suspicious people who cannot be advised by anybody.” In the remaining three months of his probation, Ford and his wife continued to live with his mother-in-law, her cousin, and his two adult daughters, pooling their relief payments and wages, with Ford's contribution being what he could make from odd jobs while he looked for work.
  
  In 1940, Ford was living with his wife and their one-year-old daughter, at 863 Home Street in the Bronx, when the census enumerator called. He gave his occupation as porter, but was still without a job, as remained the case when he completed a draft registration card later that year. On the card his address is recorded as 892 Union Avenue in the Bronx, although that address was struck out and replaced successively with four other addresses in the Bronx. A note on the card indicates Ford served in the Navy, receiving an honorable discharge on October 7, 1946.
• 1 2020-10-21T01:41:36+00:00 Hezekiah Wright arrested 50 plain 2024-01-25T22:49:35+00:00 Around 12:30 AM, Acting Captain Conrad Rothengast of the 6th Detective Division arrested Hezekiah Wright, a thirty-six-year-old Black janitor in front of a delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue. Rothengast claimed that shots being fired on 7th Avenue near 123rd Street drew his attention to a group of men standing in front of the delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue, owned by Sarah Refkin and managed by Nathan Pavlowitz, according to a Probation Department investigation report. As he approached the group, he allegedly saw Wright kick and smash the store's plate glass window, reach in and take four lamps and two jars of food. Wright then saw him coming towards him, dropped those items and held his hands above his head. The detective somehow interpreted that stance as indicating that Wright was about to attack him, so struck him with his baton before arresting him.
  
  
  
  Wright denied any involvement in the looting of the store when interviewed by a probation officer. Instead he said he was returning to his home at 155 West 123rd Street, around the corner from the delicatessen, having gone out to buy cigarettes, when he saw the crowd in front of the store. Those men ran when they saw Rothengast approaching; Wright said he stayed where he was as he was not involved in attacking the store. Others arrested in the disorder similarly claimed to have been out on errands and mistaken for participants in acts of violence. In Wright's case, it was not unusual to be on the streets late at night. He told the probation officer that he occasionally went on walks in the late evening, as the long hours of his job kept him occupied until then. The probation officer reported nothing that indicated he would have chosen to participate in looting, characterizing him instead as "a quiet, inoffensive type of individual." Dr. Walter Bromberg used a similar phrase in the report of his examination of Wright in the Court's Psychiatric Clinic, describing him as "a quiet, cooperative individual," who showed "no evidence of any emotional upset" or "of any aggressive, antisocial personality characteristics." The probation officer did report that Wright's "moral standards are lax," apparently because his "greatest outlet [was] playing the policy numbers in the hope he will 'become lucky' and 'hit the numbers.'" That very widespread activity in Harlem reflected the limited economic opportunities available to the neighborhood's residents at least as much as their morality. Missing from the Probation Department investigation report is the explanation that the probation officer wrote at the end of the Preliminary Investigation: that Wright was "A victim of mob hysteria who [?] advantages during a tense situation to enrich himself at others expense and by a criminal act." Other psychiatrists had invoked the influence of the mob in reporting their examinations of men arrested in the disorder, and it may be that this probation officer had been anticipating that it would also appear in Wright's report. When it did not, he may have chosen to omit his comment. 
  
  The Magistrate Court affidavit included few of those details. In that account, Rothengast simply saw Wright kick in the window and take a quantity of groceries. A Home News report of Wright's arraignment in that court put the value of the goods he allegedly stole at $100. The Probation Department investigation report specified that the items Rothegast alleged Wright tried to steal had a combined value of $11.10, the lamps 90 cents each and the jars of food $3.75 each. Stories in the New York Age and New York Times reporting later stages of his prosecution included the details that he had allegedly stolen "four lamps and a quantity of food," with the latter story misstating the value of those items as "about $8 in all." As Pavlowitz, the store manager, told a probation officer, others had taken the other missing merchandise, which he valued at between $50 and $75, rather than $100.
  
  The lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal included Wright among those charged with burglary. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, with the docket book and the Home News recording that Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on $1,000 bail. The grand jury indicted Wright on March 22, according to his district attorney's case file; three days later, Judge Morris Koenig of the Court of General Sessions continued his bail, a step in the legal process documented only by the New York Sun. It took only two more days for Wright to agree to a plea bargain offered by a district attorney; his appearance in court to plead guilty to unlawful entry was reported in the New York Post on March 27, and New York Herald Tribune, New York Daily News and New York Times on March 28, and the New York Amsterdam News on March 30. Wright told a probation officer he pled guilty on the advice of his lawyer, denying he attacked the store. His sentencing on April 8 was recorded in 28th Precinct police blotter and again widely reported, in the Times Union on April 8, in the New York Evening News, New York Times and Daily News on April 9, and in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Age and Afro-American on April 13. Judge Donnellan sent Wright to the Workhouse for three months.
  
  Wright told a probation officer he had been in New York City for eight years. Born in Kingston, North Carolina, his family moved at some point to Suffolk, Virginia, and from there to Boston in 1906. Around 1909, his mother became ill with tuberculosis and sought treatment at the Rutland Sanitarium. When she was released after two years, Wright and his five younger siblings returned with her to Suffolk, where her sister helped Wright look after the younger children. His father rejoined the family a year later, Wright worked with him making baskets. When Wright was fourteen years old, his mother died. The probation investigation included no information about Wright's subsequent life in Virginia other than his statement that he had spent thirty days in jail in 1917 after a fight with a railway detective when a circus arrived in town, and his marriage to Odel Burns in 1923. His World War One Draft registration lists his employment in 1918 as a soda foundation clerk in the Colored YMCA in Hopewell, Virginia.
  
  Around 1927, Wright moved to New York City, likely with his family, as his father and three of his surviving siblings lived in Harlem in 1935, and the other sibling nearby in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Charles, who in 1935 lived with his second wife and one of his daughters at 510 Manhattan Avenue, was a Baptist minister at Jerusalem Church. Wright worked for his first five years in the city as a chauffeur for Dr. Bernard Zaglin. That work was "irregular," which might explain why the Preliminary Investigation in Wright's Probation Department file also records him working in Haverstraw, sixty miles north of the city on the Hudson River, as a driver hauling bricks for the Excelsior Brick Company in the busy season, the summer of 1931, and sometime prior to that as a painter and in a poolroom, and as a laborer in nearby Iona Island. The Probation Department Investigation Report presents all Wright's work in Haverstraw as prior to his employment by Zaglin even thought the Preliminary Investigation records the length of his work hauling bricks as May-October 1931. It may be that he lived and worked in Haverstraw prior to moving to Harlem, and returned there periodically.
  
  It was to Haverstraw that his wife Odel went when she left him in 1932, with a man named Charlie Phillips, information in the Preliminary Investigation that the probation officer omitted from the Investigation Report. Instead, the report explained the couple's "separation" as a result of Wright's "infidelity with Marion Harris," with whom he was living at the time of his arrest. As was the case with others whose relationships followed the more fluid marriage patterns of working-class communities, the Probation Department Investigation Report described the twenty-two-year-old Harris as Wright's "mistress," ignoring the information in the Preliminary Investigation that they had married in April 1933, again in Haverstraw. At that time they were living with one of Wright's cousins at 860 Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx, rent free as Wright was unemployed after Zaglin decided in October 1932 that he no longer needed a chauffeur.
  
  Wright remained unemployed until July 1933, when he and Harris were employed as janitors at 155 West 123rd Street, a job that came with an apartment in the basement. They still held that position at the time of his arrest, and his employer told a probation officer he would reemploy Wright when he was released. However, if that happened, Wright did not live in the building. A census enumerator found him at 143 West 113th Street in 1940, where he told her he had been in 1935 (a question in that census), and was employed as the superintendent of an apartment building. He also told the enumerator he was married, but Harris is not recorded in the census schedule. Two years later, when Wright registered for the draft, he was living and working in another building, at 216 West 114th Street. He left blank the line for "Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your address," where men typically included their wife or a parent. His home address is struck out and updated several months later to 143 West 113th Street, his home in 1940.
• 1 2020-02-26T18:59:50+00:00 Isaac Daniels arrested 50 plain 2024-01-27T15:59:41+00:00

  Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Herman Young, in his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue. After hearing glass smashing, Young and his wife, Rose, had come downstairs from their apartment to the store, whose windows had been looted and encountered a man on the stoop, trying to come through the door. The man allegedly cursed at Young — "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here” — and then threw a stone that smashed the glass in the door. Both the stone and flying glass hit Young. Taken to Harlem Hospital, Young was being stitched by a doctor when Daniels entered to receive treatment. Young identified him as the man who had assaulted him, and an officer at the hospital arrested Daniels. Another man, James Williams, was later arrested for looting the store. The affidavit in his case made no mention of Young being assaulted, instead recording that he had come downstairs to find four men in the store stealing merchandise.
  
  Questioned in a lineup at the Manhattan Police HQ, Daniels denied throwing the stone at Young, and said he had been in the area because he was on his way home. Daniels, a native of Georgia who had come to New York City in 1928, lived with his wife only a few blocks from Young's store at 73 W. 130th Street. Later, at his trial, Daniels added the detail that he had gone out to buy cigarettes. His wife said that he had gone to the movies, and was listening to the radio at home at 1:00 AM when Young was attacked.
  
  

  The report of the arrest in the Home News linked Daniels and Young and included the detail that Young had been cut by flying glass. Daniels also appeared in lists of those who arrested and charged with assault published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, neither of which included the circumstances which led to his arrest. He also appeared in lists of the injured published in the Home News and New York Post, one of four men arrested for assault with injuries. In Daniels' case, the list identified him as having "contusions" on his left arm.
  
  Daniels was one of the first of those arrested to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where he was charged with felonious assault. The Home News and New York Post reported he was back in the court two days later, joining James Hughes and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial (which is likely why Daniels appears in the 28th Precinct police blotter as having been discharged, as did James Hughes). The indictment in the district attorney's case file has a charge of first degree assault, with intent to kill, struck out, leaving a charge of second degree assault, with intent to cause bodily harm. That change suggests that prosecutors reduced the charge after obtaining details of what happened (Young's wife had mentioned that the man who assaulted him had used a piece of pipe, but later reports mention only him throwing a stone). Indicted for assault, Daniels was one of the handful of individuals tried for alleged offenses during the disorder. On April 9, the district attorney's case file recorded that a jury acquitted Daniels, likely because of questions over Young's identification of him.
• 1 2021-04-21T19:10:20+00:00 Edward Larry arrested 48 plain 2024-01-24T00:26:07+00:00 At 1:00 AM, Patrolman William Clements observed Edward Larry, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer, traveling in a taxi at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue. He stopped the taxi, and found that Larry had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Not satisfied with Larry’s explanation that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, Clements took him to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. The Magistrates Court affidavit simply described Clements as arresting Larry; the Home News report of Larry's appearance in the Magistrates Court described Clements arresting Larry "as he was about to get into a taxicab with two boxes containing a dozen shirts." The more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation described Clements stopping the cab.
  
  Larry was one of nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged crime, a group making up one third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60). Although he was the only one arrested in a vehicle, a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal indicated that this was not the only instance in which police stopped vehicles. Larry told police he was returning home to the Salvation Army shelter at 224 West 124th Street, behind Kress' store (some reports listed the address as 218 West 124th Street; the MCCH business survey records that the Salvation Army operated in both buildings). He had lived there for a month, after spending two weeks at the Belmont Hotel on the Bowery, and the previous thirty days in the workhouse serving a sentence for pickpocketing.
  
  
  
  At the police station, Morris Towbin saw Larry and identified him as one of a group of men who had threatened him and robbed his haberdashery store at 101 West 125th Street at 10:30 PM the previous evening. Towbin also identified the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store, part of $2,000 of merchandise stolen, $1,000 of fixtures destroyed and $226.89 worth of plate glass windows smashed. Towbin's encounter with Larry was described only in the more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation. The Magistrates Court affidavit recorded only that Towbin had identified the shirts, a standard feature of a charge when an individual had not been seen stealing goods, and that he could "positively identify the defendant as one of the men" who had robbed him. In the police blotter, the charge against Larry was recorded as burglary. That record suggested that Towbin's identification came after his initial booking and after police provided that information to reporters, as the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, both included Larry among those charged with burglary. Towbin's allegation of force changed the offense to robbery, which is the charge made against Larry in the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, there was no mention of force or robbery in the story covering his court appearance in the Home News or in reports of Towbin's statements as president of Harlem Merchants Association in the Daily News and Home News. Nor did police find a knife in Larry's possession, the weapon with which Towbin said he had been threatened. Larry's criminal record did not suggest he would have used a weapon as none of his convictions involved the use of force.
  
  When Larry was arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held him without bail for the grand jury. He was one of only seven of those arrested during the disorder for which magistrates did not set bail. Nine days later, on March 29, the grand jury indicted him for robbery in the first degree. It was likely this was the indictment mentioned in stories in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York American: while the latter two stories gave no details of the case, the New York Times referred to the unnamed defendant being "charged with burglary in the looting of an East 125th Street store." No one else arrested in the disorder was indicted on March 29. Rather than go to trial, Larry agreed to a plea bargain. On April 5, he appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to attempted grand larceny in the second degree, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison rather than up to twenty years, the punishment for robbery in the first degree. Ten days later, after an investigation by the Probation Department, Judge Nott sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the state prison. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded a different sentence of six months to two years, but the Probation Department investigation and a response to the parole board in the district attorney's case file both record the longer sentence). That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record. He had been convicted three times for picking pockets in New York City in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, convicted for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928. New York's Habitual Offender statute, commonly known as the Baumes Act, required that in cases involving individuals with a previous conviction for a felony that a plea bargain be to a felony and set minimum sentences based on the previous felony conviction.
  
  Larry had been born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1909. His mother died when he was three years of age, leaving his father, and later stepmother to raise him. In 1921, a year after leaving school at age eleven to work in a cotton press, Larry left home. In the only response the Probation Department received to the letters they sent inquiring about Larry's history, the Wilmington Public Welfare Commission reported an interview with his half-sister Rose, in which she said he found work in a coal mine in West Virginia. Larry himself told the Probation Department officer G. H. Royal that he first worked briefly for a transportation company, traveling to Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent two months in a fish factory, followed by time on a truck in Far Rockaway, New York, then in a steel mill in Pittsburgh and a coal mine in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1924, aged fifteen, he began working irregularly for carnival companies that traveled the North in the summer and the South in the winter.
  
  In February 1928, carnival work, or perhaps coal mining, brought Larry to Welch, West Virginia, where he was convicted of grand larceny. The court did not respond to the Probation Department's request for details of the case; Larry told them that he and another man were accused of stealing money from a drunken man in a poolroom (given Larry's record, the theft was likely accomplished by pickpocketing). Sentenced to six years in the state prison, Larry said he served four years and eight months, which would have seen him released in June 1932. By May 28, 1933, Larry was in New York City; he also said that earlier that month, while working in a carnival, he married Cora Temple, a dancer, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In New York City, Larry was arrested for pickpocketing — the criminal record in the district attorney's case file specifying "lush," slicing open the pocket of a drunken individual — and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse. After his release, he remained in New York City for at least six months, presumably with his wife Cora, but without a home and relying on charity. According to his half sister, Larry returned to Wilmington in December 1933, and found work as a stevedore until July 1934; he told the Probation Department he did not visit until July 1934, and left his wife there while he looked for work.
  
  Almost as soon as Larry arrived back in New York City, on July 29, police arrested him for pickpocketing, again lush, according to the criminal record in the District Attorney's case file. On this occasion, he was sentenced to six months in the Workhouse. Released in January 1935, it was less than a month before officers from the police pickpocket squad arrested him again, and he spent a further 30 days in the Workhouse. In the month between his release and the disorder, he told the Probation Department that he spent a week working on a Salvation Army project in Flushing, Long Island.
• 1 2020-10-01T19:30:34+00:00 Paul Boyett arrested 47 plain 2024-01-28T22:48:07+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, Patrolman George Conn arrested Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black garage worker, for assaulting Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller. Conn testified in the Magistrates Court that he had come upon a crowd attacking Murphy on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. He may have been in a radio car as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." After firing his pistol into the air to scatter the crowd, he then called on Boyett to halt, and when he did not, shot him. Although the bullet struck Boyett in his back or shoulder, he was able to continue running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn pursued him, eventually catching him in the building hallway. Boyett denied assaulting Murphy, testifying that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave when police appeared, a bullet hit him.
  
  
  
  Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. That hospital record and New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder. Several newspapers reported other locations for the injury: the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back.
  
  Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American, and in a list of those shot in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune. He also appears in the lists of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal.
  
  Boyett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The docket book indicates that he was remanded until March 22, and then again on March 25 and April 1, before Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury on April 9. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. On April 23, the grand jury heard the case against Boyett, according to the district attorney's case file records; they indicted him for first degree assault. His trial in the Court of General Sessions occurred just over a month later, on May 29, where his lawyer was William T. Andrews, a prominent member of Harlem's elite elected to the New York State Assembly in 1934. Boyett testified he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. There is no mention in that story of what evidence was presented at Boyett's trial. Whatever it was, the jury acquitted Boyett, an outcome that indicated they accepted his account.
  
  The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the outcome of that trial but the only source for details is that brief story in the New York Amsterdam News. Headlined "Wins Acquittal in Disturbance Charge," the story only summarized Boyett's testimony and included no details of the alleged assault on Murphy or Conn's account of the shooting. In that way it fit with the approach Black newspapers took of not reporting alleged violence against whites during the disorder. The story mistakenly identified the complainant as Kennedy Murphy rather than Timothy Murphy, and mispelled Boyett's last name as Boyette.
• 1 2021-04-13T17:34:18+00:00 Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store looted 45 plain 2024-05-31T02:11:14+00:00 Benjamin Zelvin locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11:30 PM on March 19. The forty-eight-year-old Russian-born resident of Brooklyn may also have boarded up the windows, as a Home News story mentioned boards later being pulled away when the store was attacked. Although there were no reports of looting in this area at that time, there apparently were crowds or other activity that led Zelvin to seek police protection for his store before leaving it. Across the street at 371 Lenox Avenue, Irving Stekin had also called police after a window in his grocery store was broken, likely around this time. The New York World-Telegram reported that Zelvin told a representative of the city comptroller's office that he waited more than half an hour after calling the station house before police reached his store (Stekin reported waiting two hours). Those officers apparently did not remain at Zelvin's store, as it was later looted, probably starting around midnight; police told Zelvin "they didn't know anything about it." However, Officer Astel of the 25th Precinct arrested two men, John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, and Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer around 2:15 AM at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. He allegedly found a quantity of jewelry in the men's possession, which they admitted to taking from Zelvin's store. A Home News story reported that they had "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where he found all the windows broken. Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock, the value of the jewelry was initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. Zelvin later assessed his total losses as far greater. When he joined other merchants in filing claims for damages suffered in the disorder, the New York World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2,685. The New York Evening Journal reported Zelvin told the comptroller that his losses were "because of the lack of police protection."
  
  
  
  There were no newspaper stories about the looting. Henry and Leacock appeared only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested published in Black newspapers and in the New York Evening Journal. The District Attorney's case file contained some details; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information was from the Magistrate Court affidavit. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men.
  
  Zelvin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge an additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary (the only other individual charged for an offense related to the disorder in the court that day was John Henry, although Zelvin was not listed as the complainant in that case). Goodwin appeared only in the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; there were no details of his alleged crime. If he did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they were worth less than $100. When Goodwin appeared again, the charge was reduced to petit larceny and the Magistrate transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. Like Henry and Leacock, the police blotter recorded that the judges convicted him.
  
  Zelvin had started his own business soon after arriving in the city in 1904. By 1918 at the latest, when he registered for the draft, his business was located at 372 Lenox Avenue. By that time Zelvin was also living in Harlem, at 327 Lenox Avenue, where he still resided at the time of the 1920 federal census. Sometime before the state census in 1925, he relocated to a house he bought on 83rd Street in Brooklyn, which is where he lived at the time of the disorder, according to the 1940 census. It was possible that Zelvin did not reopen his jewelry store in Harlem after the disorder. It did not appear in the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935, which recorded no business at 372 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 was from an angle that did not offer a clear view of the business at that address. By the time the fifty-six year old Zelvin registered for the draft in 1942, he listed his place of business as 4116 8th Avenue in Brooklyn.
• 1 2020-10-22T01:45:42+00:00 Regal Shoes looted 41 plain 2024-05-29T16:21:37+00:00 Edward Wittleder, the assistant manager, closed Regal Shoes, on the southeast corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10:00 PM, according to his Magistrate's Court affidavit. By that time store windows had been smashed the length of the block of 125th Street to the west, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Police trying to clear people from the street had pushed them toward the intersection on which Regal Shoes sat, creating large crowds, as well as concentrating the officers and riot control trucks there. After 10:00 PM, small groups had begun to attack businesses north and south of the intersection on 7th Avenue and further east on 125th Street. By 11:00 PM the store window had been smashed (a reporter from La Prensa included Regal Shoes among the businesses he saw with broken windows the next day). So too had the windows of the businesses on the other three corners of the intersection. Two of those stores, Herbert's Blue Diamond jewelry store and the United Cigar store had police guarding the storefronts that appear to have protected them from being looted. Police do not appear to have taken up positions in front of the shoe store, but were close enough to watch the store. Around 11:00 PM, Officer Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct claimed he saw John Vivien, a twenty-seven-year-old Black laborer, reach through the window and take a pair of shoes from the display. Naton then arrested Vivien, who he said still had the shoes in his possession. Wittleder identified them as coming from the store and being worth $5.50.
  
  
  
  Vivien lived at 483 Manhattan Avenue, two blocks west of Regal Shoes, near the corner of West 120th Street. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, where Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on bail of $1,000. The Home News reported those proceedings; the remainder of his prosecution is recorded only in legal records and police records. Vivien appeared before the grand jury on April 4, according to his district attorney's case file. They sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him, indicating a lack of the evidence that he had broken into the store required for a charge of burglary. A charge of larceny was likely the alternative, with the items valued well below the $100 required for a felony offense. The judges in that court then convicted Vivien and suspended his sentence, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  Regal Shoes continued in business after the disorder. The MCCH business survey from the second half of 1935 included the store, whose address it gave as 2097 7th Avenue rather than 166 West 125th Street, the address used in the reports of the looting. The store also appeared in a building labeled 2901 7th Avenue in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2020-10-22T01:35:16+00:00 Raymond Easley arrested 40 plain 2024-02-12T21:51:05+00:00 Around 1:45 AM, Patrolmen Kalsky and Holland of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw a group of people around the cigar store at 1916 7th Avenue, and then a milk can thrown through the plate glass windows. The officers got to the store in time for Kalsky to arrest Thomas Jackson, a thirty-four-year-old Black driver who he charged had thrown the milk can, and Holland to arrest Raymond Easley, a twenty-one-year-old Black man, he charged had taken cigars from the store window, according to a story in the Home News. Holland also found that Easley was carrying a razor. Two arrests at the same incident of alleged looting was unusual during the disorder, suggesting that the officers were closer to the store than in other instances, perhaps only having to cross West 116th Street rather than 7th Avenue. Easley lived to the south of the store, on West 113th Street, an area with a mix of Black, Puerto Rican, and white residents.
  
  
  
  Easley was not mentioned in the affidavit in the District Attorney’s case file in which he and Jackson are co-defendants, nor does the file contain an examination of him. The only document in the case file referring to Easley was a criminal record; he had no previous prosecutions. Other than the story about his arraignment in the Magistrates Court in the Home News, Easley only appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal, and a report on his return to the Magistrates Court in the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  Easley and Jackson (whose real name was Thomas Dean) both appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, but took different paths through the legal system. Magistrate Renaud held Jackson for the grand jury on charges of burglary; he remanded Easley on the same charge and on the charge of carrying a dangerous weapon, a misdemeanor offense, for having the razor in his possession. Both appeared in court again on March 27, but while Jackson, indicted on March 22, pled guilty to unlawful entry in the Court of General Sessions, Easley was back in the Magistrate's Court, having the burglary charges against him dismissed as he had already been indicted by the grand jury as a result of evidence presented in District Attorney Dodge's investigation. The New York Herald Tribune, the only newspaper to report on those proceedings, noted that Easley was rearrested. The 28th Precinct police blotter and the district attorney’s case file were the only sources that recorded that the indictment was dismissed on April 12.
  
  A day earlier Easley had returned to the Harlem court to face the weapons possession charge having previously had the investigation continued on April 3 and April 9. On April 11 the magistrate sent him to the Court of Special Sessions. There was no record of the outcome of that trial and no newspaper reports of those appearances.
• 1 2020-02-26T14:46:34+00:00 Herman Young assaulted 39 plain 2024-01-25T22:47:35+00:00 Around 1:00 AM, Herman Young, a fifty-three-year-old Austrian-born white man who had lived in Harlem for twenty years, was cut on the head by flying glass after a stone was thrown through the glass door of his Lenox Avenue hardware store. Young and his wife Rose had come from their apartment directly above the store after hearing smashing glass and seeing four men taking merchandise from the window display. They rushed downstairs. Rose arrived at the store first, turning on the lights, but remained on the stoop while Herman went inside. A man came up behind her, she told police, "called her names," and tried to push past her into the store. Herman closed the door, stopping him from getting inside. The man then started cursing, according to Young, calling out "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here,” and smashed the glass in the door. Rose testified that the man used a piece of pipe; Herman said he used "some instrument." Police later reported a stone had been thrown through the door. Rose said she saw glass hit Herman; the stone may also have hit him.
  
  
  
  Young appeared in lists of the injured published by the New York Post (mistakenly identified as a patrolman) and the Home News, and among those recorded as attended by physicians from Harlem Hospital. All three sources described the injury as a laceration of the scalp. The hospital record added the detail that it resulted from being hit with a stone, while the report of the arrest mentioned that Young had been cut by flying glass. The other details appeared in the district attorney's case file, which included notes on statements by Herman and Rose Young, an arresting officer, and the man arrested for the assault and his wife. Another man, James Williams, was later arrested for looting the store. The affidavit in his case made no mention of Young being assaulted by a man, instead recording that he had seen four men in the store windows stealing merchandise. The affidavit charging assault did refer to the couple finding the store “windows cleared out” when they got downstairs. Notes in the case file made by the district attorney during the subsequent trial included information from the couple's testimony that provided the details of the events missing from the court documents.
  
  Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, was arrested and charged with throwing the rock. According to notes in the district attorney's case file, when Young was having his wound stitched at Harlem Hospital around 1:30 AM, Daniels came in for treatment. Young identified him as the man who assaulted him, and an officer at the hospital arrested him. Young was certain of his identification because he had stared at the man who assaulted him through the glass in the hardware store door for several minutes.
  
  Questioned in a lineup at the Manhattan Police headquarters, Daniels denied throwing the stone at Young. He had been in the area on his way home. Later, at his trial, he added the detail that he had gone out to buy cigarettes. Daniels, a native of Georgia who had come to New York City in 1928, lived with his wife only a few blocks from Young's store, at 73 West 130th Street. His wife said that he had gone to the movies, and was listening to the radio at home at 1:00 AM, when Young was attacked. Notes in the district attorney's case file say that neither statement was true without indicating the basis for that claim.
  
  Daniels was one of the first of those arrested to appear in the Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, one of three men returned to have their original charges dismissed so they could be rearrested and new charges brought (which is likely why Daniels appears in the 28th Precinct police blotter as having been discharged). The indictment in the district attorney's case file has a charge of first degree assault, with intent to kill, struck out, leaving a charge of second degree assault, with intent to cause bodily harm, suggesting that prosecutors reduced the charge after obtaining details of what happened. Indicted for assault, Daniels was one of the handful of individuals tried for alleged offenses during the disorder. On April 9, the district attorney's case file recorded that a jury acquitted him of the charge of assault, likely because of questions over Young's identification of him.
   
• 1 2021-09-06T19:34:04+00:00 Elizabeth Tai arrested 39 plain 2024-02-13T19:45:02+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Phillips of the 28th Precinct arrested Elizabeth Tai, a twenty-eight-year-old Black resident of 1654 3rd Avenue, for allegedly stealing groceries from a store at 340 Lenox Avenue. She may have reached into an already broken window, as a story in the Home News specified that Tai's alleged offense occurred "after the windows had been smashed." The store's address was mentioned only in that story. Both the story in the Home News and one in the Daily Worker reported that Tai had allegedly taken groceries. At the same time, Detective Phillips also arrested Arthur Davis, a thirty-six-year-old Black man, for allegedly taking groceries from the store. The arrests likely occurred around 12:30 AM.
  
  
  
  Tai appeared in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The 28th Precinct police blotter also recorded the charge against Tai as burglary, with the note "Burglarised store during riot." Her home was some way from Harlem, on the east side of Central Park between 92nd and 93rd Streets.
  
  Tai was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with Arthur Davis and another individual arrested by Detective Phillips, Herbert Hunter, also charged with burglary and arrested with them, according to the Home News. However, that story did not directly state that Hunter was charged with looting the same store. Magistrate Renaud remanded all three to appear again in court (he sent two others arrested by Phillips who appeared at the same time charged with malicious mischief, Charles Wright and William Norris, to the Court of Special Sessions). The docket book recorded only Phillips' name and precinct; the stories in the Home News and Daily Worker identified him as a detective.
  
  When Tai appeared in court again, on March 22, the docket book recorded that the charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct, the original charge crossed out. The "court" reduced the charge, according to the Home News, doing the same in the cases of Davis and Hunter. Had the police presented evidence Tai had stolen merchandise, she would have been charged with either burglary or larceny; had they presented evidence that she had broken windows, the charge would have been malicious mischief. The charge of disorderly conduct suggested that she may only have been part of a crowd near the store. Magistrate Renaud found Tai guilty, an outcome reported in the stories in the Daily Worker, Daily News, and New York Evening Journal as well as the Home News. He also found Davis and Hunter guilty. Tai was one of only three women charged with looting in the disorder.
  
  Renaud sentenced Tai to pay a fine of $25 or serve five days in the Workhouse, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, as he did Davis. The magistrate gave Hunter a longer sentence of ten days without the alternative of a fine. Tai was unable to pay the fine, according to the Home News, so was sent to the Workhouse, a sentence also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter and stories in the Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker.
  
  Tai was the name recorded in the docket book, and in the lists published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal. It was recorded differently in other sources less reliable than the legal record: as Tae in the Home News and 28th Precinct police blotter, as Pae in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, and as Cay in the Daily Worker. If it was recorded correctly by the court clerk, Tai was a common last name among Chinese living overseas, suggesting that Elizabeth was married to a Chinese man. Given it was an unusual last name for a resident of Harlem, the arrested woman may be the Elizabeth Tai who died in Harlem Hospital on April 20, 1945. She had been born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1905, and was a widow at the time of her death, with her husband's name transcribed as "Hawley Tai." That Elizabeth Tai had been a domestic worker, who lived at 124 West 135th Street at the time of her death.
• 1 2020-10-22T01:57:28+00:00 Lawrence Humphrey arrested 38 plain 2024-01-27T23:38:21+00:00 Around 12:40 AM, Officer Rock of the 28th Precinct arrested Lawrence Humphrey, a thirty-five-year-old Black laborer, near Jacob Solomon's grocery store at 2100 5th Avenue, on the corner of West 129th Street. The store had been closed since 9:00 PM. Rock claimed to have seen six men run out of the store, but arrested only Humphrey. He had a fifty-pound bag of rice worth $2.50 in his possession, according to a note written on the Magistrate's Court affidavit. The six men Rock allegedly saw must have been only some of those who took merchandise from the store, as when Solomon returned around 7:00 AM, he found approximately $100 of groceries missing. Humphrey lived only three blocks to the north, on 132nd Street, so likely had initially come on to the streets in response to the disorder and some time later had become a participant.
  
  
  
  Lawrence Humphrey (misspelled Humphries) was listed among those arrested and charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, a proceeding reported only in the Home News. It was not Humphrey's first appearance in the court. He had been arrested and charged with robbery in 1927; a grand jury dismissed the case, according to his criminal record. Magistrate Renaud held Humphrey for a grand jury on bail of $1,000. There were no newspaper reports on the subsequent steps in his prosecution. The district attorney's case file for Humphrey recorded that on April 11 the grand jury sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him and sending him to the Court of General Sessions. Their decision to charge him with a misdemeanor rather than a felony likely reflected the low value of the goods allegedly found in his possession. According to the 28th Precinct police blotter (which also misspelled his name Humphries) the judges found Humphrey guilty and on April 17 sentenced him to thirty days in the Workhouse.
   
• 1 2020-09-28T20:32:00+00:00 Douglas Cornelius arrested 37 plain 2024-01-23T20:27:16+00:00 Around 10:30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie arrested Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old Black man, for allegedly using a rock to hit Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-year-old white carpenter, in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street. Newspapers reported that a group of men had attacked Wijstem, but police arrested only Cornelius. Patrolman Mackenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two other men arrested in the same area of West 125th Street around the same time: Claude Jones, also at 10:30 PM at Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street, immediately west of where Cornelius was arrested; and William Ford, ten minutes later, at Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, several buildings further west. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. There are no details of what MacKenzie said in regards to the assault on Wijstem, but in the other two incidents, which resulted in the arrests of Jones and Ford, he stated he had witnessed the men breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them. Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10:30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
  
  Like the man he allegedly assaulted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but he is linked to the unidentified man with the fractured skull only in a story in the New York Times, a list of the arrested in the New York Evening Journal, and lists of the injured in the New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Home News. (Wijstem was named as the unidentified man in stories published by the New York Post and New York World-Telegram on March 22).
  
  
  
  After being one of the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Cornelius was charged with felonious assault. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in court docket book, in his case Pope Billings, a former state assemblyman and prominent member of the Elks Lodge with an office at 211 West 135th Street (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and William Ford, also had Black lawyers representing them). Magistrate Renaud held him until March 25 on bail of $1,000, according to the docket book. When he appeared again, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him, as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court, as they had been indicted. However, there was no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution. Wijstem's condition may have delayed the legal process. A brief story in New York Herald Tribune in June 1935 reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness.
• 1 2020-10-20T22:27:18+00:00 James Williams arrested 37 plain 2024-01-27T17:57:10+00:00 Around 2:00 AM, police arrested James Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old West Indian cook, at Lenox Avenue and West 118th Street. He allegedly had in his possession a “quantity of hardware” taken from Herman Young’s hardware store at 346 Lenox Ave, ten blocks to north, an hour earlier. It was not clear how Williams was carrying the collection of four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box, and a cloth lamp. Young identified those goods as his property. With a combined value of $12.55, they represented only a small portion of the $500 of hardware reported stolen from his store. Williams may have been going to his home. For the last two years, he had lived a block further south and west at 153 West 117th Street. Williams was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one-third (9 of 29) of the arrests for which that information is known (29 of 60).
  
  
  
  There was no mention of what caused the officer to arrest Williams. Young told police that he “was seen taking property from the store,” phrasing that suggests someone other than Young witnessed the theft. Young was unlikely to have been directly involved in the arrest. Half an hour earlier, he had been in Harlem Hospital receiving treatment for a wound to his head received when a man assaulted him during the attack on his store. Williams may be the individual in a photograph of man arrested for looting published in the New York Evening Journal carrying a large bin from which pots and pans are sticking out (the caption did not name the man).
  
  Charged with burglary the morning after the disorder, Williams appeared in only the list of those arrested published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in one list published in the New York Evening Journal. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder represented by a lawyer, in his case John Lewis, a member of the Harlem Lawyers Association. The Harlem Magistrates Court Docket Book recorded him as being remanded to appear again on March 22. He was not brought before a grand jury until April 10. They transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, according to the district attorney's case file. That decision indicated they had not charged Williams with burglary, a felony that required evidence of breaking and entering. Instead, the charge would have been larceny given the evidence provided by the goods allegedly found in his possession. Those items had a value of less than $100 so would only have support the misdemeanor charge of petit larceny. Two days later, on April 12, the judges acquitted Williams, according to the 28th Precinct pfolice blotter. The likeliest explanation for that verdict would be that the jury had not been convinced that the items Williams was carrying had come from Young's store.
• 1 2020-10-22T01:47:08+00:00 John Vivien arrested 37 plain 2024-02-09T20:28:14+00:00 Around 11:00 PM, Detective Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct claimed he saw John Vivien, a twenty-seven-year-old Black laborer, reach through the smashed window of Regal Shoes and take a pair of shoes from the display. Edward Wittleder, the assistant manager, had closed the store, on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10:00 PM, before it was damaged, according to his Magistrate's Court affidavit. However, he would have known that it was likely to be attacked. By that time store windows had been smashed the length of the block of 125th Street to the west, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Police trying to clear people from the street had pushed them toward the intersection on which Regal Shoes sat, creating large crowds, as well as concentrating officers and riot control trucks there. After 10:00 PM, small groups had begun to attack businesses north and south of the intersection on 7th Avenue and further east on 125th Street. When Naton (and Officer Redmond, according to the criminal record) arrested Vivien, he claimed he found shoes which Wittleder identified as coming from the store in Vivien's possession. They had a value of $5.50, according to the affidavit. (Naton made two other arrests around this time, of John King, thirty minutes earlier, at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, and of James Pringle fifteen minutes later, two blocks south on 7th Avenue at West 123rd Street).
  
  
  Vivien lived at 483 Manhattan Avenue, two blocks west of Regal Shoes, near the corner of West 120th Street, on margins of the Black neighborhood. He was listed among those arrested and charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York Evening Journal, his name misspelled Vivian. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, where Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on bail of $1,000. It was not Vivien's first time in court; he had been arrested for robbery in 1929, a charge dismissed by a magistrate according to his criminal record. The Home News reported those proceedings, also misspelling his name Vivian. The remainder of his prosecution was recorded only in legal records and police records. Vivien appeared before the grand jury on April 4, according to his district attorney's case file, who sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him. That outcome indicated a lack of evidence that he had broken into the store, a requirement for a charge of burglary. The charge Vivien instead faced was likely petit larceny, a misdemeanor, as the value of the items he had taken was well below the $100 required for a charge of felony theft. The judges in that court convicted him on April 10 and suspended his sentence, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2020-03-30T21:33:36+00:00 Morris Sankin's tailor's store looted 37 plain 2024-05-29T15:44:44+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, Morris Sankin closed his tailor's store at 200 West 128th Street, presumably returning to his home at 1770 Walton Avenue in the Bronx, shortly before the crowds gathered around West 125th Street and 7th Avenue began moving north. When he returned at 8:00 AM the next morning, he found a window broken and around $800 of clothing missing, the property of the store's customers.
  
  Going to the police, he would have found out that around 10:10 PM, Patrolman Irwin Young reported he "saw the window of the [Sankin's] store being broken" and then a forty-six-year-old unemployed Black man named Leroy Gillard go into the store through the window and emerge with two suits of clothing, each valued at $25. The phrasing of Young's statement implied that Gillard did not break the window, suggesting there may have been others there at the time who escaped arrest. Certainly more clothing was stolen than Gillard allegedly had in his possession. The affidavit left those possibilities open by including the stock phrasing that Gillard's alleged crime was committed "while acting in concert with a number of others not yet arrested."
  
  Sankin's store was set back from 7th Avenue in a single story structure located between the rear of the five story building on the corner of West 128th Street and 7th Avenue and the first of a block of eight three story brownstone apartment buildings that stretched for roughly a quarter of the block. Gillard may not have come to the store from 7th Avenue as he lived at 208 West 128th Street, just four buildings west of the store. It is likely Officer Young was on the corner of 7th Avenue and West 128th Street, as police tended to take up positions on intersections.
  
  As Sankin did not return to his store until 8:00 AM, the window remained broken and the clothing inside accessible throughout the disorder. At 5:40 AM, in one of the final events of the disorder, Officer Dimao arrested a twenty-eight-year-old white chauffeur named Jean Jacquelin at the corner of West 128th Street and 8th Avenue, the opposite end of the block from Sankin's store. Jacquelin allegedly was carrying two ladies' coats, valued at $20 each, and two pairs of trousers, valued at $5 each. That clothing was likely bulky enough that it attracted the officer's attention; Sankin later identified it as coming from his store.
  
  Jacquelin was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one-third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).
  
  One of only ten white men arrested in the disorder, Jacquelin, like Gillard, would not have had to travel far to Sankin's store. He lived at 222 West 128th Street, a four story apartment building seven buildings west of Gillard. He had only lived there for a month, an unusual address for a white man by 1935. Whites resided nearby, on West 126th Street and on several blocks south of West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, but this block was home to Black residents.
  
  
  
  Gillard and Jacquelin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court one after the other on March 20, with both sent to the grand jury. On April 5, the grand jury determined that both men should only be charged with a misdemeanor not felony burglary, sending them to the Court of Special Sessions. (As both men had been charged with taking property worth more than $25, so could have been charged with grand larceny, a felony, if not burglary.) According to the 28th Precinct police blotter, on April 11, the judges dismissed the charges against Jacquelin. It took almost two more weeks before Gillard was tried, on April 23, when the judges convicted him and sentenced him to the workhouse for three months.
  
  Sankin may not have continued in business after the disorder. A tailor's store at his address did appear in the MCCH bBusiness survey, French Dry Cleaners and Tailor, but was recorded as a Black-owned business. The Tax Department photographs taken between 1939 and 1941 did not provide a clear view of the business.
  
   
• 1 2020-02-25T03:21:30+00:00 Thomas Wijstem assaulted & killed 36 plain 2024-02-02T22:58:08+00:00 Around 10:30 PM, Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, was struck on the head by a rock and knocked unconscious in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street.There is no information on why Wijstem was on West 125th Street at that time. He lived across town to the east, at 16 East 127th Street, a racially mixed section likely too far away for him to have heard the noise of the disorder. By 10:30 PM, police had established a perimeter around 125th Street and the large crowds that had been concentrated there earlier had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues. However, around 10:30 PM, crowds broke through the police cordon on to this block of 125th Street. Three of the four brief newspaper accounts of the assault reported that a group of Black men attacked Wijstem. At the same time, a rock was thrown through the window of Blumstein's department store, the building immediately to the west of where Wijstem was struck, and ten minutes later, a rock was thrown that broke windows in Kress' store. In both those cases, police alleged that the men responsible urged people on the street to attack police, causing large crowds to gather. With police reinforcements having arrived, unlike earlier in the disorder, police made arrests in all three of those incidents, albeit of only one individual at each location. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for allegedly throwing a rock that struck Wijstem. Given the objects being thrown at nearby store windows at this time, it is possible that the rock that hit Wijstem may have been meant for the windows of the W. T. Grant store, which were broken during the disorder
  
  
  
  While many of those injured in the disorder suffered head injuries, Wijstem’s injury was one of the most severe, a fractured skull that rendered him unconscious. As a result, he appears in stories of the disorder and lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, New York American, Home News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide as a seriously injured "unidentified white man." The Home News, New York Post and New York World-Telegram did eventually name him, on March 22, with the Home News and New York World-Telegram reporting that his brother had identified him and the New York Post that his neighbors had identified him (the Home News misreported his name as "Thor Wigstrom"). Three months later, a brief story in New York Herald Tribune reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness. However, as the attack on Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault, he is included among both those assaulted and killed (but not among those injured in assaults).
  
  Like the man he targeted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed Black and Puerto Rican section. He appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in nine newspapers, but only five of those reports link him to the unidentified man with the fractured skull. After appearing in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault, he was remanded in custody. He appeared in court again on March 25, when Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court because they had been indicted already. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the district attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution.
• 1 2021-04-21T18:58:52+00:00 Morris Towbin's haberdashery store looted 36 plain 2024-05-29T16:30:39+00:00 Around 10:30 PM, a group of eight men entered Morris Towbin's haberdashery store on the corner of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Towbin and a clerk named Cy Bear were in the store, apparently still open for business despite the crowds around Kress' store and windows being broken in other stores one block west on West 125th Street. In his affidavit in the Magistrates Court Towbin described the men using “force and fear and…threatening to kill” to steal goods from the store with a value of $5,000, breaking windows and store fixtures in the process. A Probation Department investigation by G. H. Royal used more sensational language to also describe a robbery, in which “the defendant and a group of hoodlums…brandished knives with which they threatened [Towbin] and his clerk, demolished fixtures and perpetrated other acts of vandalism,” after which they forced the men into the basement of the store. However, the police blotter and newspaper reports of the arrest of a man who allegedly took part labeled the event as looting, without mention of threats of violence. The Home News report of the Magistrates Court hearing included no mention of the force in the affidavit, describing Towbin’s store as looted, the goods carried out, and the windows smashed, and not noting that the charge brought was robbery, not burglary. Reporting of Towbin’s statements as president of Harlem Merchants Association after the disorder likewise referred to a looting, with the Daily News identifying his store as one “into which hoodlums broke and stole several thousand dollars worth of merchandise,” and the Home News as “one of those wrecked during the disorder.” Moreover, the arrest of the man charged occurred away from the store, and was based on the goods he had in his possession, as in the other arrests for looting away from the scene of the crime. He was not charged with possession of a knife, so did not have the weapon Towbin alleged had been used and provided the legal basis for charging robbery, not burglary. Given this evidence, the thefts from the haberdashery store have been categorized as looting, not robbery.
  
  
  
  A photograph published in the Home News, captioned as a haberdashery located at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, likely showed the damage to the store's display windows. No glass appeared to be left in the windows and little merchandise was in the display. Towbin initially reported losses of $5,000, but, after taking an inventory, told the Probation Department officer that only $2,000 of goods had been stolen. His insurance paid $1,000 for the goods taken from inside the store; the policy did not cover the goods taken from the store window. That payment was unusual in that insurance policies typically excluded losses due to riot, which is why many other business owners in Harlem filed claims for damages from the city. Another insurance company replaced the smashed plate glass windows, at a cost of $226.89, but the damaged fixtures, Towbin estimated, would cost an additional $1,000 to replace. That he was well-insured suggested that Towbin’s business was more established than many of those on Harlem’s avenues. It certainly occupied a prime location, next to an entrance to the 125th Street subway station, through which crowds entered and exited the neighborhood. Towbin’s leadership of the Harlem Merchants Association, an all-white organization established during the picketing of white business on West 125th Street in 1934, also suggests his standing in the white business community. It is not surprising, then, that he remained in business in the years immediately after the disorder.
  
  At 1:00 AM, Patrolman William Clements observed Edward Larry, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer, traveling in a taxi at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue. He stopped the taxi, and found that Larry had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Not satisfied with Larry’s explanation that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, Clements took him to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. He was one of nine men arrested away from the store they had allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  Towbin was at the police station, where he had gone to report the theft from his store once the group of men fled. It is not clear how he had spent the two and a half hours since the men entered his store; it would have taken some time for a group of men, even if joined by others, to remove $2,000 of goods, so he may have been in the basement for much of that time, and given the growing scale of the disorder, he also may have had to wait some time at the 28th Precinct station to report the theft. Regardless, he saw Larry there, and identified him as one of the men who had threatened him, and the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store. That encounter was described only in the more detailed account included in the Probation Department investigation, not the Magistrates Court affidavit. Had Towbin only identified the property, Larry would have been charged with burglary; the allegation of force changed the charge to robbery. That the the charge against Larry was recorded in the police blotter as burglary suggests that Towbin's identification came after Larry's initial booking, as police charged others arrested away from looted stores in possession of goods suspected of being stolen with burglary.
  
  Arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 and held without bail, Larry was indicted for robbery by the grand jury. Rather than go to trial, he agreed to plead guilty to attempted grand larceny in the second degree. The judge sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the state prison. That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record, which included three convictions for pickpocketing in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, a conviction for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928.
   
• 1 2021-09-06T19:20:25+00:00 Arthur Davis arrested 35 plain 2024-02-13T19:44:29+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Phillips of the 28th Precinct arrested Arthur Davis, a thirty-six-year-old Black resident of 42 West 126th Street, for allegedly stealing groceries from a grocery store at 340 Lenox Avenue. Davis may not have broken the store windows, as a story in the Home News specified that Davis' alleged offense occurred "after the windows had been smashed." The store's address was mentioned only in that story. Both the Home News and the Daily Worker reported the Davis had allegedly taken groceries. At the same time, Detective Phillips also arrested Elizabeth Tai, a twenty-eight-year-old Black women, for allegedly taking groceries from the store. The arrests likely occurred around 12:30 AM.
  
  
  
  Davis appeared in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The 28th Precinct police blotter also recorded the charge against Davis as burglary, with the note "Burglarised store during riot."
  
  Davis was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with Tai and another individual arrested by Detective Phillips, Herbert Hunter, also charged with burglary, and arrested with them according to the Home News. However, that story did not directly state that Hunter was charged with looting the same store. Magistrate Renaud remanded all three to appear again in court. (He sent two others arrested by Phillips who appeared at the same time charged with malicious mischief, Charles Wright and William Norris, to the Court of Special Sessions). The docket book recorded only Phillips' name and precinct; the stories in the Home News and Daily Worker identified him as a detective. Both the docket book and 28th Precinct police blotter gave Davis' age as thirty-six years; both lists and all the newspaper stories gave his age as thirty-two-years.
  
  When Davis appeared in court again, on March 22, the docket book recorded no change in the charge against him, but a story in the Home News reported that "the Court" had reduced the charge from burglary to disorderly conduct, as it had for both Tai and Hunter. In Tai's case, the docket book did record that the charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct. Had the police presented evidence Davis had stolen merchandise, he would have been charged with either burglary or larceny; had they presented evidence that he had broken windows, the charge would have been malicious mischief. The charge of disorderly conduct suggested he may only have been part of a crowd near the store. Magistrate Renaud found Davis guilty, an outcome reported in the stories in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal as well as the Home News. He also found Tai and Hunter guilty.
  
  Renaud sentenced Davis to pay a fine of $25 or serve five days in the Workhouse, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, the same sentence he gave Tai. He gave Hunter a longer sentence of ten days without the alternative of a fine. Davis was unable to pay the fine, according to the Home News, so was sent to the Workhouse. The sentence also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter and stories in the Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker.
• 1 2021-10-30T20:28:37+00:00 Danbury Hat store windows broken and looted 34 plain 2024-01-19T02:01:27+00:00 Some time during the disorder, the windows of the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue were broken, likely allegedly by David Terry, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, and, around the same time, James Hayes, a sixteen-year-old Black youth, allegedly took a baseball bat from the store window. There are no clear details of the circumstances of the damage to the store or the men's arrest. Hayes lived at 476 West 141st Street, on Black Harlem's northwest boundary, further from the location of his arrest than most of those caught in the disorder, who typically lived south of 125th Street or near Lenox Avenue south of 135th Street. Terry had "no home." Police had pushed the crowds that gathered in front of Kress' store to the intersection of 125th Street and 8th Avenue early in the disorder, and groups of people remained in the area for several hours. Nearby stores on either side of the hat store had windows broken: the branch of the Liggett's drug store chain to the south, on the northeast corner of 125th Street; and a seafood restaurant to the north at 2338 8th Avenue. Neither of those stores was among those reported looted. Other isolated reports of looting and arrests on 8th Avenue occurred further north, around 127th and 128th Streets.
  
  
  
  The Danbury Hat store was one of the businesses with broken windows identified by the reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, up Lenox Avenue, and across West 125th Street to 8th Avenue on the day after the disorder. The business is also likely the storefront that appears in a photograph published in the Decatur Review. Although the caption to that image did not identify the business, hats are visible in the display window, together with the last few letters of the store name on an unbroken section of glass at the bottom of the window: "RY HAT CO." (The only other hat store recorded as having been damaged or looted was Young's Hat store). Two white men pose in front of the damaged store; white bystanders are most likely to be found near West 125th Street, where the Danbury Hat store was located. A large basket sits inside the display window, perhaps a trash bin taken from the sidewalk. The stock just visible behind the basket suggest that the store was not looted.
  
  Despite this damage, the Danbury Hat store was recorded as in business in the second half of 1935 in the MCCH business survey, mistakenly located at 2336 8th Avenue. The Tax Department photograph was taken from too far away to show the presence of the store when it was taken between 1939 and 1941.
  
  Hayes taking a baseball bat from the store was reported in a story about his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News, which gave only the address of the store. The name of the store was confirmed by the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded the complainant against Hughes as Wilbur Montgomery, living at 951 Woodycrest Avenue. Montgomery was identified in the 1933 City Directory as the manager of Danbury Shoes. He was also recorded as the complainant against David Terry. There are no sources with details of the circumstances of Terry's arrest, only the charges made against him.
  
  Officer Balkin was recorded as the arresting officer of both Hayes and Terry in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, suggesting they were arrested at the same time. When James Hayes appeared he was charged with petit larceny not burglary. That charge did not involve breaking in and entering a store as burglary, only taking merchandise. Magistrate Renaud transferred Hayes to the Court of Special Sessions, where he was convicted and given a suspended sentence. It was Terry who was charged with breaking the store windows. Tried in the Harlem Magistrates Court, he was convicted by Magistrate Renaud, who sentenced him to pay a $500 fine or spend five days in the Workhouse. Terry served the time in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-06-02T20:59:41+00:00 Arthur Merritt arrested 34 plain 2024-02-12T19:53:28+00:00 At about 1:30 AM, Officer George Nelson of the 15th Precinct was “on duty” near Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store at 343 Lenox Avenue when he saw a group of about five people gathered around the store, he later told a Probation officer. As he watched, Arthur Merritt, a forty-two-year-old Black painter, allegedly broke the store window with a hammer. The group then climbed through the windows and took groceries — although likely not all 126 pounds of butter, 90 dozen eggs, eight cartons of cigarettes, a ham, and other food products, as well as $14 from the cash register, the owners reported had been taken. By the time Nelson got to the store, the group had run back out, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit; he told a Probation officer he arrested Merritt “a short distance away.” He found two cans of beans, a can of milk, and a can of tuna in Merritt's possession, as well as a hammer. Those details of what was allegedly found on Merritt are not included in the affidavit, although that evidence is crucial to the charge made against him. Notes on the affidavit did record the total stock lost, with calculations that seem to be an effort to establish the value of that stock.
  
  
  
  Merritt denied looting the store or participating in the disorder, telling a Probation officer he was on his way home after visiting his sister, Pauline. She lived at 108 West 130th Street; he lived at 134 West 121st Street. Both address were between 7th and Lenox Avenues, so his route home could have taken him down Lenox Avenue. He would been walking through the blocks north of 125th street that saw the most extensive reported looting of the disorder, much of which occurred around the time Nelson arrested him. As Merritt was the only one of the group Officer Nelson claimed he saw who was arrested, it was likely he was on his own or with another officer. That Nelson saw the attack on the store without being able to prevent it suggests he was some distance away, most likely on one of the corners of Lenox Avenue and West 127th Street, allowing some possibility that he misidentified Merritt among the crowds milling about.
  
  Arthur Merritt appeared in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court on March 20. A lawyer, Albert Halperin, represented him; only seventeen others arrested in the disorder had lawyers appear for them. No information could be found on the lawyer. Merritt was in the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. His criminal record showed an arrest for grand larceny in 1920, which resulted in a suspended sentence, so Magistrate Renaud ordered him held without bail. Returned to the court on March 22, Merritt was sent to the grand jury, an appearance reported in the Home News, Daily Worker, Daily News, and New York Evening Journal. After the grand jury indicted him on April 9, he agreed to plead guilty to petit larceny on April 12. Ten days later, Judge James Garrett Wallace sentenced him to three months in the workhouse, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as well as the Probation Department case file.
  
  Born in New Jersey, Merritt had lived in Harlem for fifteen years, likely arriving after his discharge from the US Army in 1919. His Probation Department case file provides fragmentary information on his life. He had married twenty-one-year-old Blanche Morris two months before arriving in the city, in Newport News, Virginia, where he was stationed. Blanche had a six-year-old son, Charles. At the beginning of 1920, Merritt started work as a porter for Weingarten Bros., at 151 West 30th Street, living at 434 Lenox Avenue. After nine months, he lost that job when he was caught stealing dresses from his employers; twenty-four dresses worth $700 were found in a trunk in his apartment, but he allegedly stole clothing worth $2,000. No other details of the alleged theft are recorded by the probation officer, but Merritt and his wife pled guilty to petit larceny and received a suspended sentence, a lenient punishment for a theft of that scale. The probation investigation recorded May 1922 as the date of arrest, but based on the criminal record, that appears to be the date the couple were discharged from probation. There was no mention that they had jobs during those years, but their first daughter was born in 1922.
  
  Around 1923, Merritt began working as a painter and as a janitor at 1027 Avenue St. John in the Bronx until 1926, living in the building, according to the Probation Department case file. However, the family appeared in the 1925 New York State census living at 906 Intervale Avenue, in a large household that now included three children, as well as Arthur's sister and brother-in-law, and two of Blanche's brothers, aged nineteen and twenty years. After the janitorial job ended, Merritt and his wife and children relocated first to 200 West 128th Street, and then to 109 West 144th Street, where a census enumerator found them in 1930.
  
  Later in 1930, Arthur and Blanche separated, a result of his heavy drinking, according to the Probation Department investigation. For three years, the three children lived with Merritt, in apartments at 2170 7th Avenue for two years and then 34 West 132nd Street. He worked sporadically as a painter for a contractor based at 160 East 116th Street. However, in 1932 he was discharged as they had insufficient work for him. Several months later, Merritt found work for a real estate agent, but it was seasonal. By the beginning of 1934 he was evicted from his apartment after falling two months behind in the rent, and became unable to support his children. Found to be neglected children, they were put in their mother's care, after which Merritt appeared to have had limited contact with them and did not contribute to their support. He moved to a furnished room at 112 West 113th Street, leaving after a year for the room at 134 West 121st where he lived at the time of the disorder. Merritt remained in Harlem, and estranged from his family, after the disorder. When he registered for the draft, he gave his sister's address as his home, and an employer in the Bronx.
• 1 2021-08-21T21:30:13+00:00 Thomas Cut Rate Drug store looted 34 plain 2024-06-01T03:18:51+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Thomas Babbitt, a forty-two-year-old Black man, allegedly took two cases of soap from the window of the Thomas Cut Rate Drug store at 2374 8th Avenue, on the northeast corner of West 127th Street. He did not smash the window. A Home News story described Babbitt as having "stolen two cases of soap from a drug store window"; the 28th Precinct police blotter included a less ambiguous description, that he "Put hand though Window. Stole merchandise." Detective Balkin of the 5th Division arrested Babbitt, according to the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book; at some time in the disorder he also arrested James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store two blocks to the south, near 125th Street. The attack on the Thomas drug store was one of the northernmost reports of disorder on 8th Avenue; further uptown were the arrests of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street, in possession of goods he allegedly took from a store on 7th Avenue, and Henry Stewart for allegedly breaking a window in a meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, between 130th and 131st Streets. Police shot and killed James Thompson on corner diagonally opposite the drug store at the end of the disorder. Police made three other arrests in the block south of the drug store, of Emmet Williams and Theodore Hughes, for allegedly breaking windows and looting a meat market, and Rose Murrell, for breaking windows. There is no evidence of when any of those events occurred. The businesses on the blocks of 8th Avenue north of 125th Street were almost entirely white owned when the MCCH business survey was taken in the second half of 1935.
  
  
  
  Babbitt appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with petit larceny, not burglary. That change was likely made because of a lack of evidence that he had broken the store window and entered the store to steal merchandise. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, where the judges convicted Babbitt and sent him to the Workhouse for ten days.
  
  Abraham Thomas, living at 1262 43rd Street in Brooklyn, is the complainant recorded in the docket book. Notwithstanding his last name, the forty-five-year-old white man appears to have been a staff member rather than owner of the store. In both the 1930 and 1940 census, Thomas gave his occupation as "drug clerk," and his employer as Thomas Pharmacy in his draft registration in 1942 (business owners recorded themselves as self employed). Further evidence that the store remained in business after the disorder comes from the MCCH business survey, which recorded a white-owned drug store, "Cut Rate Drug Store," at 2374 8th Avenue, and the Tax Department photograph, in which the store is visible.
• 1 2021-04-13T17:45:18+00:00 John Henry arrested 32 plain 2024-01-27T18:15:49+00:00 Patrolman Astel of the 28th Precinct arrested John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, together with Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, around 2:15 AM, at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. There is no mention of what prompted Officer Astel to stop the men; the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street had been the site of attacks on stores for around two hours before he stopped Henry and Leacock. He reported that he found on them "a quantity of jewelry," which when questioned they admitted taking from Benjamin Zelvin's store at 372 Lenox Avenue. The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where they found all the windows broken — and perhaps boarded up, as a Home News story about one of the men's court appearances reported that they "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." Zelvin had locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11:30 PM and did not return from his home in Brooklyn until opening time the next day. Given that there was extensive disorder in Harlem by the time Zelvin left, he may have boarded up the store as well as locking it.
  
  Henry and Leacock were two of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one-third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).
  
  Henry lived at 313 West 118th Street, near 8th Avenue. Leacock lived at the opposite end of the same street, at 39 West 118th Street, near 5th Avenue. Henry was one of the youngest people arrested during the disorder; James Hayes was also sixteen years of age (two seventeen-year-old men were also arrested, one of whom, Robert Tanner, was the only other identified as a student). There is no indication how he and Leacock came to be together on March 19.
  
  
  
  Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock, the value of the jewelry was initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. The grand jury reduced the felony burglary charge against the men to a misdemeanor, a decision that likely reflected the lack of evidence that the men had broken into the store that a charge of burglary required. Given that they had been arrested with merchandise in their possession, the grand jury likely charged them with petit larceny; a felony larceny charge was not an option as the jewelry they had allegedly taken was worth less than $100. Zelvin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge one additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary. That charge was reduced to petit larceny, suggesting he too had only allegedly taken jewelry worth less than $100.
  
  There was no newspaper coverage of the looting; Henry and Leacock appeared only in the most comprehensive lists of those arrested, published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal. The details came from the district attorney's case file; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information was from the Magistrate Court affidavit. Although arrested together, the men appeared in the Harlem Magistrate Court at different times, Leacock on March 20 with most of those arrested during the disorder, and Henry not until the next day. Despite Patrolman Astel's report that the men had confessed at the time of their arrest, they pled not guilty in court. Both men appeared in court again on March 22, when the Magistrate sent them to the grand jury charged with burglary, an outcome reported in the Home News. It was not until April 2 that the grand jury heard their cases, sending them to the Court of Special Sessions, not the Court of General Sessions. The 28th Precinct police blotter is the only source for the outcome of those trials, that the judges convicted both men. On April 17, they sent Henry to the House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory on Randalls Island (which would close less than a month later, on May 11). The next day the judges gave Leacock a suspended sentence.
• 1 2020-10-22T02:13:07+00:00 Robert Tanner arrested 32 plain 2024-02-01T00:36:09+00:00 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.
   
• 1 2021-09-07T21:35:13+00:00 Viola Woods arrested 32 plain 2024-02-03T00:25:28+00:00 Officer St. Louis of the 28th Precinct arrested Viola Woods, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, for allegedly smashing the window of a vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue with an umbrella sometime during the disorder. There was no information on when during the disorder the arrest took place. The most likely time would be around 10:00 PM, when the disorder intensified and many of those at the nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and 125th Street began to move up and down the avenue. Only a New York Amsterdam News story identified the store as vacant; a list in the New York American and stories in the Home News and New York Times provided only the address. The vacant store was in the block between 125th and 124th Streets, where four other stores had windows broken, including two other empty stores at 2320 8th Avenue and 2324 8th Avenue, the Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue and Andy's Florist on the southeast corner of 125th Street. Those other damaged stores were all included in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked west along 125th Street and and up and down 8th Avenue a block north and south of the intersection on the day after the disorder. It was possible the store whose window Woods allegedly broke was not on that list because it suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  Woods name was misrecorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as Viola Williams, a mistake repeated in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. The New York American misreported Woods' name as Loyola Williams. Another woman named Loyola Williams was arrested during the disorder and charged with burglary. Both women were recorded as being twenty-eight-years of age and living at 301 West 130th Street. While these overlapping details might indicate the reports refer to a single woman, both Loyola Williams and Viola Williams [Woods] appear in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, with Viola Williams [Woods] charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving the destruction of property used in the prosecution of those alleged to have broken windows during the disorder. That is the charge recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter, with a note reading "Broke window with umbrella." However, when that woman appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book and stories about her two appearances in court in the New York Amsterdam News, Home News, and New York Times recorded her name as Viola Woods.
  
  When Woods appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge against her was disorderly conduct. The change from malicious mischief indicated police did not have evidence that she had broken the window, but only that she had been in the crowds in the area of the attack. Disorderly conduct was a charge that the magistrate could adjudicate, unlike misdemeanor and felony charges that required referral to other courts. Magistrate Renaud ordered Woods held on bail of $100, a court appearance reported in the Home News. Unusually, she was represented by a lawyer, future alderman Eustace Dench of 207 West 125th Street. Dench was one of several prominent members of the Harlem Lawyers Association who represented those arrested during the disorder. When Woods returned to the court on March 28, Magistrate Ford discharged her. The New York Amsterdam News reported that she "was freed for lack of evidence." The New York Times story simply reported that she had been discharged, the outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. That outcome suggests Woods was not part of a crowd that clashed with police but likely simply a bystander.
  
  The woman arrested may be the woman named Viola Woods a census enumerator found at 123 West 133rd Street on April 16, 1940. She was the same age and had been in Harlem in 1935. Born in South Carolina, in Hilton Head, she gave birth to a son, William, in 1923, and a second son, Samuel, in 1925, according to their draft registrations. At that time her last name was Bligen. She arrived in Harlem sometime between 1925 and 1930, when she was recorded in the census living at 255 West 143rd Street, with a cousin, working as a domestic servant (both her sons are recorded as living with their father, William Bligen and his wife in Hilton Head until at least 1940). In 1931, she married Chester Woods, a West Indian longshoreman. At the time of the 1940 census, they had four children, aged between ten and two years. When her sons William and Samuel registered for the draft in 1942, Viola Woods was living at 49 West 133rd Street.
• 1 2021-12-07T17:37:45+00:00 John Kennedy Jones arrested 32 plain 2024-02-13T22:00:15+00:00 Around 12:30 AM, Patrolman James Lamattina of the 66th Division allegedly saw "large number" of people gather in front of William Gindin's Shoe Store at 333 Lenox Avenue. Then John Kennedy Jones "motioning with his hand, said to the others 'come on,' and threw a rock that 'broke the plate glass window' of the store." Other people in the crowd also threw 'stones and sticks' at the window, Lamattina alleged in his Magistrates Court affidavit. At some point Lamattina arrested Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black laborer; the affidavit made no mention of the circumstances of the arrest. No other members of the crowd were arrested. The shoe store had been attacked at least twice earlier in the disorder. A display window had been smashed and merchandise stolen sometime between 9:45 PM and 11:20 PM, and another window allegedly kicked in and three shoes taken at 11:20 PM, when a patrolman arrested Julian Rogers. In the half hour before Lamattina arrested Jones, other police officers arrested three men for breaking windows near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, Leon Mauraine and David Smith at 318 Lenox Avenue and Bernard Smith at 317 Lenox Avenue. Multiple arrests by different officers indicated that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  Jones lived at 135 West 119th Street according to the information he gave in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court. Some distance from the shoe store, this block between Lenox and 7th Avenue was in an area south of 125th Street with a mix of Black and white residents.
  
  
  
  Jones appeared in the lists of those arrested and charged with "inciting to riot" published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Similarly, the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as "inciting to riot." When Jones was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the docket book recorded the charge against him as riot for leading others in the crowd to attack the store. Crossed out was an additional charge of malicious mischief for damage to the store window. That charge did appear on the Magistrate Court affidavit in a handwritten note that also listed the forms of riot being charged. Reporting the proceeding in the Magistrates Court, a story in the Home News mixed the two charges together to describe Jones as having "urged the crowd to smash windows," but being held for the grand jury "on a charge of malicious mischief" for which urging a crowd was not relevant. That garbled account likely indicated that Jones faced both charges, as did the six other men who allegedly both urged crowds to break windows and broke windows themselves. Only two of those men, Leroy Brown and Bernard Smith, had both charges recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book.
  
  On March 20, Magistrate Renaud held Jones for the grand jury and set bail at $1,000. A week later, when Jones appeared before the grand jury, they decided to transfer him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on misdemeanor forms of the charges (as the malicious mischief charge was not recorded in the docket book, Jones was not categorized as being charged with that offense). The judges convicted Jones and on April 1 gave him a suspended sentence, recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-04-26T21:26:03+00:00 Mario Pravia's candy store looted 32 plain 2024-05-29T18:10:51+00:00 Around 11:30 PM, Mario Pravia and his wife Gertrude were in their candy store at 1953 7th Avenue when a group of around five people on the street outside began throwing stones at the store window. Crowds had started to move down 7th Avenue from 125th Street around 10:00 PM, reportedly attacking whites and stores before and and they continued to do so after the stones were thrown at the store window. Why the Pravias were in their store was not mentioned in the sources. The store was unlikely to have been open that late, but they may have remained inside after closing the store when they saw the crowds begin to gather.
  
  When the store window shattered, members of the crowd began to take goods from the window display. Officer Harmon of the 18th Division witnessed the attack on the store, and reported seeing Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher, throw a stone and reach into the window to take something. Taylor lived south of the store, at 1800 7th Avenue, so may not have been part of the crowd that came from 125th Street. He was the only member of the group in front of the store arrested, despite at least one other police officer being at the scene, Detective Harry Wolf of the 28th Precinct, listed as a witness on the Magistrates Court affidavit and an arresting officer with Harmon on Taylor's criminal record. The New York Evening Journal identified a different officer as making the arrest, Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan. In a vignette within the paper’s narrative of the disorder, that senior officer observed the attack on the store while driving to 125th Street. He pulled over and attempted to round up the thieves in “a terrific battle” from which “Ryan emerged...with Amie Taylor, 21, as his prisoner.” No other sources supported that account.
  
  
  
  Harmon allegedly found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at three cents each, in Taylor’s possession. Struck out information on the Magistrates Court affidavit suggested $200 worth of merchandise was stolen from Pravia’s store. Pravia appeared to have remained in business despite those losses, perhaps because he had insurance, although that would have been unusual for such a small-scale business. The MCCH business survey identified a white-owned business operating at 1953 7th Avenue in the second half of 1935, although it was categorized as a stationery store.
  
  Pravia, born in Uruguay in 1899, had arrived in New York City from Chile in 1925, and married his German-born wife Gertrude in 1929. His naturalization petition identified him as white. While the building had Black residents, it was located just a block north of an area populated by Spanish speaking residents. A business advertising candy and other merchandise also appeared in the tax photograph of the building taken sometime between 1939 and 1941. But by 1942, whatever business was at 1953 7th Avenue, Pravia was not its owner. When Pravia registered for the draft, they lived nearby at 126 West 119th Street, but he no longer worked at the store. He was working as a butcher, according to his naturalization petition, and his draft registration records his place of employment as a hotel in East Orange, New Jersey.
  
  Taylor appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud remanded him until March 22. When he appeared in court again, Renaud sent him to the grand jury. They transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. The police blotter recorded that the judges in that court acquitted Taylor. The sources are silent on what alternative account of events Taylor offered, but others arrested in the disorder claimed to have been bystanders mistakenly grabbed by police trying to pick offenders out of crowds.
   
• 1 2020-10-22T02:08:11+00:00 Horace Fowler arrested 31 plain 2024-01-26T18:11:26+00:00 Around 1:30 AM, Detective George Booker arrested Horace Fowler, a thirty-two-year-old Black laborer who lived at 362 Lenox Avenue, after he allegedly saw Fowler break the window of Nicholas Peet's tailor's shop at 2063 7th Avenue, reach inside, and take several articles of clothing. Fowler did admit stealing the clothing in his possession when Booker arrested him, a man's suit and a lady's coat, according to the Probation Department investigation, but denied "breaking the window or knowing how it was broken." In the Magistrate's Court affidavit, Booker describes Fowler breaking the window with a club. The Probation Department investigation reports Booker as saying that he saw Fowler break the window "by throwing a missile through it." If Fowler smashed the window to gain entry, he had committed burglary; if he did not, he had only committed theft.
  
  
  
  Fowler told the Probation Department officer that "he mingled with the crowds on the streets of Harlem following the disturbances and that when he observed the looting taking place, he stole the articles indiscriminately." The probation officer's notes suggest the theft was not entirely at random: "fell in with mob - needed a suit." As Detective Booker would have been in plainclothes, Fowler may have been unaware that there were police in the vicinity of the store. Fowler was certainly not the only person to steal goods from the store, and unlikely one of the first. Peet put his total losses during the disorder at $452.25 of secondhand suits, coats, and pants, and an addition $133 of suits, overcoats, women's coats, and dresses belonging to customers, according to the Probation Department investigation. The items found in Fowler's possession had a value of only $25. It is not clear how much of the other clothing was stolen before Fowler's arrest. It could not all have been in the display windows, so people must have entered the store, which required that the windows be broken. If Fowler had to break a window, that looting was unlikely to have happened before his arrest. However, Peet's store was located only two blocks south of West 125th Street, so crowds would have been on this section of 7th Avenue for several hours by 1:30 AM, making it unlikely that the windows remained intact that long. It is more likely that Fowler did not have to break the window and was following in the wake of other looters.
  
  Fowler appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, charged with burglary. He appears in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, a list published in the New York Evening Journal, and a story in the Home News that included brief summaries of the charges made in the Magistrates Court. Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on $1,000 bail. The criminal record provided by the Police Department in the district attorney’s case file showed no arrests, but the Probation Department found a conviction for disorderly conduct, for loitering in the subway, for which Fowler served five days in the Workhouse in 1930. Indicted on April 5, Fowler agreed to plead guilty to petit larceny on April 8. After being investigated by the Probation Department, he returned to the Court of General Sessions on April 22, where Judge Wallace sentenced him to three months in the Workhouse, according to both the 28th Precinct police blotter and the Probation Department case file.
  
  Born in Cooleemee, North Carolina, Fowler had lived in New York City since around 1930. At the time of the 1920 census he was still living with his mother, stepfather, and their seven children in Jerusalem, North Carolina, working as a card hand in a cotton mill (his name misrecorded as Horris). Fowler appears to have left home soon after, working around North Carolina before relocating to Philadelphia around 1924. He told a Probation officer he worked as a porter in two different bakeries and the Baltimore and Ohio station restaurant, details that could not be confirmed in the time available for the investigation.
  
  When Fowler arrived in New York City sometime in 1930, he found work as an assistant janitor in a series of apartment buildings — but likely not immediately. His arrest for loitering in the subway was in February 1930; he also mentioned an unconfirmed arrest for vagrancy in Baltimore a month earlier, when he had traveled from Philadelphia looking for work. In both cases he appears to have been seeking shelter. Work as a janitor came with onsite accommodation, first at 1955 Grand Concourse in the Bronx, then 144 West 144th Street in Harlem, and finally, from October 1931 to January 1933, back in the Bronx at 1756 Taylor Avenue, according to the information he gave the probation officer. Sometime in 1932, Fowler also began working part-time as a porter at a drug store at 1758 East Tremont Avenue, close to the apartment building where he worked. In January 1933 he suffered a hernia which prevented him from working as a janitor. He subsequently rented a room in the apartment of Walter Stevenson and his family at 362 Lenox Avenue, while continuing to work at the drug store almost seven miles away. The owner told the probation officer he would be glad to give Fowler a job on his release, as he considered him “a reliable, industrious and honest person.” His industry extended to his leisure time, much of which he spent attending adult education classes at P.S. 89.
  
  At some point after his release in 1935, Fowler left New York City and returned to Philadelphia. In 1940, a census enumerator found him living in a Salvation Army Men’s Hostel. He had been unemployed for over two months, and reported only four weeks of work in 1939. When Fowler registered for the draft two years later, in 1942, he was still living in Philadelphia, and without a job.
   
• 1 2021-04-13T17:45:34+00:00 Oscar Leacock arrested 31 plain 2024-02-09T15:35:29+00:00 Officer Astel of the 25th Precinct arrested Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, together with John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street around 2:15 AM. There was no mention of what prompted Astel to stop the men. By this time the crowds that had been on the street attacking businesses or watching the disorder had thinned and more police were stationed on the corners of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street. Astel reported that he found that the men had "a quantity of jewelry," which when questioned they admitted taking from Benjamin Zelvin's store at 372 Lenox Avenue. The officer then had the men take him to the store three blocks to the north. They found all the windows broken. Zelvin had closed the business around 11:00 PM but remained there until police he had called to protect the store arrived at 11:30 PM. Those officers had evidently not remained at the jewelry store. Zelvin did not return from his home in Brooklyn until opening time that morning.
  
  Leacock and Henry were two of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).
  
  Leacock lived at 39 West 118th Street near 5th Avenue. Henry lived at the opposite end of the same street, at 313 West 118th Street, near 8th Avenue. Henry was the youngest person arrested during the disorder. There was no indication of how he and Henry came to be together on March 19. Leacock lived in an area that housed a mix of Black and Spanish-speaking residents. In the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book he was recorded as Black; in his examination in the court he gave his birthplace as Brazil, making him one of the very few among those arrested who was not identified as born in the United States or the West Indies (the transcription of the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded his birthplace as the United States, but also misspelled his name as Ossor Leasode).
  
  
  
  Zelvin later identified the jewelry police allegedly found on the men as having come from his store. In the charge against Leacock and Henry, the value of the jewelry was initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. The grand jury reduced the felony burglary charge against the men to a misdemeanor. Their decision indicated the lack of evidence that the men had broken into the store that a charge of burglary required. Given that they had been arrested with merchandise in their possession, the grand jury likely instead charged them with petit larceny; a felony larceny charge was not an option as the jewelry they had allegedly taken was worth less than $100. Zelvin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge one additional man with burglary, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin. That charge was also reduced to petit larceny, indicating the same lack of evidence he had broken into the store and that he too had allegedly taken jewelry worth less than $100.
  
  There were no details of Leacock's alleged offense published in the press. Leacock and Henry appeared among those charged with burglary only in the two most comprehensive lists of those arrested, published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal. The details were in the Magistrate Court affidavit contained in Leacock's district attorney's case file. Although arrested together, the men appeared in the Harlem Magistrate Court at different times. Leacock was arraigned on March 20 with most of those arrested during the disorder. Henry was not arraigned until the next day. Despite Officer Astel's report that the men had confessed at the time of their arrest, they pled not guilty in court. Leacock was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder represented by a lawyer, in his case H. Hirsch of 9 Sylvan Place. No information could be found on the lawyer. Both men appeared again on March 22, when the magistrate sent them to the grand jury. It was not until April 2 that the grand jury heard their case and sent both men to the Court of Special Sessions. The 28th Precinct police blotter was the only source that recorded that the judges in that court found both men guilty, Leacock on April 18 and Henry on April 17. The judges suspended Leacock's sentence, but sent Henry to the House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory on Randalls Island (which would close less than a month later, on May 11).
• 1 2021-12-03T20:25:38+00:00 Lokos Clothes shop windows broken 31 plain 2024-05-29T16:06:31+00:00 Windows in the Lokos Clothes store at 2275 8th Avenue were broken sometime during the disorder. Located just north of West 122nd Street on the west side of 8th Avenue, the store was in an area with no other reported activity during the disorder other than rocks hitting Patrolman Harry Whittington as he traveled on an emergency truck. Officer Phillips of the 28th Squad arrested two men for allegedly having "thrown an ashcan through the window" of the store, according to a story in the Home News. One of those arrested, William Norris, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, gave his address as 201 West 122nd Street, only a block east of the clothing store. The other individual arrested, Charles Wright, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, was recorded as having "no home" in the 28th Precinct police blotter and the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, but with an address in Philadelphia in the Home News. There are no details of the time or circumstances of the arrests. They likely occurred around 10:30 PM as Max Newman was assaulted as he closed his grocery store across the street, at 2275 8th Avenue, indicating the presence of crowds in the area.
  
  Pauline Lokos, a thirty-nine-year-old white woman, was identified as the storeowner in the Home News and recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when Norris and Wright appeared in court on March 20. She and her husband Henry were listed in the 1933 City Directory as the owners of the men's clothing store at 2275 8th Avenue. The Home News story misidentified the business as a delicatessen. An advertisement in 1954 said the business had opened in 1914. In 1933 the Lokos family lived at 312 West 122nd Street, just a block west of the store, on the corner of Manhattan Avenue, a section of Harlem where the residents were white in the early 1930s.
  
  When Norris and Wright appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court both men were charged with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred them to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. The judges convicted them and on April 1st sentenced them each to three months in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  
  
  The clothing store was recorded as a white-owned business in the second half of 1935 in the MCCH business survey, which mistakenly located the business at 2273 8th Avenue. By 1937, Lokos Clothes had relocated to 2285 8th Avenue, in the three-story building north of their location in 1935 (where the New York Amsterdam News reported a police officer had shot and killed Allen Bruce after allegedly seeing the twenty-five-year-old Black laborer smash the display window and take a coat). A "Henry Lokos Clothes" store sign was visible in a Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, overhanging the street north of the one-story building in which it was located in 1935. The Lokos' two sons also gave 2285 8th Avenue as their place of employment when they registered for the draft in 1942. By April 6, 1940, when a census enumerator called, the family had moved to 285 St. Nicholas Avenue, between West 124th and West 125th Streets, still close to the store. Their new home was in a section of Harlem west of 8th Avenue where white residents remained the majority.
  
  
  
   
• 1 2021-09-08T14:53:39+00:00 Aubrey Patterson arrested 30 plain 2024-01-17T20:20:57+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Baumann of the 11th Precinct arrested Aubrey Patterson, a twenty-one-year-old Black man who lived at 81 East 113th Street. Baumann charged him with burglary, with a note in the 28th Precinct police blotter recording that Patterson "Burglarised store during riot." Patterson was named in the list of those arrested for burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the list in the New York Evening Journal. No one was recorded as the complainant against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  Police transported Patterson and ninety-five others to Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20 after the disorder. That group was then put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters before police put them back into patrol wagons and drove them uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Three of the four newspaper stories about the line-up mentioned Patterson. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle did so to make fun of him: "'I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt,' said Aubery Patterson, colored, of 83 E. 113th St. Manhattan, in explaining (amid laughter) why he didn't want to discuss the charge of burglary against him." The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun by contrast, quoted Patterson answering questions, although only the New York Sun reported the questions: "'Are you a citizen?' Capt. Dillon asked this prisoner, who had identified himself as Aubrey Patterson, of 83 East 113th Street. 'I am a citizen of this great metropolis,' replied Patterson. I was born in this metropolis on 132d Street.' 'What do you do for a living?' 'I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime.'" The story framed that exchange by denigrating Patterson as having "assumed a pompous air when questioned by Acting Capt. Dillon and gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions." The New York Herald Tribune did not offer any similar judgement but did add that Patterson was "a light-skinned Negro." (The only other individual quoted in stories about the line-up was Harry Gordon, one of the white men arrested at the start of the disorder).
  
  In the Harlem Magistrates Court, prosecutors charged Patterson with disorderly conduct, not burglary. That charge likely indicates that police had no evidence that he had either entered a store or taken merchandise, so could not charge him with burglary or even attempted burglary, or with larceny. Patterson was one of a small number of those arrested during the disorder who was recorded as having had an attorney appear for him, in his case "T. French," whose offices were at 200 West 131st Street. He told a MCCH investigator that French was "a friend," and that the ILD had also offered to defend him. Magistrate Renaud remanded Patterson in custody on $100 bail. When he appeared in court again, on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged Patterson, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  Patterson was later interviewed by a MCCH investigator, identified as "A Militant Negro Student of the Harlem Evening High School, 116th St & Lenox Avenue." The questions focused on the existence of a united front and any interracial campaigns being carried on by the National Student League or others, as part of MCCH research into radical groups in Harlem. Patterson told the interviewer he had been a student at the evening high since 1932. "Studying" was the occupation he gave when he registered for the draft five years after the disorder, in 1940. In April of that year a census enumerator recorded Patterson and his widowed mother still living at 83 East 113th Street; by October, when he registered for the draft, their address was several buildings further east, 110 East 113th Street.
  
  
• 1 2021-05-24T00:20:09+00:00 Joseph Wade arrested 30 plain 2024-01-27T21:46:56+00:00 At about 2:45 AM, Officer William Leahy of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw Joseph Wade, a twenty-four-year-old Black "candy boy" coming out of Frank DeThomas' candy store at 101 West 127th Street. Leahy noted that store's windows were broken, but not that he had seen Wade break them. When Leahy arrested Wade, he found several toy pistols worth sixty cents in Wade's possession, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, or $70 of goods, according to later reports of Wade's sentencing in the New York Age and New York Times. For the last month, Wade had lived at 148 West 127th Street near the other end of the block of West 127th Street on which the store was located.
  
  
  
  Wade was clearly not the only person to have looted the store, as DeThomas claimed $745.25 in losses. He was among the twenty white store-owners to bring the first suits against the city for failing to protect their businesses identified in the New York Sun.
  
  Wade appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud ordered him held for the grand jury without bail. While few of those charged after the disorder were denied bail, Wade's criminal record featured three convictions since 1926, including one for unlawful entry resulting from a charge of burglary. That conviction in December 1926 was followed by a second arrest for burglary in April 1931 for which Wade was discharged. Two months later he was convicted of gun possession. Finally, in October 1933, Wade pled guilty to attempted second degree assault, having been charged with rape. As a result, he spent around two years in prison in the nine years before the disorder: two indeterminate terms for the first two convictions, and a year in Sing Sing Prison for the final conviction. The New York Age reported Wade had been paroled in December 1934, only three months before the disorder (a detail not mentioned by any other newspaper).
  
  The grand jury indicted Wade for burglary on March 22, and five days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions having agreed to plead guilty to the lesser offense of petit larceny. The Probation Department would have conducted an investigation before Wade's sentencing, but as he had been convicted previously in the Court of General Sessions, he had likely had been investigated previously and that report would have been put in the file created then. On April 8, Judge Donnellan sentenced him to six months in the workhouse, a decision reported in the press as well as recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  There are more reports of the progress of Wade’s prosecution than most looting cases. He appears not only in the lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but also in the New York Evening Journal and the Home News story on proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court. The New York Sun also reported his return to the Magistrates Court on March 25 to have his bail decision continued. At least five papers — New York Amsterdam News, New York Herald Tribune, New York Daily News, New York Post, and the New York Times — reported Wade’s appearance in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty. The New York Times, New York Evening News, Daily News, and Times Union, and three Black newspapers, the Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, and New York Age, also reported his sentencing eleven days later.
  
  Wade had lived in New York City since at least 1920, when he and his mother Marie appear in the federal census, living with his father's brother at 262 West 124th Street. According to the census, he was born in New York City, but the Sing Sing Prison Inmate Admission Register recorded Charleston, South Carolina as his birthplace, and that of both his parents. Exactly when the family moved to New York City is uncertain; the register entry recorded Wade as having lived there for eleven years, so since around 1922, but the census indicates he had been in the city at least two years earlier. The Admission Register contains other fragmentary details of Wade’s life before the disorder. His father apparently died around 1923, when Wade was thirteen years old. He remained in school until he was sixteen years old; his first arrest and conviction must have occurred around the time he left school. He was born in according to the register, and he gave his age as twenty-four years in the Magistrate’s Court, but the census schedule records his age as ten years in 1920, putting his birthday in 1910. He must have given that earlier date when arrested in 1926, as he was not prosecuted in the juvenile court as he would have been if under sixteen years of age. As a youthful first offender, he was sent to the New York City Reformatory in January 1927. Released later that year, he began working as a porter at the Alhambra Theater. It appears that Wade’s arrest and conviction for gun possession in June 1931 cost him that job. Now aged around twenty-one, he was sentenced to another indeterminate sentence, this time in the penitentiary.
  
  Wade served no more than eighteen months, as he started work as a porter for Sam Rosen of 216 West 125th Street around January 1933, according to the Sing Sing Prison Inmate Admission Register. By October, 1933, he lived at 109 West 129th Street; his mother Marie lived at 226 West 124th Street. That month Wade was charged with rape. The Admissions Register includes a section to record “Criminal Acts attributed to"; Wade’s entry is “Lived with girl,” suggesting that the charge may have been statutory rape, for sexual acts with a girl under eighteen years of age, the age of consent in New York in 1933. (Both the plea bargain and the sentence are in line with how courts handled such cases.) Although sentenced to a minimum term of fifteen months, the Admissions Register recorded that he was eligible for parole after one year, on December 28, 1934. The report of his sentencing in the New York Age indicated he was released at the time.
• 1 2021-12-07T20:14:00+00:00 Rex Drug store windows broken 30 plain 2024-05-29T21:40:43+00:00 At 12:05 A.M., as Officer Anthony Barbaro of the 25th Precinct stood on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 126th Street, he saw a group of people gather in front of the Rex Drug store at 318 Lenox Avenue. He then heard two of the men say, "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them," according to his statement in the Harlem Magistrates Court. Those men, Leon Mauraine and David Smith, then allegedly threw stones at the store windows, breaking them, after which they ran north on Lenox Avenue. Barbaro chased them, catching and arresting both men at 322 Lenox Avenue, two buildings from the drug store. As the drug store was on the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and West 126th Street, Barbaro was likely standing across 126th Street, on the southeast corner, as he would not have been able to hear the men or catch them so quickly from across Lenox Avenue.
  
  Around ten minutes after Barbaro arrested Mauraine and Smith, a group of people broke windows in a store across Lenox Avenue two stores south of 126th Street. Fifteen minutes later, the windows of a shoe store across Lenox Avenue north of the drug store were broken by large group of people. On both occasions, nearby police officers arrested one individual, indicating multiple police officers were stationed at the intersection at this time. They may not have been there throughout the disorder, as multiple stores close to the drug store were reported as looted or damaged, with particularly extensive damage to both George Chronis' restaurant diagonally across the intersection from the drug store on the southwest corner of Lenox Avenue and West 126th Street and Harry Piskin's laundry next to it on West 126th Street.
  
  
  
  A white-owned drug store was recorded as still at this address in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935. While the drug store is not named in the survey, an advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News in July 1934 identifies the "Rex Drug Co., 318 Lenox Avenue on 126 St. Corner." By the time the Tax Department photograph of 318 Lenox Avenue was taken, between 1939 and 1941, the Rex Drug store had relocated to 322 Lenox Avenue, two buildings north of the corner (a real estate office is recorded at that address in the MCCH business survey).
  
  Leon Mauraine and David Smith appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with inciting a riot. Both were twenty-two-year-old Black men. Mauraine gave his occupation as window washer when examined in the court, while Smith said he was a clerk. They lived northeast of the store, Mauraine at 52 West 128th Street and Smith at 2094 Fifth Avenue, between 128th and 129th Streets. Magistrate Renaud held both men for the grand jury. A week later the grand jury transferred both men to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, likely for the misdemeanor forms of riot and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in other cases involving breaking windows. Convicted by the judges in that court, on April 2 both men received suspended sentences, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-08-05T19:48:50+00:00 Carl Jones arrested 29 plain 2024-01-18T20:23:53+00:00 Around 1:45 AM, Officer Raymond Early arrested eighteen-year-old Carl Jones in front of 391 Lenox Avenue. From across the street he had allegedly seen Jones pick up an object and throw it through the window of the stationery store owned by Harry and Morris Farber located at that address. Early must also have alleged that Jones reached into the window or tried to climb through it, as he charged Jones with attempted burglary. The Home News reported that police alleged that Jones "attempted to steal merchandise" after smashing the window. Jones, who lived several blocks to the north in a furnished room at 84 West 134th Street, admitted that he smashed the window, but denied trying to steal any merchandise. However, given that Early had some distance to cover (across the four lanes of Lenox Avenue), Jones evidently did not immediately flee after the window was smashed. The Probation Officer investigating Jones appeared to have sought another motive for Jones' attack other than theft, recording that Jones "had been a regular customer of the complainant's store, but denies that he had any personal grievance against the complainant." The explanation the probation officer settled on was that Jones had become "imbued with the mob psychology prevalent at the moment," echoing the conclusion of Dr. Charles Thompson after examining Jones in the Court Psychiatric Clinic.
  
  
  
  Morris Farber told the probation officer that he wanted "the leniency of the Court be extended to [Jones]." The District Attorney's case file for Jones was missing, producing some confusion about his prosecution. Jones appeared in the lists of those arrested during the disorder charged with burglary, published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. The docket book recorded that Jones appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with attempted burglary. Magistrate Renaud held him on bail of $1,000 and, when he returned to court on March 25, discharged him, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. The Home News reported the discharge resulted from the grand jury having indicted him in response to evidence presented as part of District Attorney Dodge's investigation. The docket book did not record that information as it did in the case of others discharged because they had been indicted, but ADA Kaminsky identified Jones as one of those indicted in those circumstances in testimony to the first public hearing of the MCCH. On March 29, Jones pled guilty to unlawful entry, the Probation Department investigation report recorded, and was sentenced to the Workhouse for four months on April 9. The plea bargain the district attorney offered Jones was in line with that offered to others not allegedly found with stolen goods in their possession, as was the sentence. Other offenders around eighteen years of age were sentenced to institutions for youthful offenders, but the Probation Department investigation raised questions about Jones' age that likely worked against such an outcome in his case. While noting that Jones "claims to be 18 years, four months of age," a probation officer wrote that he "appears to be several years older than he claims." The department was unable to obtain any evidence of his date of birth in the eleven days it spent investigating Jones.
  
  It was not only Jones' statement about his age that the probation officer considered unreliable. Jones said he had been born in St. Louis, Missouri, leaving at age fourteen to travel to New York City. The only response to the department's inquiries about Jones that appears in his file is a letter dated April 5 from the St. Louis Juvenile Court, reporting that the court could find no mention of Jones in its files, nor anyone at the address Jones gave for his father who knew him or his family. A probation officer was able to confirm that Jones had lived at a furnished room at 84 West 134th Street for six months prior to his arrest, with an eighteen-year-old Black woman named Georgia Harris. Jones' statements about his employment proved less reliable. The bakery on East 103rd Street that Jones named as his employer at the time of his arrest did not exist. Prior to that, he said he worked for a year at a shoe repair store at 395 Lenox Ave, in the same building as the Farber's store; the owner said Jones had been employed only for several months, about three years earlier. The neckwear manufacturer Jones identified as his employer for nine months had no recollection of him. The probation officer's frustration with Jones is evident in his conclusion that "the manner in which he has lived during this time is decidedly questionable." He was more direct in the preliminary investigation, scrawling "Liar" across the section of the form relating to manner and "etiology of maladjustment." Dr. Charles Thompson's psychiatric examination report did not offer similar assessments. He found Jones neither psychotic nor mentally defective, but merely "an immature youth" of "low average intelligence." The explanation of his alleged crime lay in outside forces: "he seems to have acted together with other individuals under the influence of mob spirit, with no purpose in his action."
• 1 2021-08-12T23:53:03+00:00 James Pringle arrested 29 plain 2024-01-27T17:35:54+00:00 Around 11:15 PM, Detective Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct was watching a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue when that he allegedly heard James Pringle, a twenty-eight-year-old Black laborer, shout to the group, “Let's go cross the way and scale rocks at the cops, they are coming down our side of the street.” Naton's affidavit in the Harlem Magistrates Court then records that the detective arrested Pringle, a twenty-eight-year-old Black laborer, and found a rock in his right hip pocket. His statement held Pringle responsible for what the other members of the crowd did after his arrest, "acts of force and violence committed to several persons and the property of others, in said vicinity." A handwritten note below the typewritten charge presents a different narrative, in which "Deft led others who smashed windows." The windows of the grocery store on the northwest corner of West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue were broken sometime during the disorder. A patrolman from the 28th Precinct arrested David Bragg for breaking that window; he may have been part of the crowd on the corner around 11:15 PM. The shoe repair store directly across 7th Avenue from the grocery store was also looted sometime during the disorder. But that looting likely came an hour or more after Naton arrested Pringle, the time when two other looted stores near the intersection were looted, Sarah Refkin's delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue at 12:30 AM, and then Nicholas Peet's tailors store at 2063 7th Avenue at 1:30 AM. (Naton made two other arrests around this time, of John Vivien fifteen minutes earlier, and John King, forty-five minutes earlier, at 10:30 PM, both at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street.) Pringle's address was recorded in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court as 101 West 115th Street, southeast of where Naton arrested him, in an area with a mix of Hispanic and Black residents.
  
  
  
  The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded the charge against Pringle as burglary, with the note "Burglarized store during riot." He appeared only in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, among those charged with riot. That was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when Pringle appeared in court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held him until March 27. When he returned to court, Magistrate Ford sent Pringle to the grand jury. His court appearance was mentioned in stories in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, with the later newspaper reporting the charge against Pringle as malicious mischief. Although not recorded in the docket book, the handwritten note on the affidavit listed that charge, as well as riot. Almost two weeks later, on April 8, Pringle appeared before the grand jury, which transferred his case to the Court of Special Sessions, reducing the charges against him from felonies to misdemeanors. A week later the judges in that court convicted Pringle and suspended his sentence, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2020-12-05T17:58:29+00:00 Jean Jacquelin arrested 29 plain 2024-01-27T18:01:55+00:00 At 5:40 AM, in the final event of the disorder, Officer Di Maio arrested a twenty-eight-year-old white chauffeur named Jean Jacquelin at the corner of West 128th Street and 8th Avenue. Jacquelin allegedly was carrying two ladies' coats, valued at $20 each, and two pairs of trousers, valued at $5 each. There was no mention of what caused Di Maio to arrest him, but the clothing was likely bulky enough that it attracted the officer's attention; Morris Sankin later identified it as coming from his tailor's store at 200 West 128th Street, at the opposite end of the block from where Di Maio arrested Jacquelin.
  
  Jacquelin was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one-third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).
  
  Jacquelin would not have had to travel far to Sankin's store. He lived at 222 West 128th Street, a four-story apartment building ten buildings west of the store. He had only lived there for a month. That block was home to Black residents, making it an unusual address for Jacquelin, one of only ten white men arrested in the disorder. There were areas occupied by white residents nearby, on West 126th Street and several blocks south of West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.
  
  
  
  The evidence that Jacquelin was white comes from the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book. It is the only legal record that collected information on an individual's race. The Magistrate's Court examination recorded only birthplace. So too did the police blotter. Jacquelin may have been Canadian. His birthplace is recorded as Nova Scotia in the Magistrate's Court examination, but as the United States in both the docket book and the 28th Precinct police blotter (although the blotter also mistakenly identifies Jacquelin as a woman). He had been in New York City since at least 1932, when his criminal record shows he was arrested for assault with a knife, an incident that does not seem to have involved significant violence as the charge was reduced to disorderly conduct, for which the Magistrate convicted him but gave him a suspended sentence. No newspapers reported Jacquelin's race. He appears in the list of those arrested published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published by the New York Evening Journal (both of which misspelled his first name as Kean). He also appears in the Home News story on hearings in the Magistrate Court, his first name reported as Gene, with Leroy Gillard, a forty-six-year old Black man also charged with burglary of Sankin's store, but arrested earlier, at 10:10 PM, at the store. The story reported that they stole all $800 of clothes taken from Sankin's store, rather than the clothing allegedly found on them.
  
  Jacquelin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, immediately after Gillard. The magistrate sent Jacquelin to the grand jury, along with Gillard. On April 5, the grand jury determined that both men should only be charged with a misdemeanor not felony burglary, likely petit larceny in Jacquelin's case as the clothing he had allegedly taken had a value of less than $100, so too little for a charge of grand larceny. Sent to the Court of Special Sessions, he appeared before the judges on April 11, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter, when they dismissed the charges against him.
  
   
• 1 2020-10-22T01:55:04+00:00 Jacob Solomon's grocery store looted 29 plain 2024-05-30T20:03:32+00:00 At 9:00 PM, Jacob Solomon closed his grocery store at at 2100 5th Avenue, on the corner of West 129th Street. Around 12:40 AM, Officer Rock of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw six men run out of the store. He gave chase and claimed he was able to arrest one of those men, a thirty-five-year-old Black laborer named Lawrence Humphrey. He allegedly had a fifty-pound bag of rice worth $2.50 in his possession, according to a note written on the Magistrate's Court affidavit. The men Rock allegedly saw must have been only some of those who took merchandise from the store, as Solomon's reported losses exceeded what they could have carried. When Solomon returned to his store around 7 AM he found the door and windows broken and approximately $100 of groceries missing. He told a passing New York World-Telegram reporter, who heard the sound of "cracking glass" and saw him "sweeping the walk in front of his little shop" the morning after the disorder that "my windows were smashed early this morning and the mob stole $150 worth of food."
  
  The attack on Solomon's store was one of only four incidents reported on 5th Avenue; two occurred on blocks north of the grocery store, the other on West 116th Street. In part that absence of disorder reflected a lack of targets. The blocks around the grocery store contained very few businesses. Only the block north of 125th Street, and the blocks from 131st Street to 138th Street, were lined with stores. The men who attacked the store may have come from Lenox Avenue, a block to the west, where multiple attacks on businesses were reported around this time. Humphrey lived at 55 West 132nd Street, in the middle of the block between 5th Avenue and Lenox Avenue three blocks north of Solomon's store, closer to the crowds and violence on Lenox Avenue than the apparently relatively incident-free 5th Avenue.
  
  
  
  Humphrey appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, a proceeding reported only in the Home News. Magistrate Renaud held Humphrey for a grand jury on bail of $1,000. There were no newspaper reports on the subsequent steps in his prosecution. His district attorney's case file recorded that the grand jury sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him and sending him to the Court of General Sessions. Their decision to charge him with a misdemeanor rather than a felony likely reflected the low value of the goods — $2.50 — allegedly found in his possession. According to the 28th Precinct police blotter, the judges found Humphrey guilty and on April 17 sentenced him to thirty days in the Workhouse.
  
  It is not clear if Solomon remained in business after the attack on his store. The store did not appear in the MCCH business survey, which included no businesses at 2100 5th Avenue. However, the Tax Department photograph taken a few years later does show a store with the window signs characteristic of grocery stores, and a truck parked outside filled with boxes and milk containers that could have been stock for the store.
• 1 2021-12-05T21:00:05+00:00 Bernard Smith arrested 28 plain 2024-01-18T00:22:05+00:00 Officer Alfred Tait of the 42nd Precinct testified in the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw a group of about thirty people assemble in front of the Temple Grill & Restaurant at 317 Lenox Avenue. Then, about 12:15 AM, he allegedly heard Bernard Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man, shout to the group, "We will get these two windows here," and saw him then throw two stones at the restaurant windows, breaking them. Smith then allegedly shouted to the others, "You fellows get the others." Tait presumably arrested Smith in front of the store, although his statement did not mention the circumstances, but according to the officer, members of the group in front of the restaurant acted on Smith's urging, as "thereafter there were several acts of force and violence committed in said vicinity to other persons and property of others." In the minutes around when Tait arrested Smith, other police officers arrested three men near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, Leon Mauraine and David Smith at 318 Lenox Avenue ten minutes earlier, and John Kennedy Jones at 333 Lenox Avenue fifteen minutes later. Multiple arrests by different officers indicate that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  Bernard Smith gave his occupation as interior decorator when examined in the Harlem Magistrates Court, and his home, for the last eight years, as 116 West 126th Street. That building was close to the bar and restaurant, around the nearby southwest corner of West 126th Street and four buildings west. Smith appeared in the lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal as one of those charged with inciting a riot. The 28th Precinct police blotter also recorded the charge made against Smith as "Inciting riot."
  
  
  
  The last person to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Smith was charged with both malicious mischief, for allegedly breaking the window, and inciting a riot, for his alleged call for the group to break other windows. Held in custody by Magistrate Renaud, Smith returned to court on March 25, when bail was set at $500 for the first charge and $1,000 for the second, and then again on March 26, when Magistrate Ford held him for the grand jury on the charge of riot. Prosecutors reduced the charge of malicious mischief to disorderly conduct, likely indicating a lack of evidence that he had broken the window. Magistrate Ford found him guilty of that charge and sentenced him to five days in the Workhouse or a fine of $25. The docket book recorded that he paid the fine. Misleadingly, the 28th Precinct police blotter also recorded that sentence, but not either of the charges of malicious mischief and disorderly conduct, only the charge of riot.
  
  A week later, Smith appeared before the grand jury, which dismissed the riot charge, an outcome recorded only in his District Attorney's case file. While the grand jury did not indict any of those arrested during the disorder charged with inciting a riot, it did send all the others who appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions rather than dismissing the charges. The difference in Smith's case could be that no one else allegedly broke windows in the store that he attacked and the subsequent attacks on people and property could not be linked to him. 
• 1 2021-12-09T01:50:22+00:00 Claude Jones arrested 27 plain 2024-01-19T00:10:35+00:00 At about 10:30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court, he saw Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, throw a brick that broke a window in Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street. Then Jones allegedly shouted "in a loud voice 'Kill the cops, the dirty mother-fucking sons of bitches,' causing a large crowd to gather." By that time the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, but some groups remained. Ten minutes after windows were broken in Blumstein's store, William Ford allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Kress' store several buildings to to the west, and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumstein's store, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Police arrested one man, Douglas Cornelius.
  
  Patrolman MacKenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of not just Jones but also the two other men arrested nearby around the same time, William Ford and Douglas Cornelius. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. In court MacKenzie stated that he had witnessed Ford and Jones breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them (there are no details of the circumstances of the arrest of Cornelius). Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10:30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
  
  The address Jones gave when examined in the Harlem Magistrates Court, 170 West 121st Street, his home for only about two weeks, was four blocks south of Blumstein's store, at close enough to where the disorder began for him to have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise, crowds, or rumors. After reporting that police had identified Jones as "an ace trombonist in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra," the New York Amsterdam News published a story on April 6 in which the trombonist denied he was man arrested. The trombonist, now "connected with Cab Calloway's Band," had been out of the city on tour at the time of the disorder.
  
  
  
  Jones appeared among those charged with inciting a riot in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The same charge is recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, a consistency unusual for the men reported as both breaking windows and inciting crowds. When Jones appeared in court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud remanded him in custody. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in the court docket book. Only the lawyer's first name and initial, James W., are legible, together with his address, 200 West 135th Street, an office building in the heart of Harlem that housed the offices of many Black lawyers (both the other men arrested at same time, William Ford and Douglas Cornelius, had prominent Black lawyers recorded as representing them).
  
  Returned to court a week later, Jones was held for the grand jury on bail of $1000 by Magistrate Ford, an appearance reported in the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times. Jones was to have appeared before the grand jury on April 8, the same day as William Ford, but Patrolman MacKenzie was not present. It was not until April 12 that the grand jury heard the case against Jones, deciding then to transfer him to the Court of Special Sessions, likely to be tried for the offenses written in a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit, both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot, and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder (as the malicious mischief charge was not recorded in the docket book Jones is not categorized as being charged with that offense). Convicted, Jones received a suspended sentence on April 16, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
  
  Three days after his release, on April 19, Jones obtained a license to marry twenty-one-year-old Erma (or Emma) Harris, a marriage reported in the New York Age on May 4, 1935.
• 1 2022-01-05T21:44:26+00:00 John King arrested 27 plain 2024-01-27T18:20:11+00:00 Around 10:30 PM, Detective Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people gathered at the 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, he stated in an affidavit in the Harlem Magistrates Court. Crowds had been gathering at the intersection for several hours, and police had been stationed there to control and disperse them since around 9:00 PM as part of the perimeter around the block of 125th Street from 7th to 8th Avenues on which Kress' store stood. In response to this group, Naton "announced himself as a police officer," necessary as he would have been in plainclothes, not in uniform, and told the group to "move on." John King, a twenty-eight-year-old Black fish and ice dealer, allegedly responded by yelling "I won't move for you this is my Harlem, and we will put that Kress store out of business and punish that man that injured the child." He then allegedly grabbed hold of the billy club in Naton's hand and broke its strap. As well as arresting King, Naton made two other arrests around this time, of John Vivien thirty minutes later at the same intersection, and James Pringle another fifteen minutes later, two blocks south at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue.
  
  The affidavit was the only source that includes details of King's arrest. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against King as inciting riot. He appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, among those charged with riot, and in a story in the Home News that only mentioned the charge against him. Riot was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when King appeared in court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury, on bail of $1,000. A handwritten note on the affidavit listed an additional charge not recorded in the docket book, "simple assault," likely in response to Detective Naton's allegation that King had grabbed his billy club. That charge may have been added by the grand jury after they heard the evidence against King on March 27, when they transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, reducing the riot charge against him from a felony to a misdemeanor. King did not appear before the judges in that court for almost two months; there is no information on the reason for that delay. The judges convicted King and suspended his sentence, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  King's address was recorded in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court as 2905 8th Avenue, on the northern boundary of Harlem just south of West 154th Street. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, he had lived at that address for five years, likely since he arrived in New York City sometime after April in 1930. At the time of the 1930 Census, King lived in Philadelphia, where he worked as a porter for a theater company, and lived with his wife Inez and their four-month-old son. He was still at the same address, 2905 8th Avenue, when the census enumerator called on April 2, 1940, by then working as the superintendent of the building, while Inez owned a candy store. The couple had two more children by that date, an eight-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son. King listed the same address and occupation when he registered for the draft two years later.
  
  
• 1 2021-05-24T21:29:44+00:00 Julian Rogers arrested 27 plain 2024-01-27T22:37:45+00:00 Around 11:20 PM, Patrolman Nador Herrman allegedly saw Julian Rogers, a thirty-seven-year-old Black auto washer, kick in a display window in William Gindin's shoe store at 333 Lenox Avenue. Rogers then took three odd women's shoes worth $1 each and put them under his jacket. Herrman arrested Rogers about 100 feet from the store, and recovered the shoes, according to the Magistrates Court affidavit. Gindin had closed his store around 9:45 PM. Around 10:30 PM, crowds gathered on Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street and began to smash store windows, and a group of men looted Towbin's haberdashery at Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street. By the time Rogers allegedly stole from Gindin's store, the other display window had already been smashed and "a large quantity of merchandise stolen," the patrolman told the probation officer investigating the case. Just over an hour later, another officer arrested John Kennedy Jones, alleging he had been part of a large group that threw objects that smashed more of the store windows. Gindin claimed $1,273.89 in damages, well above the median reported claim of $733, as part of a group of twenty white business owners who sued the city for failing to protect their stores identified by the New York Sun.
  
  Rogers was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with burglary. Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury and set bail at $1,000. He appeared in the lists of those arrested published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. None of Rogers' other appearances in court were reported in the press. After being indicted by the grand jury on April 5, the district attorney's case file indicated that he agreed to plead guilty to petit larceny and appeared in the Court of General Sessions to do so on April 16. Returned to court for sentencing on April 25, Rogers received a suspended sentence from Judge Allen, recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. A consideration in that decision may have been the probation officer's conclusion that there was "no evidence that [Rogers] was a member of any group which participated in the riot"; instead, "he was swayed by the behavior of the mob and that when he saw a general invasion of stores, he resorted to the same practice." Unusually, the Probation Department file indicated that Rogers was not placed on probation, as was generally the case for those given a suspended sentence.
  
  The Probation Department's investigation gathered few details of Rogers' life. He did not provide the information they required for their analysis of his history and personality. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, around 1898, Rogers claimed no recollection of his parents as he had been raised by various relatives since he was infant; nor could he give the probation officer the name of the school he attended. When Rogers was sixteen years old, he left the uncle with whom he had been living, and traveled around the country. In 1917 he said he enlisted in the US Army, but was diagnosed with syphilis and discharged after six months. Around 1926, he arrived in New York City. During his nine years in the city, Rogers claimed to have lived in various furnished rooms and lodging houses, but gave no specific addresses. He likely spent at least some of the time homeless, as he was at the time of the disorder. For two months before his arrest, he slept in a garage at 332 East 122nd Street, without the owner being aware. For around a year, Rogers had worked roughly one day a week washing cars at the same garage.
  
  
  
  Almost a year before the disorder, police arrested Rogers for failing to leave a street corner when directed to by an officer. Convicted in the Magistrates Court, he received a suspended sentence. The probation officer reported that Rogers spent considerable time on street corners, congregating with "neighborhood idlers," and "engag[ing] in petty gambling, with chance acquaintances."
  
  The decision not to place Rogers on probation could have resulted from difficulty of supervising a man without a job, home, or family in the city. There was also a possibility that Rogers deliberately withheld information to keep the white authorities at arms length. The probation officer investigating him could not decide: "he is either unable or unwilling to give definite information concerning his antecedents, and the facts of his domestic life are unobtainable,...and his means of subsistence, for the most part, is open to question."
  
   
• 1 2021-04-16T19:59:19+00:00 Leroy Gillard arrested 27 plain 2024-01-28T00:02:02+00:00 Patrolman Irwin Young alleged that around 10:10 PM, he "saw the window of [Morris Sankin's tailor's] store being broken" and then saw a forty-six-year-old unemployed Black man named Leroy Gillard go into the store through the broken window and emerge with two suits of clothing, each valued at $25. The phrasing of the affidavit implied that Gillard did not break the window, so there may have been others there at the time who escaped arrest. Certainly more clothing was stolen, to the value of $800, than Gillard allegedly had in his possession. The affidavit left those possibilities open by including the stock phrasing that Gillard's alleged crime was committed "while acting in concert with a number of others not yet arrested."
  
  Sankin's store was set back from 7th Avenue in a single story structure located between the rear of the five-story building on the corner of West 128th Street and 7th Avenue and the first of a block of eight three-story brownstone apartment buildings that stretched for roughly a quarter of the block. Gillard may not have come to the store from 7th Avenue as he lived at 208 West 128th Street, just four buildings west of the store. Officer Young was likely on the corner of 7th Avenue and West 128th Street, as police tended to take up positions at intersections. Young had been one of the officers in front of Kress' store four hours earlier, during which time he was allegedly assaulted by Harry Gordon as he arrested him for trying to speak to the crowd.
  
  
  
  Leroy Gillard appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, immediately before Jean Jacquelin, a twenty-eight-year-old white chauffeur arrested near the end of the disorder, at 5:40 AM, allegedly in possession of two ladies' coats, valued at $20 each, and two pairs of trousers, valued at $5 each, identified by Morris Sankin as also coming from his store. As Sankin had not returned to his store until 8:00 AM that morning, its contents would have been accessible through the broken window throughout the disorder. Jacquelin had been arrested away from the store, at the 8th Avenue end of West 128th Street, and like Gillard, lived on the same block as the store. A story in the Home News reported that the two men stole all $800 of clothing taken from Sankin's store rather than the items worth $100 allegedly found on them.
  
  Gillard appeared in more newspapers than most of those arrested for looting. That is likely because police arrested him early in the disorder, so would have been able to provide his name to reporters for several hours. The New York Herald Tribune singled out Gillard as "the first arrest for alleged looting" during the disorder and described the arrest as taking place inside the store (and misspelled his last name as Gilliard as all the newspapers but the Home News did). As well as appearing in the Home News story, the list of those arrested and charged with burglary published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list published by the New York Evening Journal, he was included in a list in an earlier edition of the New York Evening Journal (which mistakenly listed the charge against him as disorderly conduct), a list in the New York American, and a list in the Daily News (which mistakenly identified him as a white man in one edition).
  
  The magistrate sent both Gillard and Jacquelin to the grand jury. On April 5, the grand jury determined that Gillard should only be charged with a misdemeanor, not felony burglary and sent him to the Court of Special Sessions. The grand jury disposed of Jacquelin's case in the same way. Those decisions indicated a lack of evidence that the men had broken into the store, a requirement for a charge of burglary. The charge voted by the grand jury was therefore likely larceny for taking the clothing; as those items were valued at less than $100, the men could only be charged with petit larceny. According to the 28th Precinct police blotter, on April 11 the judges dismissed the charges against Jacquelin. It took almost two more weeks before Gillard was tried, on April 23. The judges then convicted him and sentenced him to the Workhouse for three months.
  
   
• 1 2021-12-03T21:46:41+00:00 Charles Wright arrested 26 plain 2024-01-18T22:14:35+00:00 Officer Phillips of the 28th Squad arrested Charles Wright, together with William Norris, for allegedly having "thrown an ashcan through the window" of the Lokos Clothes store at 2275 8th Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. There were no details of the time or circumstances of the arrests. The store was located just north of West 122nd Street, on the west side of 8th Avenue. Across the street, at 2275 8th Avenue, Max Newman was assaulted as he closed his grocery store at 10:30 PM. The men's arrest likely happened around the same time. Violence had begun intensifying away from 125th Street around half an hour earlier as more people left 125th Street. Sufficient police had arrived at 125th Street for some to be deployed on the avenues in response to that change. Phillips was likely among the first officers to arrive this far south on 8th Avenue. The only other reported incident around this intersection was not until after midnight, when someone on the street threw a rock that hit Patrolman Harry Whittington as he traveled on an emergency truck. That was too late for groups to be focused on breaking windows.
  
  
  
  Wright, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, was recorded as having "no home" in the 28th Precinct police blotter and the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, but with an address in Philadelphia in the Home News. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, and held him on bail of $500 (indicating that the value of the damage to the building was not more than $250, the level required for the charge to be a felony). The judges convicted him and on April 1st sentenced him to three months in the Workhouse. The prosecution of Norris followed the same process, with the same result. Phillips also arrested Arthur Davis, Herbert Hunter, and Elizabeth Tai.
  
  Pauline Lokos of 2275 8th Avenue was identified in the Home News as the owner of the store whose windows Wright allegedly broke. She was also recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when he appeared in court on March 20. Wright appeared in the lists of those arrested during the disorder published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, but the two lists differed in the charge made against him. The Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide included him among those charged with burglary, while the New York Evening Journal listed the charge against Wright as inciting a riot. The charge recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter was inciting a riot. In the Magistrates Court, the charge made was malicious mischief, recorded in the docket book and reported in the Home News. That change reflected a general practice of replacing the initial charge of riot made at the time of an arrest with a more specific charge that fit what police officers alleged an individual had done.
• 1 2021-12-08T18:54:47+00:00 Leon Mauraine arrested 26 plain 2024-01-27T23:51:49+00:00 At 12:05 A.M., Officer Anthony Barbaro of the 25th Precinct arrested Leon Mauraine, a twenty-two-year-old Black window washer, and David Smith, a twenty-two-year-old Black clerk, in front of 322 Lenox Avenue. Barbaro had been standing on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 126th Street when he saw a group of people gather in front of the Rex Drug store at 318 Lenox Avenue, according to the statement he gave in the Harlem Magistrates Court. He then allegedly heard two of the men, Mauraine and Smith, say, "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them." Those men then threw stones at the store windows, breaking them, after which they ran north on Lenox Avenue. Barbaro chased them, catching and arresting both men two buildings north of the drug store. As the drug store was on the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and West 126th Street, Barbaro must have been standing across 126th Street, on the southeast corner, as he would not have been able to hear the men or catch them so quickly from across the much wider Lenox Avenue. In the half hour after Barbaro arrested Mauraine and Smith, other police officers arrested two men for breaking windows near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, John Kennedy Jones at 333 Lenox Avenue and Bernard Smith at 317 Lenox Avenue. Multiple arrests by different officers indicates that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  
  
  Mauraine had lived for the last nine months at 52 West 128th Street, two blocks north and a block east of the store, according to his examination in the Magistrates Court. He may have been drawn to Lenox Avenue by the noise of windows being broken earlier in the disorder. While both he and Smith could have thrown stones at the windows, as Barbaro stated, it is unlikely they said exactly the same words. It may be that only one of the them urged on the group, or that they expressed similar sentiments that the officer chose to report in the same words (The Home News story about the proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court reported they had said "Come on. Let's bust some more windows," a difference in wording from the affidavit likely produced by a reporter's difficulty hearing what was said in the courtroom.) The list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, did distinguish the men in a way Barbaro's affidavit did not. Mauraine was listed among those charged with inciting a riot and Smith among those charged with malicious mischief, an offense which involved damaging property used in other cases involving broken windows. However, that distinction is not replicated in the 28th Precinct police blotter or in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded both men as charged with inciting a riot. So too did the story in the Home News about the proceedings in the court, which did not mention that Mauraine or Smith had broken the store windows, only what they had been "overheard saying to companions." A note on the Magistrates Court affidavit did, however, include malicious mischief alongside three sections of the riot law, indicating that both men faced both charges at some point in their prosecution.
  
  When Mauraine and Smith appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held them for the grand jury, on bail of $1,000. A week later, both men appeared before the grand jury, which transferred them to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. It is likely that the note on the Magistrates Court affidavit was the charges they faced in that court, malicious mischief (as the malicious mischief charge is not recorded in the docket book, Mauraine is not categorized as being charged with that offense) and the three misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot. Convicted in that court, on April 2, Mauraine and Smith received suspended sentences, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-20T20:47:07+00:00 Claudius Jones arrested 25 plain 2024-01-19T00:21:18+00:00 Sometime early in the disorder, Claudius Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black man who lived at 306 West 120th Street, was arrested. The two sources that mention Jones' alleged offense provide different descriptions. The note on the 28th Precinct police blotter described his offense as "Threw ash can in store window," whereas a story in the New York Herald Tribune that mentions his arraignment in the Night Court described Jones as "refusing to obey police order to move away from a Harlem corner.”
  
  
  
  Neither the charge brought against Jones nor the outcome of his prosecution help resolve that contradiction. Both the 28th Precinct police blotter and the story in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as lists of those arrested during the disorder in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York Evening Journal and the New York American agree that he was charged with disorderly conduct (the Daily News did not include a charge). Only the 28th Precinct police blotter and the New York Herald Tribune mention the outcome of the prosecution, agreeing that Magistrate Capshaw found Jones guilty and gave him a suspended sentence. Both the charge and the outcome were common for those arrested for breaking windows and refusing to move on.
  
  Arraignment in the Night Court, which opened at 8:00 PM and closed no earlier than 1:00 AM, suggests that Jones was arrested early in the disorder, and certainly before midnight, as the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the arraignment as occurring on March 19, and likely before 10:00 PM, given when the others arraigned on March 19 were arrested. Five individuals recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter as arraigned on March 19 were arrested before 10:10 PM: Margaret Mitchell, arrested around 5:00 PM; Claudio Viabolo, arrested around 6:45 PM; Paul Boyett, arrested around 9:00 PM; James Hughes, arrested around 10:00 PM; and Leroy Gillard, arrested around 10:10 PM. For four others, like Claudius Jones, there was no information on the time of their arrest: Louise Brown, William Jones, Rose Murrell, and Loyola Williams. Other sources show six other men were arrested before 10:00 PM: Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels (the two speakers arrested with Viabolo before that group), Daniel Miller, Harry Gordon, Frank Wells, and Leroy Brown, are missing from the transcript of the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:01:46+00:00 Henry Stewart arrested 25 plain 2024-01-25T22:24:42+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Henry Stewart, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for allegedly having thrown a bottle through a window in the meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, a story in the Home News reported. There was no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. The arrest may have taken place around 10:30 PM, when the disorder intensified and crowds spread from 125th Street along 8th Avenue, but more likely occurred later, around 11:00 PM, given how far north the store was located. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another man, Warren Johnson, and two women, Louise Brown and Rose Murrell, who, with Stewart, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. The broken window in 2422 8th Avenue was the northern-most report of disorder on 8th Avenue, on the block between 130th and 131st Streets, two and half blocks north of where the story reported Stewart's arrest. While the grocery store whose window Murell allegedly broke was located at that intersection, on the southeast corner of 127th Street, the location of Brown and Johnson's alleged offenses are not mentioned in any sources. The intersection may have been where police were stationed and where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest. The other reported broken windows and looting on 8th Avenue were south of 128th Street. Stewart lived at 268 West 132nd Street, east of 8th Avenue a block and a half north of the meat market, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  
  
  Henry Stewart was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge was reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal and the Daily News, and in a story in the Daily Mirror. However, malicious mischief was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on March 20, when Stewart appeared in court, and reported in the Home News story about those proceedings. Police appeared to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. The others arrested by Libman were all charged with malicious mischief, although Brown and Johnson later had that charge reduced to disorderly conduct, indicating a lack of evidence they had broken windows. Magistrate Renaud transferred Stewart to the Court of Special Sessions and set bail at $500. That decision meant that the value of the damage to the building was not more than $250, the level required for the charge to be a felony. On March 25, the judges in that court discharged Stewart, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. He was the only one of the six individuals tried for malicious mischief known to have been released (the outcome of three trials is unknown). Evidently police could not prove that Stewart had been a participant in the disorder rather than a spectator.
• 1 2021-08-18T21:11:39+00:00 James Hayes arrested 25 plain 2024-01-27T16:35:57+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Detective Balkin of the 5th Division arrested James Hayes, a sixteen-year-old Black youth, for allegedly taking a baseball bat from the window of a store at 2334 8th Avenue, according to a report of his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News. The name of the store is provided by the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded the complainant against Hayes as Wilbur Montgomery, living at 951 Woodycrest Avenue. Montgomery is identified in the 1933 City Directory as the manager of Danbury Shoes. He is also the complainant against another man arrested by Detective Balkin, likely at the same time, David Terry. There are no details of the circumstances of Terry's arrest, but the charge against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, malicious mischief, was made against those arrested in the disorder who had allegedly broken windows. The nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, only a few buildings from Kress' store, saw some of the earliest crowds and violence of the disorder, and a concentration of police, who sought to clear West 125th Street by pushing people on to the avenue. Windows were also broken in stores either side of Danbury Shoes, the branch of the Liggett drug store chain on the corner of West 125th Street, and a seafood restaurant at 2338 8th Avenue.
  
  James Hayes is named among those charged with burglary in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where the charge was recorded as petit larceny, not burglary. That charge did not require evidence that Hayes had entered the store to take the bat, as a charge of burglary did. While the 28th Precinct police plotter, which misspelled his name as Hazel, included a note that he "Broke store window," the different charge in court indicates that that information had been reassessed by the time of his arraignment. The Home News story reporting the court proceeding mentioned only that "he is said to have stolen a baseball bat from a store window." Magistrate Renaud transferred Hayes to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on $500 bail. The 28th Precinct police blotter is the only source for the outcome of that proceeding: a conviction and suspended sentence on April 1.
  
  The Home News story gave Hayes' age as seventeen years, while the blotter and the list in the New York Evening Journal gave his age as sixteen years (the list published in the Black newspapers did not include age or home address). The age in the Magistrates Court docket book is difficult to decipher, appearing to be "10," but is likely a hastily written "16." Hayes was one of the youngest arrested during the disorder, together with John Henry, also aged sixteen years. Hayes lived at 476 West 141st Street, on Black Harlem's northwest boundary, further from the location of his arrest than most of those caught in the disorder, who typically lived south of 125th Street or near Lenox Avenue south of 135th Street. 
  
  
• 1 2021-09-07T19:32:37+00:00 Louis Tonick arrested 25 plain 2024-01-28T05:30:34+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Cusberita [?] of the 28th Precinct arrested Louis Tonick, an eighteen-year-old white man who lived at 1052 Bryant Avenue in the Bronx. The charge against Tonick recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter was robbery, with the note "Robbed store during riot," while he was named as one of those charged with burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. Robbery required taking merchandise from someone, while burglary required taking merchandise from an unoccupied store. Tonick was also recorded as charged with robbery in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, with John Masdaym of 237 West 111st Street as the complainant and likely victim of the robbery. In this case, the address did appear to be Masdaym's residence, as there are no business identified on the street in the MCCH Business survey. There was no evidence of the location of the store in which the robbery took place.
  
  Tonick was one of only eight men identified as white arrested during the disorder; he and Jean Jacquelin were the only members of that group arrested for looting. His identity was recorded as white in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book and in the list published in the New York Evening Journal. Neither the 28th Precinct police blotter nor the the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide included information on an individual's race. While Jacquelin lived in Harlem, at 222 West 128th Street on the same block as the business he allegedly looted, Tonick lived in the Bronx, well beyond the neighborhood's boundaries.
  
  
  
  Tonick appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Like Edward Larry, the only other person charged with robbery after the disorder, Tonick was held without bail by Magistrate Renaud. The magistrate continued that custody when Tonick returned to court on March 25, and again on March 28. When Tonick appeared in court on April 1, Renaud dismissed the charges against him, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. That the Magistrate released Tonick indicates a lack of evidence rather than evidence only of taking merchandise or damaging a store, which would have resulted in reduced charges. In other cases it was the inability to locate a complainant that led to the discharge of defendants.
  
  While the docket book records the name as Tonick, the newspaper lists record it as Tunick, and the 28th Precinct police blotter as Tonisle (the later an error made when the blotter was transcribed for the MCCH). A man named Louis Tonick of the correct age appeared in census schedules in 1930 and 1940 living at different addresses in the Bronx. The child of Russian immigrants who worked as a fruit peddler, he lived with his parents and four siblings in 1930. By 1940, his three older sisters were no longer recorded in the household, which included only his parents, Louis and his (twin?) brother, and an uncle who also worked as a peddler. Tonick was unemployed at the time of that census and also when he registered for the draft in 1943.
• 1 2021-09-07T21:04:31+00:00 Loyola Williams arrested 25 plain 2024-01-28T05:39:00+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Loyola Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who lived at 301 West 130th Street, was arrested and charged with burglary. Williams' name appeared among those charged with burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list in the New York Evening Journal, which also included her age, race, and address. However, Williams did not appear in 28th Precinct police blotter, the 32nd Precinct police reports, or the docket book of either Magistrates court or any newspaper stories, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that she allegedly looted. That was also the case with nine men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their failure to appear in court could mean that police questioned and released them the next day.
  
  
  
  In the case of Loyola Williams, it was also possible that whoever compiled the list had confused her with another Black woman arrested during the disorder, Viola Woods, who was identified as Viola Williams in several sources. Both women were recorded as being twenty-eight-years of age and living at 301 West 130th Street. However, both Loyola Williams and Viola Williams appeared in the list published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, with Viola Williams charged with malicious mischief. Viola Williams also appeared in the 28th Precinct police blotter with the same age and address, and a note that recorded her alleged offense as using her umbrella to break a store window. However, when that woman appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book and stories about her two appearances in court in the New York Amsterdam News, Home News, and New York Times recorded her name as Viola Woods.
• 1 2021-08-30T21:01:15+00:00 Milton Ackerman arrested 25 plain 2024-01-28T18:23:02+00:00 Officer Brown of the 40th Precinct arrested Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, some time during the disorder. According to the Home News he had taken "several radios" from a store at 400 Lenox Avenue. By contrast, the New York Times, reported Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." Harry Lash was recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book, confirmation that Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location from which Ackerman allegedly took merchandise. Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store. There was no mention of where or when police arrested him. The attacks on Lash's store occurred from around 11:30 PM to 1:20 AM, likely interrupted around midnight when firefighters arrived to extinguish a fire lit in the storefront facing West 130th Street. Police officers would have converged on the store in response to the fire, so Ackerman was most likely arrested around midnight.
  
  
  
  Ackerman was named in the lists of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud had him held until March 25. When Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court the magistrate discharged him as the grand jury had indicted him in response to evidence presented as part of District Attorney Dodge's investigation. That proceeding was reported only in a story in the Home News. He was then rearrested and held on $1,000 bail. Three days later Ackerman appeared in the Court of General Sessions, an appearance reported only in the New York Times. Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released Ackerman. Neither that story nor the 28th Precinct police blotter provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
• 1 2022-01-07T19:57:38+00:00 John Hawkins arrested 24 plain 2024-01-27T18:13:02+00:00 Detective George Booker of the 28th Precinct arrested John Hawkins, a thirty-year-old Black man, for allegedly inciting a riot. There are no details of his alleged offenses or where or when Hawkins was arrested. Booker also arrested Horace Fowler during the disorder, for allegedly looting Nicholas Peet's tailor's shop at 2063 7th Avenue. Booker made no mention of a crowd or anyone else being involved in that alleged looting, so he likely arrested Hawkins at some other time and place. Hawkins lived at 2357 8th Avenue, between West 126th and West 127th Streets. He could have been part of the crowds around that block of 8th Avenue, where Theodore Hughes was arrested for allegedly looting the store directly opposite the building where Hawkins lived, Emmet Williams for breaking the window of that store, and Rose Murrell for breaking a window in the store at 2366 8th Avenue.
  
  
  
  In the 28th Precinct police blotter, the charge against Hawkins was recorded as inciting riot, which was also the charge under which he appeared in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. When he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, that was also the charge recorded in the docket book. However, the charge was later crossed out and "DISORDERLY CONDUCT" stamped in its place. That change had to have been made on March 20, as Magistrate Renaud convicted him that day and held him for investigation before sentencing. The offense of disorderly conduct did not involve being part of a group of three or more, as the offense of riot did, nor inciting others to threaten to, attempt to, or use violence against a person or property. Charging Hawkins with disorderly conduct thus likely indicated that police did not have evidence that he acted with or led a group of people; rather, that he had been part of a crowd on the street near attacks on property or people.
  
  When Hawkins returned to court on March 23, Renaud sentenced him to thirty days in the Workhouse. Stories in the Daily News, New York Times, New York Age, and Afro-American reported the sentencing. Three other men sentenced at the same time had been accused of breaking windows; the three newspapers other than the New York Times reported that Hawkins had also committed that offense, while that newspaper merely reported his sentence.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:00:50+00:00 Rose Murrell arrested 24 plain 2024-02-01T00:55:41+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, for allegedly having "stoned a store window," in the grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue, a story in the Home News reported. There is no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another woman, Louise Brown, and two men, Henry Stewart and Warren Johnson, who, with Murrell, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. While the grocery store was located at this intersection, on the southeast corner of 127th Street, the location of Brown and Johnson's alleged offenses are not mentioned in any sources, and the store in which Stewart allegedly broke a window was two and half blocks north of where the story reported his arrest. It is possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest.
  
  
  
  The grocery store at 2336 8th Avenue was in the midst of the blocks of 8th Avenue on which there are reports of violence and police making arrests during the disorder: the arrest of James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue near 125th Street; the arrest of Emmett Williams and Theodore Hughes for allegedly breaking windows and looting Frendel's meat market three buildings south at 2360 8th Avenue; the arrest of Thomas Babbitt for allegedly taking soap from Thomas Drug store at 2374 8th Avenue, across 127th Street; and at the very end of the disorder, the arrest of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street for allegedly looting and police shooting and killing James Thompson across 8th Avenue from the store. Murrell lived at 260 West 126th Street, just east of 8th Avenue a block south of the grocery store, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  Rose Murrell is recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is reported in a list in the Daily News and a story in the Daily Mirror. However, the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal include her among those charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows during the disorder. That was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on March 20, when Murrell appeared in court, and reported in the Home News story about those proceedings. Police appear to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Magistrate Renaud transferred Murrell to the Court of Special Sessions, and set bail at $500, indicating that the value of the damage to the building was not more than $250, the level required for the charge to be a felony. Almost two weeks later, on April 1st, the judges in that court convicted Murrell and sentenced her to one month in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  Murell's name is spelled in different ways in the sources: as Murrell in the 28th Precinct police blotter and Harlem Magistrates Court docket and book and the Daily News and New York Evening Journal; as Murelle in the Daily Mirror; as Murell in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and as Morrell in the Home News.
• 1 2021-11-13T19:11:50+00:00 Blumstein department store windows broken 24 plain 2024-05-29T15:58:20+00:00 At about 10:30 PM, a brick broke a window of the Blumstein department store at 230 West 125th Street, likely a large display window, as it caused $200 damage. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, throw the brick, and then shout "in a loud voice, 'Kill the cops, the dirty mother-fucking sons of bitches,' causing a large crowd to gather." By that time the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, as police established a perimeter around the block between 8th and 7th Avenues. Ten minutes after windows were broken in Blumstein's store, William Ford allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Kress' store several buildings to to the west and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumstein's, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Jones lived four blocks south, at 170 West 121st Street, close enough to where the disorder began to have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise, crowds, or rumors.
  
  
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Blumstein's department store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the W. T. Grant and McCrory's department stores were also included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The Blumstein department store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.
  
  Only the New York American included the address of the department store, which was one of the best-known businesses in Harlem. The Blumstein department store was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
  
  Claude Jones appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with inciting a riot. Remanded in custody, he was returned to the court a week later, when Magistrate Ford held him on $1,000 bail for the grand jury. On April 12, they sent Jones to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, likely to be tried for the offenses written in a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit, both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. Convicted by the judges in that court, Jones received a suspended sentence on April 16, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-08-31T19:14:13+00:00 Albert Bass arrested 23 plain 2024-01-11T22:42:57+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Officer Ferry of the 28th Precinct arrested Albert Bass, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man. He likely made the arrest in the vicinity of Lafayette Market at 2044 7th Avenue. Salvatore Marrone, with his address recorded as 2044 7th Avenue, was the complainant against Bass in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book. The windows of the market were smashed during the disorder and merchandise taken. Channing Tobias, who lived in an apartment above the market, reported hearing both smashing glass and gunshots between midnight and 1:00 AM, sounds that indicated both attacks on the business and the presence of police. It was likely that Bass was arrested during that period, perhaps around 12:30 AM when Fred Campbell also saw stores being attacked and police trying to disperse crowds in this area.
  
  Just what Bass allegedly did was uncertain. Both the list published in the New York Evening Journal and the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as burglary, with the blotter noting that he allegedly "In concert with others burglarized stores." However when Bass was arraigned in the Magistrate's Court he was charged with disorderly conduct. That charge suggested that police did not have evidence that he had broken windows, which would have seen him charged with malicious mischief, or that he had taken merchandise, which would have been the basis for the charge of burglary. Instead, the charge of disorderly conduct indicated that police had encountered Bass been on the street in the area of the looted store. That was not surprising as he lived only half a block west of the market, at 238 West 122nd Street. He likely had come to 7th Avenue to investigate the noise and disorder.
  
  
  
  Magistrate Renaud held Bass in custody until March 26. When he returned, the magistrated convicted him and fined him $25 or, if he did not pay the fine, sentenced him to five days in the workhouse, according to the docket book. The docket book and the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded that he paid the fine of $25.
  
  Bass was one of a small number of those listed as arrested in the New York Evening Journal not also present in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. The 28th Precinct police blotter misspelled his name as Boss; both the New York Evening Journal and the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book recorded his name as Bass.
• 1 2021-04-27T19:22:05+00:00 Amie Taylor arrested 23 plain 2024-01-11T23:53:59+00:00 Officer Harmon of the 18th Division arrested Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher, near Mario Pravia's candy store at 1953 7th Avenue around 11:30 PM. Harmon and at least one other police officer, Detective Harry Wolf of the 28th Precinct, reported seeing Taylor throw a stone at the store window and take merchandise from the window display. Wolf appeared as a witness on the Magistrates Court affidavit and an arresting officer with Harmon on Taylor's criminal record. Taylor was also not alone. "About 5 others" threw stones at the store and took merchandise at the same time, while Pravia and his wife watched from inside, but police managed to arrest only Taylor. Harmon allegedly found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at three cents each, in his possession. The Home News reported that a total of $200 of merchandise was taken from the store.
  
  The New York Evening Journal identified a different officer as making the arrest, Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, in a vignette within the paper’s narrative of the disorder:

  Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, in charge of all Manhattan detectives, figured in another incident in which police were forced to draw their revolvers, although no shot was fired. While speeding to the trouble zone, Ryan saw a group of men looting a store at 1952 Seventh ave. The detective chief, with his chauffeur, swung into action and attempted to round up the thieves. there was a terrific battle, but Ryan emerged from it with Amie Taylor, 21, as his prisoner.

  No other sources support that account. The story's framing of the incident in relation to the force used by police did direct attention to the unremarked upon means by which police made arrests. The New York Evening Journal was one of several white newspapers that claimed that police showed restraint in responding to the disorder, and did not shoot at crowds until the after midnight, when looting became widespread. If police drew their revolvers but did not fire them in this "terrific battle," they likely used the gun butts as clubs, as they are in several photographs taken during the disorder.
  
  Crowds had moved down 7th Avenue from West 125th Street around 10 PM. This event was the first this far south on the avenue. Taylor may have come from the opposite direction. He lived south of the store, at 1800 7th Avenue, next to Central Park, in an area home to Black, white, and Spanish speaking residents. Taylor's first name caused confusion about his identity. In the 28th Precinct police blotter, the name is "Annie," and he is identified as female, information likely responsible for Annie also being used in the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. While the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book identifies Taylor as male, the clerk recorded the name as Annie on his examination, and on the back of the Magistrates Court affidavit, where it is struck out and Amie written underneath.
  
  
  
  When Taylor appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with burglary, Magistrate Renaud remanded him to appear again on March 22. Reporters from the Home News, New York Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker were in court when Taylor appeared again; the Daily Worker somehow misreported his name as Annie. Renaud sent Taylor to the grand jury, who on April 3 transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, which as it adjudicated misdemeanors, means they must have reduced the charge from burglary to an offense such as unlawful entry or petit larceny. Two weeks later, on April 17, the judges acquitted Taylor, according to the police blotter. Given the low value of what Taylor allegedly stole — a total of 54c — it would not have been surprising to see him receive a minor punishment; but to acquit him the judges would have had to find fault with the evidence against him provided by Officer Harmon and Detective Wolf. The sources are silent on what alternative account of events Taylor offered, but others arrested in the disorder claimed to have been bystanders mistakenly grabbed by police trying to pick offenders out of crowds. It could also be that prosecutors could not prove that the chewing gum found on Taylor had been taken from the store; it was a common enough item, in a large but not inexplicable quantity, that he could have obtained it legitimately elsewhere.
• 1 2021-08-22T20:58:43+00:00 Thomas Babbitt arrested 23 plain 2024-02-02T22:49:58+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Detective Balkin of the 5th Division arrested Thomas Babbitt, a forty-two-year-old Black man, for allegedly taking two cases of soap from the window of the Thomas Cut Rate Drug store at 2374 8th Avenue, on the northeast corner of West 127th Street. Babbitt is not alleged to have smashed the window. A Home News report of his appearance in the Magistrates Court described Babbitt as having "stolen two cases of soap from a drug store window"; the 28th Precinct police blotter focused on the means he allegedly used, that he "Put hand though Window. Stole merchandise." Balkin also appears in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book as the officer who arrested James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store two blocks to the south, near 125th Street, some time during the disorder. Babbitt lived at 321 West 136th Street, a block west of 8th Avenue, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  
  
  Babbitt is among those listed as being charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with petit larceny, not burglary. That change was likely made because of a lack of evidence he had broken into the store and entered it to steal merchandise, and because the allegedly stolen merchandise had a value of less than $100, the requirement for a felony grand larceny charge. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, holding him on bail of $500. His trial and conviction occurred sooner than was the case with most of those arrested in the disorder sent to that court. On March 22, Babbitt was sentenced to ten days in the Workhouse, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  The man arrested during the disorder may be the Thomas Babbitt, who a census enumerator found at 108 West 133rd Street on April 8, 1940. That man was the same age, and had been in Harlem in 1935. Born in Massachusetts, he was working on a farm in Williamsburg, South Carolina in 1917 when he registered for the draft. After serving in France in World War One, he was transported back to Hoboken, New Jersey in 1919, after which he appears to have made his home in New York City. In 1940, he listed his occupation as a junk dealer.
• 1 2021-12-03T21:46:21+00:00 William Norris arrested 23 plain 2024-02-03T18:11:10+00:00 Officer Phillips of the 28th Squad arrested William Norris, together with Charles Wright, for allegedly having "thrown an ashcan through the window" of the Lokos Clothes store at 2275 8th Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. There are no details of the time or circumstances of the arrests. The store was located just north of West 122nd Street, on the west side of 8th Avenue. Across the street, at 2275 8th Avenue, Max Newman was assaulted as he closed his grocery store at 10:30 PM. The men's arrest likely happened around the same time. Violence had begun intensifying away from 125th Street around half an hour earlier the store as more people left 125th Street. Sufficient police had arrived at the Kress store for some to be deployed on the avenues in response to that change. Phillips was likely among the first officers to arrive this far south on 8th Avenue. The only other reported incident around this intersection was not until after midnight, when someone on the street threw a rock that hit Patrolman Harry Whittington as he traveled on an emergency truck. That was too late for groups to be focused on breaking windows.
  
  
  
  Norris, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, was recorded as residing at 201 West 122nd Street in all the records of his arrest, only a block east of the clothing store. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, and held him on bail of $500. His decision indicated that the value of the damage to the building was less than the $250 required for the charge to be a felony. The judges in the Court of Special Sessions convicted him, and on April 1st sentenced him to three months in the Workhouse. The prosecution of Wright followed the same process and brought the same result. Phillips was also the arresting officer of three other individuals, Arthur Davis, Herbert Hunter, and Elizabeth Tai.
  
  Pauline Lokos of 2275 8th Avenue was identified as the owner of the store whose windows Norris allegedly broke in the Home News and recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when he appeared in court on March 20. Norris appeared in the lists of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and in the New York Evening Journal, but the two lists differed in the charge made against him. The Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide included him among those charged with burglary, while the New York Evening Journal and the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge as inciting a riot. That offense appeared to be the charge initially made against many of those arrested during the disorder. The charge malicious mischief made in the Magistrates Court was recorded in the docket book and reported in the Home News. That change reflected a general practice of replacing the initial charge of riot made at the time of an arrest with a more specific charge that fit what police officers alleged an individual had done.
• 1 2021-09-07T15:18:04+00:00 Frederick Harwell arrested 22 plain 2024-01-24T19:48:56+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Murphy arrested Frederick Harwell, a nineteen-year-old Black man, for allegedly having "Burglarised store during riot," according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. There was no evidence identifying the store. Harwell appeared in the list of the names of those arrested for burglary in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the list in the New York Evening Journal, which added his age and home address. No complainant was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. Harwell lived at 2075 8th Avenue, between West 137th and West 138th Street.
  
  
  
  Harwell appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, and was held on bail of $1,000. He was one of only eighteen of those who appeared in court represented by a lawyer, E. D. Watson of 2297 7th Avenue. With an office in the heart of Harlem, Watson was likely a Black lawyer; no other information could be found about him. When he returned to the court on March 22, the clerk crossed out the charge of burglary in the docket book and wrote "Red[uced] to Pet[it] Larceny," recording a decision the prosecutor would have made, and Magistrate Renaud sent Harwell to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, reducing his bail to $500. The amended charge suggests that police did not have evidence that Harwell had broken into a store, only evidence that he had taken merchandise. Almost two months later, on May 13, the magistrates in that court released Harwell, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. That outcome indicated a lack of evidence against Harwell; commonly that resulted from a failure to locate a witness.
  
  The docket book and newspaper lists recorded the name as Harwell; the blotter recorded it as Horwell. The 28th Precinct police blotter had his address at 2578 8th Avenue; the New York Evening Journal had him living at 2175 8th Avenue.
• 1 2021-12-02T17:25:14+00:00 James Bright arrested 22 plain 2024-01-27T16:30:48+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Perretti of the 6th Division arrested James Bright, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, for allegedly breaking windows in the drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of 127th Street. Perretti likely arrested a second man, Arthur Bennett, also a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, at the same time, also for breaking the store's windows. There was no information on the circumstances of the arrests. Police had arrested Julian Rogers for breaking windows in William Gindin's store a few buildings to the south around 11:20 PM, so officers likely arrested Bright and Bennett soon after, around 11:30 PM. Late in the disorder, other officers made arrests for alleged looting at Frank De Thomas' candy store next to the drug store on West 127th Street and at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store two buildings north on Lenox Avenue. Bright did not live close to the store, but five blocks north, at 44 West 133rd Street. He could have made his way down Lenox Avenue as part of one of the groups moving through the area attacking businesses or as a spectator following the crowds.
  
  
  
  A story in the Home News was the only evidence that connected Bright, and Arthur Bennett, to 339 Lenox Avenue. Bright appeared in lists of those charged with disorderly conduct published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Inexplicably, the 28th Precinct police blotter records "Annoyed pedestrians" as the charge against him; no one else arrested during the disorder other than Bennett was charged with that offense. Bright appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with disorderly conduct, with Detective Perretti recorded in the docket book as the arresting officer. Bright had allegedly thrown "stones through the window of the store at 339 Lenox Ave.," according to the Home News story on those proceedings. However, if police had evidence of such an attack Bright would have been charged with malicious mischief. Charging him instead with disorderly conduct generally indicated that they only had evidence that he had been in the crowd around the store when the windows were broken. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bright of disorderly conduct. He returned to the court for sentencing on March 23, and received a term of one month in the Workhouse "for breaking windows" from Magistrate Renaud in proceedings reported in the Afro-American, New York Age, Daily News, and New York Times. None of those stories gave an address for the store whose windows Bright had allegedly broken.
• 1 2021-04-13T20:44:01+00:00 Henry Goodwin arrested 22 plain 2024-02-12T19:58:58+00:00 Officer Le Sage of the 76th Precinct arrested Henry Goodwin, a thirty-one-year-old Black man, who was charged with burglary. There was no evidence of the timing or details of the arrest or his alleged crime, as the only sources in which Goodwin appeared are the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book and the 28th Precinct police blotter. Goodwin was not in the lists of those arrested published in either the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide or the New York Evening News, perhaps because he was arrested after they were compiled. He did not appear in court until March 21, one of only seven arrested during the disorder who was not arraigned on March 20.
  
  Benjamin Zelvin was recorded as the complainant against Goodwin in the docket book. He owned a jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue that suffered extensive looting in the hours after 11:30 PM, when he closed the store. All the windows were broken by 2:15AM, when Officer Astel arrived there with Oscar Leacock and John Henry, whom he claimed had admitted taking goods from the store when he had arrested them several blocks south of the store. Those men allegedly had about $75 of goods in their possession when arrested, according to Zelvin's Magistrate's Court affidavit. When Zelvin joined other merchants in suing the city for losses suffered in the disorder, the World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2,685 in damages. Goodwin was likely to have taken some of the additional missing merchandise. If so, he had traveled some distance from his home at 17 East 119th Street, below Mt. Morris Park, ten blocks south of Zelvin's store.
  
  If Goodwin did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they apparently were of little value. Charged with burglary when he first appeared in court, Goodwin was held on bail, and then returned to court the next day, March 22. At that time the charge against him was reduced to petit larceny, and Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, to be tried for a misdemeanor. The police blotter records that on March 28 the judges convicted him and sentenced him to six months in the workhouse.
• 1 2021-12-15T19:44:40+00:00 Grocery store window broken 22 plain 2024-05-29T16:12:16+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, the windows of the grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue, on the southeast corner of 127th Street, were broken. Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, for allegedly having "stoned a store window," a story in the Home News reported. There is no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another woman, Louise Brown, and two men, Henry Stewart and Warren Johnson, who, with Murrell, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. The store was in the midst of the blocks of 8th Avenue on which there are reports of violence and police making arrests during the disorder: the arrest of James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue near 125th Street; the arrest of Emmett Williams and Theodore Hughes for allegedly breaking windows and looting Frendel's meat market three buildings south at 2360 8th Avenue; the arrest of Thomas Babbitt for allegedly taking soap from Thomas Drug store at 2374 8th Avenue, just across 127th Street; and at the very end of the disorder, the arrest of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street for allegedly looting and police shooting and killing James Thompson across 8th Avenue from the store.
  
  
  
  Rose Murrell appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows during the disorder. Magistrate Renaud transferred her to the Court of Special Sessions, and set bail at $500. Almost two weeks later, on April 1st, the judges in that court convicted Murrell, and sentenced her to one month in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  A white-owned grocery store was recorded at 2366 8th Avenue in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935. The Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941 shows a grocery store at that address.
• 1 2021-05-19T01:53:41+00:00 Frank DeThomas' candy store looted 22 plain 2024-05-31T01:38:12+00:00 Around 9:55 PM, Frank DeThomas closed and locked his candy store at 101 West 127th Street, at the rear of 339 Lenox Avenue, he told the Magistrate's Court, and likely headed to his home in White Plains. Crowds appeared on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street not long after DeThomas left. Sometime during the violence that spanned the blocks as far north as West 134th Street, the windows of DeThomas' store were broken. Later, at about 2:45 AM, Officer William Leahy of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw Joseph Wade, a twenty-four-year-old Black "candy boy" coming out of the store. Leahy arrested him and found several toy pistols worth sixty cents in Wade's possession, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, or $70 of goods, according to later reports of Wade's sentencing in the New York Age and New York Times. Wade lived at 148 West 127th Street near the other end of the block of West 127th Street on which the store was located.
  
  Wade was clearly not the only person to have looted the store as DeThomas filed a claim for $745.25 in damages. DeThomas was among the twenty white store-owners who filed claims for damages from the city for failing to protect their businesses identified in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News. By the time the city comptroller heard testimony from those bringing suits, 106 owners had sought damages. DeThomas was not among those whose testimony appeared in newspaper stories about that proceeding nor did he appear in any of the trials to resolve the claims. The claim for $745.25 in losses was just above the median reported claim of $733. The city lost the court cases, so DeThomas likely was awarded a small amount of damages. It was not clear if he was able to remain in business. The MCCH business survey did not include any businesses at 101 West 127th Street in the second half of 1935. The Tax Department photograph of the address taken between 1939 and 1941 showed a business, but the angle and distance did not allow any details of the store to be identified.
  
  
  
  Wade appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud ordered him held for the grand jury without bail. While few of those charged after the disorder were denied bail, Wade had been convicted three times since 1926, including once for unlawful entry resulting from a charge of burglary. The grand jury indicted him for burglary on March 22. Five days later, he appeared in the Court of General Sessions having agreed to plead guilty to the lesser offense of petit larceny. Almost all those indicted for looting agreed to such plea bargains. On April 8, Judge Donnellan sentenced him to six months in the Workhouse, a decision reported in the press as well as recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-02T17:24:56+00:00 Arthur Bennett arrested 21 plain 2024-02-13T21:32:03+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Perretti of the 6th Division arrested Arthur Bennett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, for allegedly breaking windows in the drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of 127th Street. Perretti likely arrested a second man, James Bright, also a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, at the same time, also for breaking the store's windows. There was no information on the circumstances of the arrests. Police had arrested Julian Rogers for looting William Gindin's store a few buildings to the south around 11:20 PM, so officers likely arrested Bright and Bennett soon after, around 11:30 PM. Late in the disorder, other officers made arrests for alleged looting at Frank De Thomas' candy store next to the drug store on West 127th Street and at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store two buildings north on Lenox Avenue. Bennett did not live close to the store, but eight blocks south, at 48 West 119th Street.
  
  
  
  A story in the Home News was the only evidence that connected Bennett and James Bright to 339 Lenox Avenue. Bennett appeared in lists of those charged with disorderly conduct published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Inexplicably, the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded "Annoyed pedestrians" as the charge against him; no one else arrested during the disorder other than Bright was charged with that offense. Bennett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with disorderly conduct, with Detective Perretti recorded in the docket book as the arresting officer. He alleged that Bennett had thrown "stones through the window of the store at 339 Lenox Ave.," according to the Home News story on those proceedings. However, if police had evidence of such an attack Bright would have been charged with malicious mischief. Charging him instead with disorderly conduct generally indicated that they only had evidence that he had been in the crowd around the store when the windows were broken. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bennett of disorderly conduct. He returned to the court for sentencing on March 23, and received a term of one month in the workhouse "for breaking windows" from Magistrate Renaud in proceedings reported in the Afro-American, New York Age, New York Daily News, and New York Times. None of those stories gave an address for the store whose windows Bennett had allegedly broken.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:01:28+00:00 Louise Brown arrested 20 plain 2024-01-28T05:32:22+00:00 Sometime during the riot, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Louise Brown, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman. There was no information on Brown's alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. The arrest likely took place around 10:30 PM or 11:00 PM, when the disorder intensified and crowds spread from 125th Street along 8th Avenue. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another woman, Rose Murrell, and two men, Henry Stewart and Warren Johnson, who, with Brown, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. Murrell and Stewart were alleged to have broken windows in two different stores, Murrell at 2366 8th Avenue and Stewart at 2422 8th Avenue. Brown and Johnson were also arrested for breaking windows, based on the charge against them, malicious mischief according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. An offense involving damage to property, malicious mischief was used by prosecutors after the disorder only against individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows. Brown has been treated as having been arrested for breaking windows on the basis of that charge even though there are no details of her alleged act.
  
  While the story in the Daily Mirror suggested Brown and Johnson had been arrested at the intersection, so likely had allegedly broken windows nearby, the store in which Stewart allegedly broke a window was two and half blocks north of where the story reported his arrest. It was possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, so where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest. Brown lived at 251 West 128th Street, just east of 8th Avenue, a block north of where she was reported arrested, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  
  
  Louise Brown was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge was reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal and in the Daily News, as well as in the story in the Daily Mirror. Police appeared to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Prosecutors had changed the charge against Brown to malicious mischief by the time she appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held Brown in custody until March 25, on bail of $500. When she was returned to court, the charge against Brown was reduced to disorderly conduct, malicious mischief crossed out in the docket book, "Red." written above it, and "DISORDERLY CONDUCT" stamped in its place. That change, to a lesser offense that did not involve damage to property, likely indicated a lack of evidence that Brown had broken a window. Instead, she was likely part of a crowd in the vicinity of the damaged store, arrested either by mistake or to get her off the street as part of police efforts to disperse the crowd. Disorderly conduct was an offense that could be adjudicated by a magistrate, unlike malicious mischief which would have been referred to another court. Magistrate Ford convicted Brown and gave her a suspended sentence. Warren Johnson, arrested with her and prosecuted in the same way, also received a suspended sentence.
• 1 2021-09-01T12:13:14+00:00 Nelson Brock arrested 19 plain 2024-01-28T19:20:19+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Redmond of the 28th Precinct arrested Nelson Brock, a thirty-two-year-old Black man, likely near 1974 7th Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 119th Street. Redmond charged Brock with burglary, with the note "Burglarized store during riot" recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. There were no details of circumstances of the arrest in other sources. Redmond arrested two other Black men, Reginald Mills and William Grant, for burglary of the same location, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. Brock and Mills were also identified as having been charged with inciting a riot in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide (but not the list in the New York Evening Journal). That charge required others to have been involved in the looting, and suggests that police alleged Brock and Mills had somehow led the group to attack the store. However, burglary was the only charge brought against them in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
  
  The address recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for James Marshall, the complainant in the prosecutions against the three Black men, was likely the location of the looted store. Although that column of the docket book was headed "Residence," clerks commonly put the address related to the charge in that space rather than the home of the complainant. A branch of the white-owned James Butler Food Market chain occupied that location between 1939 and 1941 when the Tax Department photograph was taken, and was likely there at the time of the disorder as chain stores were an established part of the neighborhood's business landscape. (That side of the street is missing from the MCCH business survey conducted in the second half of 1935). Brock lived at 219 West 121st Street, just west of 7th Avenue two blocks north of 1974 7th Avenue. He could have been drawn to the street by the noise and crowds on 7th Avenue after 10:00 PM.
  
  
  
  Brock, Mills, and Grant appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud remanded them in custody. When they were returned to court on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged them as the grand jury had already indicted them, in response to evidence presented as part of District Attorney Dodge's investigation of the the disorder, and then held them on $1,000 bail. No records mentioned the outcome of those prosecutions. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only the discharge on March 25.
• 1 2021-12-12T03:19:41+00:00 David Terry arrested 19 plain 2024-02-13T19:07:03+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Detective Balkin of the 5th Division arrested David Terry, a twenty-four-year-old homeless Black man. Wilbur Montgomery, living at 951 Woodycrest Avenue, recorded as the complainant against Terry in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, was identified in the 1933 City Directory as the manager of Danbury Hats, at 2334 8th Avenue. The nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, only a few buildings from Kress' store, saw some of the earliest crowds and violence of the disorder, and a concentration of police, who sought to clear West 125th Street by pushing people on to the avenue. Windows were also broken in stores on either side of Danbury Hats, the branch of the Liggett drug store chain on the corner of West 125th Street, and a seafood restaurant at 2338 8th Avenue. Montgomery was also the complainant against another man arrested by Detective Balkin, likely at the same time, James Hayes.
  
  
  
  There were no details of the circumstances of Terry's arrest, but the charge against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, malicious mischief, was made against those arrested in the disorder who had allegedly broken windows. Hayes had allegedly taken a baseball bat from the hat store, according to a story about his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News, which gave only the address of the store. Police appeared to have initially charged Hayes with breaking a window as well as taking the bat. He appeared in the 28th Precinct police blotter, his name misrecorded as Hazel, with the note "Broke store window, burglarized store." In line with that entry, Hayes was among those charged with burglary in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, when Hayes appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge was recorded as petit larceny, not burglary. That charge did not require evidence of breaking in and entering a store as burglary did, indicating a reassessment of the information in the blotter by the time of his arraignment. Given that the arrests came in response to attempts to take merchandise, they likely occurred after 11:00 PM, when businesses in the area had already been damaged, when incidents of looting became more frequent
  
  Instead, it appeared that it was Terry who police alleged had broken the hat store windows, as he was charged in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud held Terry in custody so his case could be investigated. When he was returned to court on March 26, the charge against him was reduced to disorderly conduct, the previous charge crossed out in the docket book, "Red. to" written above it, and the new charge stamped in its place. That change likely indicates a lack of evidence that Terry had broken windows. Instead, he would have been among those on the street around the store when the window was broken. Police may have mistaken him for the person who broke the window or have arrested him to get him off the street as part of their efforts to restore order. It was that reduced charge of disorderly conduct that appeared as the charge against Terry in lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. A different charge recorded against him in the 28th Precinct police blotter, inciting a riot, appeared to have frequently been used by police as the initial charge against those arrested during the disorder, and was often replaced by other charges in the Magistrates Court. Disorderly conduct was a charge that magistrates had the power to adjudicate. Magistrate Ford convicted Terry and fined him $500 or five days in the Workhouse. Terry served the time in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
   
• 1 2020-10-22T02:20:21+00:00 Joseph Moore arrested 18 plain 2024-01-27T21:36:58+00:00 Around 1:50 AM, Patrolman Louis Frikser arrested Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, on the Third Avenue Bridge, which connected the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Frikser charged that Moore had been part of a group of men who had entered Harry Lash's 5 & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, five blocks west of the bridge on the corner of West 130th Street, and stolen goods. None of the reports of this case detail what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Moore was likely returning home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx.
  
  
  
  "A few minutes" earlier Frikser had observed Arnold Ford, a nineteen-year-old Black man, "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation of Ford. Ford was also likely going home; he lived in a building next to Moore's residence, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large; it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted he had stolen goods from Harry Lash's 5 & 10c store, joining others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise," but denying breaking the store windows. But Ford did not know Moore, according to a note in the Preliminary Investigation in his Probation Department file.
  
  Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one-third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  While the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against Moore as "Acc'd stolen goods during the riot" not "Burglarized store during riot" as in Ford's case, police charged both Moore and Ford with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. The first charge suggested Moore had not obtained whatever goods he had allegedly stolen directly from the store, a version of events not mentioned anywhere else. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried together in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Moore was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared for him (that story made no mention of Ford, who pled guilty to petit larceny). The story gave no indication of the basis of the successful defense, noting only that the attorneys "had riddled the framed-up case against the worker." The involvement of the ILD suggests Moore may have had ties to the Communist party; the only others arrested during the disorder they represented were the men who picketed Kress' store.
  
  Moore (and Ford) appear in newspaper reports only in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, a list published in the New York Evening Journal, and stories in the Home News and New York Sun. The Home News story included brief summaries of the charges made in the Magistrates Court; in this case, it grouped Moore and Ford together, arrested at the same time for looting the same store, but confused the $1,000 of goods stolen reported by Lash in his affidavit before the Magistrates Court for what the men were found carrying, also mistakenly identifying it as clothing. The New York Sun likewise mistakenly alleged the men had stolen $1000 of property, but did correctly identify those goods as "general merchandise," in reporting the men's pleas in the Court of General Sessions, and those of four others charged with third degree burglary, on March 25, after their indictment by the grand jury on March 22.
  
  Moore had arrived in the United States from Barbados in 1917, perhaps initially living in Pennsylvania, as the 1930 Census reported his eldest daughter had been born there around 1920. By around 1926, he and his family were in New York City, as another daughter is listed as having been born there. In 1930, the census enumerator recorded Moore living in an apartment at 213 West 142nd Street with his wife Olive, three daughters, and a son, and working as a carpenter for building contractors, but unemployed at that time, April 3. At some point between 1930 and his arrest in 1935 the family relocated to the Bronx, and were still at the same address when a census enumerator called on April 2, 1940. Moore's eldest daughter, twenty years old by this time, is not part of the household, but Moore and his wife had two more children, both boys. Still working as a carpenter, Moore was now employed by the Parks Department.
• 1 2021-08-31T16:32:04+00:00 Oscar Austin arrested 18 plain 2024-01-28T21:49:00+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, an officer from the 28th Precinct arrested Oscar Austin, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man (the clerk's handwriting in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book is too messy to decipher the officer's name). The arrest likely occurred near the Romanoff Drug Store at 375 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 129th Street. J. Romanoff of 375 Lenox Avenue was recorded as the complainant when Austin was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
  
  Just what Austin allegedly did is uncertain. He appeared among those listed as being arrested for burglary, the charge used in cases of alleged looting, in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as attempted burglary, suggesting that he was not arrested with any merchandise in his possession. In the Magistrate's Court, Austin was charged with disorderly conduct. Such a change suggests that police did not have evidence that he had either broken windows or taken any merchandise. Instead, a charge of disorderly conduct suggested he had been in the crowds around the store when it was looted and clashed in some way with police. However, Magistrate Renaud acquitted Austin, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. Renaud's verdict indicated Austin was a spectator, perhaps arrested as part of police efforts to disperse crowds on the street. The Romanoff Drug store was located in the midst of the area of Lenox Avenue that saw multiple arrests and reports of looting and violence, likely after midnight, noise and disorder that could have drawn Austin to the street. He lived relatively close to the store, at 204 West 128th Street, just west of 7th Avenue.
  
  
  
  J. Romanoff was also the complainant in the cases of two twenty-four-year-old Black men, Jacob Bonaparte and Sam Nicholas arrested by the same police officer, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. Their prosecution followed the same pattern as that of Austin, ending in acquittal. Bonaparte lived even closer to the store than Austin, at 123 West 128th Street, midway down the block between Lenox and 7th Avenues, while Nicholas lived further away, on West 124th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.
• 1 2021-12-21T20:46:19+00:00 William Jones arrested 18 plain 2024-02-03T17:41:09+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Patrolman Murphy of the 28th Precinct arrested William Jones, a twenty-five-year-old Black man. There is no information on Jones' alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. He was charged with malicious mischief, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. An offense involving damage to property, malicious mischief was used by prosecutors after the disorder only against individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows, so Jones has been treated as having been arrested on that charge, even though there are no details of his alleged act. Jones lived at 38 West 129th Street.
  
  
  
  William Jones is recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Police appear to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Prosecutors had changed the charge against Jones to malicious mischief by the time he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held Brown in custody until March 22, on bail of $1,000. When he was returned to court, the charge against Jones was reduced to a misdemeanor, "Red. to Misd." written above the original charge in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. That change would have reflected information on the value of the window that Jones allegedly broke: it had to be more than $250 for Jones to be charged with felony malicious mischief. Magistrate Ford then transferred Jones to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. On March 28 the three judges of that court convicted Jones and gave him a suspended sentence according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. The others convicted of malicious mischief, three men and one woman, received terms of one month or three months in the Workhouse.
• 1 2021-12-08T21:40:57+00:00 William Gindin's shoe store windows broken 18 plain 2024-05-29T17:41:26+00:00 At 12:30 AM Patrolman James Lamattina saw a "large number" of people gathered in front of William's Shoe store at at 333 Lenox Avenue. Then John Kennedy Jones "motioning with his hand, said to the others 'come on,' and threw a rock that broke the plate glass window" of the store, Lamattina alleged in his Magistrates Court affidavit. Other people in the crowd also threw "stones and sticks" at the window. Lamattina arrested Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black laborer, likely after having to pursue him. No other members of the crowd were arrested. Groups of people broke windows in at least two other nearby stores in the preceding half hour. About fifteen minutes before this alleged attack on the shoe store, a group of about thirty people had broken windows in a restaurant at 317 Lenox Avenue, a block to the south, where a police officer arrested one man. Ten minutes before that arrest, about 12:05 AM, another group had broken windows in the store across the street at 318 Lenox Avenue, where a police officer arrested two men.
  
  Just over an hour earlier, at 11:20 PM, Patrolman Nador Herrman allegedly saw Julian Rogers, a thirty-seven-year-old Black auto washer, kick in one of the store's display windows, take three odd women's shoes worth $1 each, and put them under his jacket. Herrman arrested Rogers about 100 feet from the store. William's Shoe store had been a target before Roger's arrest. One display window was already smashed and a large quantity of merchandise stolen, according to Patrolman Herrman. The multiple attacks combined to do significant damage. Both display windows were smashed and emptied of their contents in the photograph of the store published in the New York World Telegram. Merchandise scattered on the street is also visible. Gindin told a Probation Department investigator that shoes valued at $1,200 were stolen during the disorder.
  
  
  
  Gindin was one of the twenty white business owners that the New York Sun identified as suing the city for failing to protect their stores; he claimed $1,273.89 in damages, well above the median reported claim of $733. By the time the city comptroller heard testimony from those bringing suit, 106 owners had sought damages. Gindin is not among those whose testimony appears in newspaper stories about that proceeding, and he is not one of those whose cases went to trial to test the claims. The city lost the test cases, so Gindin likely was awarded some amount of damages. Whatever the award, Gindin was able to remain in business. William's Shoe Store appears in the MCCH business survey from the second half of 1935, and Gindin still owned and operated the store when he registered for the draft in 1942.
  
  Born in Russia in 1894, Gindin was resident in New York City at least by 1917, when he registered for the draft. By 1930, Gindin owned the shoe store, and was one of a small number of white business owners who resided in Harlem. According to the federal census schedule, he lived a block north of his store, at 363 Lenox Avenue. Unusually, all six of the other apartments in that building had white residents, including three households headed by men who owned stores in Harlem later looted during the disorder who joined Gindin in suing the city, Irving Stekin, Jacob Saloway, and Michael D'Agostino. In 1935, Gindin lived at 346 Lenox Avenue, where he would have been a neighbor of Herman Young, who lived above a hardware he owned at that address that was also looted during the disorder. While Young and his wife went to his store when they heard glass smashing and witnessed the looting, Gindin apparently did not head to his store during the disorder. The Magistrates Court affidavit specified that no one was in the store when Rogers stole the shoes. By 1942, while still in business in Harlem, Gindin had moved to the Upper West Side, according to his draft registration.
  
  Jones was also arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with riot according to the docket book, for leading others in the crowd to attack the store. Crossed out is an additional charge of malicious mischief, for damage to the store window; that charge does appear on the Magistrate Court affidavit, in a handwritten note that also lists the forms of riot being charged. Magistrate Renaud held Jones for the grand jury and set bail at $1,000. On March 27, when he appeared before the grand jury, they transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on misdemeanor forms of the charges. The judges convicted Jones on April 1 and gave him a suspended sentence, recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-09-01T12:03:37+00:00 Butler's Food Market looted 18 plain 2024-05-29T21:53:04+00:00 A business at 1974 7th Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 119th Street, was looted sometime in the disorder. A branch of the white-owned James Butler Food Market chain occupied that location at the time between 1939 and 1941 that the Tax Department photograph was taken, and was likely there at the time of the disorder, as chain stores were an established part of the neighborhood's business landscape. (That side of the street is missing from the MCCH Business Survey conducted in the second half of 1935.) There were seven branches of the Butler Food Market chain, and nine branches of the white-owned A & P grocery store chain, in the MCCH Business survey from the second half of 1935. While most of the reported looting on 7th Avenue occurred in the blocks closer to West 125th Street, a shoe repair store on the corner diagonally opposite was also reported looted during the disorder, as was a candy store on the intersection to the south of this business. The grocery store was likely attacked and looted around the same time as those two businesses, soon after midnight.
  
  
  
  The address was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book as that of James Marshall, the complainant in prosecutions against three Black men, Nelson Brock, Reginald Mills, and William Grant, all charged with burglary. The docket book also identified Officer Redmond of the 28th Precinct as having arrested all three men. Multiple arrests at the same location were rare during the disorder. Brock, Mills, and Grant appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with burglary. Magistrate Renaud remanded them in custody. When they were returned to court on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged them so they could be rearrested as they had already been indicted by Dodge's grand jury, and then held them on $1,000 bail. No further records mentioned the outcome of those prosecutions. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only the discharge on March 25.
• 1 2021-08-31T16:33:51+00:00 Jacob Bonaparte arrested 17 plain 2024-01-27T16:23:17+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, an officer from the 28th Precinct arrested Jacob Bonaparte, a twenty-four-year-old Black man (the clerk's handwriting in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book is too messy to decipher the officer's name). The arrest likely occurred near the Romanoff Drug Store at 375 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 129th Street. J. Romanoff of that address is recorded as the complainant when Bonaparte is arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
  
  Just what Bonaparte allegedly did is uncertain. He appeared among those listed as being arrested for burglary, the charge used in cases of alleged looting, in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as attempted burglary, suggesting that he was not arrested with any merchandise in his possession. In the Magistrate's Court, Bonaparte was charged with disorderly conduct, an offense that did not include attempting to take proprty. Instead, that charge suggested he had been in the crowds around the store when it was looted and clashed in some way with police. However, Magistrate Renaud acquitted Bonparte, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. Renaud's verdict indicated Bonaparte was a spectator, perhaps arrested as part of police efforts to disperse crowds on the street. The Romanoff Drug store was located in the midst of the area of Lenox Avenue that saw multiple arrests and reports of looting and violence, likely after midnight. Bonaparte may have been among the crowds drawn to the street by the noise. He lived 123 West 128th Street, midway down the block between Lenox and 7th Avenues, relatively close to the store.
  
  
  
  J. Romanoff was also the complainant in the case of Oscar Austin, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, and Sam Nicholas, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, both arrested by the same police officer, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. Both men's prosecution followed the same pattern as that of Bonaparte, ending in Magistrate Renaud acquitting them. They lived a little further from the store than Bonaparte, Austin at 204 West 128th Street, just west of 7th Avenue, and Nicholas at 224 West 124th Street.
• 1 2021-12-10T19:49:14+00:00 David Bragg arrested 17 plain 2024-03-05T21:07:51+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Patrolman Leahy of the 28th Precinct arrested David Bragg, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for allegedly throwing a rock through the window of Ben Salcfas' grocery store at 2061 7th Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. The window could have been broken around 11:15 PM, when a group of twenty-five to thirty people gathered at the intersection. Another officer from the 28th Precinct, Patrolman Peter Naton, arrested one member of that group, James Pringle, for allegedly urging the others to cross the street so they could throw rocks at police. The group continued on despite the arrest, smashing store windows, according to Naton. Bragg may have been part of that group. Later, two stores close to the grocery store were looted. First, Sarah Refkin's delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue at 12:30 AM, and then Nicholas Peet's tailors store at 2063 7th Avenue at 1:30 AM. The shoe repair store directly across 7th Avenue from the grocery store was also looted sometime during the disorder. Bragg lived at 235 West 135th Street, over ten blocks north of the store, between 7th and 8th Avenues. He likely had come to 125th Street some time earlier in the evening in response to the rumors circulating in Harlem and joined the people who moved south on 7th Avenue as the disorder intensified.
  
  "Ben Salcfas" of 2061 7th Avenue was recorded as the complainant against David Bragg in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. A story in the Home News was the only other source that linked Bragg to 2061 7th Avenue. The information that Bragg threw a rock at the store window was also only found in that story, a report of his appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court. The charge made against Bragg when he was arraigned, malicious mischief, involves the destruction of property, and was used in other prosecutions for breaking windows. However, police initially charged Bragg with inciting a riot, which was the charge recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter, and in the lists of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. When Bragg appeared in court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on bail of $1,000. Convicted by the judges of that court, he was sentenced on April 1 to three months in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-08T18:55:05+00:00 David Smith arrested 16 plain 2024-01-22T19:54:17+00:00 At 12:05 A.M., Officer Anthony Barbaro of the 25th Precinct arrested David Smith, a twenty-two-year-old Black clerk, and Leon Mauraine, a twenty-two-year-old Black window washer, in front of 322 Lenox Avenue. Barbaro had been standing on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 126th Street when he saw a group of people gather in front of the Rex Drug store at 318 Lenox Avenue, according to the statement he gave in the Harlem Magistrates Court. He then allegedly heard two of the men, Smith and Mauraine, say, "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them." Those men then threw stones at the store windows, breaking them, after which they ran north on Lenox Avenue. Barbaro chased them, catching and arresting both men two buildings north of the drug store. As the drug store was on the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and West 126th Street, Barbaro must have been standing across 126th Street, on the southeast corner, as he would not have been able to hear the men or catch them so quickly from across the much wider Lenox Avenue. In the half hour after Barbaro arrested Smith and Mauraine, other police officers arrested two men for breaking windows near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, John Kennedy Jones at 333 Lenox Avenue and Bernard Smith at 317 Lenox Avenue. Multiple arrests by different officers indicates that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  
  
  Smith had lived for the last fourteen months at 2094 5th Avenue, three blocks north and a block east of the store, according to his examination in the Magistrates Court. He may have been drawn to Lenox Avenue by the noise of windows being broken earlier in the disorder. While both he and Mauraine could have thrown stones at the windows, as Barbaro stated, it is unlikely they said exactly the same words. It may be that only one of the them urged on the group, or that they expressed similar sentiments that the officer chose to report in the same words. (The Home News story about the proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court reported they had said "Come on. Let's bust some more windows," a difference in wording from the affidavit likely produced by a reporter's difficulty hearing what was said in the courtroom.) The list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, did distinguish the men in a way Barbaro's affidavit did not. Smith was listed among those charged with malicious mischief, an offense that involved damaging property used in other cases involving broken windows, and Mauraine among those charged with inciting a riot. However, that distinction is not replicated in the 28th Precinct police blotter or in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded both men as charged with inciting a riot. So too did the story in the Home News about the proceedings in the court, which did not mention that Smith or Mauraine had broken the store windows, only what they had been "overheard saying to companions." A note on the Magistrates Court affidavit did, however, include malicious mischief alongside three sections of the riot law, indicating that both men faced both charges at some point in their prosecution.
  
  When Smith and Mauraine appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held them for the grand jury, on bail of $1,000. A week later both men appeared before the grand jury, which transferred them to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. It is likely that the note on the Magistrates Court affidavit was the charges they faced in that court, malicious mischief (as the malicious mischief charge is not recorded in the docket book Smith was not categorized as being charged with that offense) and the three misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot. Convicted in that court, on April 2, Smith, and Mauraine, received suspended sentences, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-15T22:17:50+00:00 Meat market window broken 16 plain 2024-05-29T17:12:44+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, a store window in the meat market at 2422 8th Avenue was broken. Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Henry Stewart, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for allegedly having thrown a bottle through the window, a story in the Home News reported. There is no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another man, Warren Johnson, and two women, Louise Brown and Rose Murrell, who, with Stewart, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. The broken window was the northernmost report of disorder on 8th Avenue, on the block between 130th and 131st Streets. The other reported broken windows and looting were south of 128th Street.
  
  Henry Stewart appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, and set bail at $500. On March 25, the judges in that court discharged Stewart, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. That outcome indicated that whatever evidence police had presented to the Magistrate did not indicate to those judges that Stewart was responsible for the broken window.
  
  
  
  A white-owned meat market is recorded at 2422 8th Avenue in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935. The signs for the market are visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:02:06+00:00 Warren Johnson arrested 15 plain 2024-02-13T19:24:29+00:00 Sometime during the riot, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Warren Johnson, an eighteen-year-old Black man. There was no information on Johnson's alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. The arrest likely took place around 10:30 PM or 11:00 PM, when the disorder intensified and crowds spread from 125th Street along 8th Avenue. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two women, Rose Murrell and Louise Brown, and another man, Henry Stewart, who, with Johnson, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. Murrell and Stewart were alleged to have broken windows in two different stores, Murrell at 2366 8th Avenue and Stewart at 2422 8th Avenue. Johnson and Brown likely also allegedly broke store windows, based on the charge against all four of those Libman arrested, malicious mischief, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. An offense involving damage to property, malicious mischief was used by prosecutors after the disorder only against individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows. Johnson has been treated as having been arrested for breaking windows on the basis of that charge even though there are no details of his alleged act.
  
  While the story in the Daily Mirror suggested Johnson and Brown had been arrested at the intersection, so likely were alleged to have broken windows nearby, the store in which Henry Stewart allegedly broke a window was two and half blocks north of where the story reported his arrest. It is possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest. Johnson lived at 206 West 121st Street, a block east of 8th Avenue and six blocks north of where he was reported arrested. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, but the others lived north of 125th Street, considerably closer than Johnson.
  
  
  
  Warren Johnson was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge was reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal and in the Daily News, as well as in the story in the Daily Mirror. Police appear to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Prosecutors had changed the charge against Johnson to malicious mischief by the time he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held Johnson in custody until March 25, on bail of $500. When he was returned to court, the charge against Johnson was reduced to disorderly conduct, malicious mischief crossed out in the docket book, "Red." written above it, and "DISORDERLY CONDUCT" stamped in its place. That change, to a lesser offense that did not involve damage to property, likely indicated a lack of evidence that Johnson had broken a window. Instead, he was likely part of a crowd in the vicinity of the damaged store, arrested either by mistake or to get him off the street as part of police efforts to disperse the crowd. Disorderly conduct was an offense that could be adjudicated by a magistrate, unlike malicious mischief, which would have been referred to another court. Magistrate Ford convicted Johnson and gave him a suspended sentence. Louise Brown, arrested with him and prosecuted in the same way, also received a suspended sentence.
• 1 2021-09-06T19:34:21+00:00 Herbert Hunter arrested 15 plain 2024-02-13T19:46:16+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Phillips of the 28th Precinct arrested Herbert Hunter, an eighteen-year-old Black resident of 56 West 126th Street. At the same time Phillips arrested Elizabeth Tai and Arthur Davis for taking groceries from a store at 340 Lenox Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. However, that story did not directly state that Hunter was charged with looting the same store, so that was not identified here as the location he alleged looted. The arrests likely occurred around 12:30 AM. Hunter was not included in the lists of those arrested published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and in the New York Evening Journal. It is not clear why he was omitted.
  
  
  
  The 28th Precinct police blotter also recorded the charge against Hunter as burglary, with the note "Burglarised store during riot." The Daily Worker more precisely described his alleged offense as "stealing groceries." Hunter did not appear in the lists of those arrested published in the press.
  
  Hunter was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with Elizabeth Tai and Arthur Davis, all charged with burglary. Magistrate Renaud remanded all three to appear again in court (he sent two others arrested by Phillips who appeared at the same time charged with malicious mischief, Charles Wright and William Norris, to the Court of Special Sessions). The docket book recorded only Phillips' name and precinct; the story in the Daily Worker identified him as a detective.
  
  When Hunter appeared in court again, on March 22, the docket book recorded no change in the charge against him, but a story in the Home News reported that "the Court" had reduced the charge from burglary to disorderly conduct, as happened to both Tai and Davis. In Tai's case, the docket book did record that the charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct. Had the police presented evidence Hunter had stolen merchandise, he would have been charged with either burglary or larceny; had they presented evidence that he had broken windows, the charge would have been malicious mischief. The charge of disorderly conduct suggested that he may only have been part of a crowd near the store. Magistrate Renaud found Hunter guilty, an outcome reported in the stories in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal as well as the Home News and Daily Worker. He also found Tai and Davis guilty.
  
  Renaud sentenced Hunter to serve ten days in the Workhouse, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, 28th Precinct police blotter and stories in the Home News, Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker. Renaud gave Tai and Davis a lesser sentence, a fine of $25 or five days in the Workhouse. Unable to pay the fine, according to a story in the Home News, both were sent to the Workhouse.
• 1 2021-09-08T21:16:11+00:00 Sam Nicholas arrested 14 plain 2024-02-01T21:11:27+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, an officer from the 28th Precinct arrested Sam Nicholas, a twenty-four-year-old Black man (the clerk's handwriting in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book is too messy to decipher the officer's name). The arrest likely occurred near the Romanoff Drug Store at 375 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 129th Street. J. Romanoff of that address is recorded as the complainant when Nicholas is arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
  
  
  
  Just what Nicholas allegedly did is uncertain. He appears among those listed as being arrested for burglary, the charge used in cases of alleged looting, in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, the 28th Precinct police blotter records the charge against him as attempted burglary, suggesting that he was not arrested with any merchandise in his possession. In the Magistrate's Court, Nicholas was charged with disorderly conduct, an offense not used in cases of alleged looting. Instead, a charge of disorderly conduct suggests he had been in the crowds around the store when it was looted and clashed in some way with police. However, Magistrate Renaud acquitted Nicholas, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. Renaud's verdict indicates Nicholas was a spectator, perhaps arrested as part of police efforts to disperse crowds on the street. The Romanoff Drug store was located in the midst of the area of Lenox Avenue that saw multiple arrests and reports of looting and violence, likely after midnight. Nicholas may have been among the crowds drawn to the street by the noise. He lived at 224 West 124th Street, midway down the block between 7th Avenue and Eighth Avenue, five blocks south of the store.
  
  J. Romanoff was also the complainant against Oscar Austin, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, and Jacob Bonaparte, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, both arrested by the same police officer, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. Both men's prosecutions followed the same pattern as that of Nicholas, ending in acquittal. They lived closer to the store, on West 128th Street.
• 1 2021-09-07T18:21:31+00:00 Nathan Snead arrested 11 plain 2024-01-28T19:15:27+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer McNulty of the 28th Precinct arrested Nathan Snead, a twenty-six-year-old Black man who lived at 310 West 128th Street. McNulty charged Snead with petit larceny, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter, which noted he allegedly “Stole Merchandise from store.” Neither Snead's arrest nor his subsequent court appearances are reported in the press. No complainant is recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, so there is no evidence regarding the store from which Snead allegedly stole.
  
  
  
  On March 20, Snead appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court. Magistrate Renaud sent him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on $500 bail, according to the docket book. His trial took place on March 25, when the judges convicted him and sentenced him to the penitentiary, according the the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2021-09-01T12:16:42+00:00 Reginald Mills arrested 10 plain 2024-01-31T23:25:01+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Redmond of the 28th Precinct arrested Reginald Mills, a nineteen-year-old Black man, likely near 1974 7th Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 119th Street. The charge Redmond made against Mills recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter is burglary, together with the note "Burglarized store during riot," indicating that he had allegedly looted a business. There are no details of circumstances of the arrest in the other sources. Redmond arrested two other Black men, Nelson Brock and William Grant, in relation to the same location, also charging them with burglary, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. Mills and Brock are also identified as having been charged with inciting a riot in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide (but not the list in the New York Evening Journal). That charge requires others to have been involved in the looting, and suggests that police alleged Mills and Brock had somehow contributed to the group attacking the store. However, burglary was the only charge brought against them in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
  
  The address recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for James Marshall, the complainant in the prosecutions against three Black men, is likely the location of the looted store. Although that column of the docket book is headed "Residence" clerks commonly put the address related to the charge in that space rather than the home of the complainant. A branch of the white-owned James Butler Food Market chain occupied that location between 1939 and 1941 when the Tax Department photograph was taken, and was likely there at the time of the disorder as chain stores were an established part of the neighborhood's business landscape. (That side of the street is missing from the MCCH Business Survey conducted in the second half of 1935.) Mills lived at 269 West 121st Street, west of 7th Avenue two blocks north of 1974 7th Avenue. He could have been drawn to the street by the noise and crowds on 7th Avenue after 10:00 PM.
  
  
  
  Mills, Brock, and Grant appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud remanded them in custody. When they were returned to court on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged them so they could be rearrested as they had been indicted by the grand jury, and then held them on $1,000 bail. No further records mention the outcome of those prosecutions. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only the discharge on March 25.
• 1 2022-11-18T03:03:57+00:00 Edward Hughes arrested 9 plain 2024-01-24T00:24:28+00:00 Edward Hughes, a thirty-six-year-old man of unknown race, was arrested during the disorder. There were no details of the circumstances, timing, or location of his arrest other than that it occurred below West 130th Street as it was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. Hughes was one of three men, together with William Jackson and Roger Scott, who appeared in the police blotter and in the list of those arrested for riot published in the in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. The police blotter recorded that Hughes and the other men were discharged on March 20, but their names did not appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on that date. It is therefore likely that they were not prosecuted.
  
  Hughes resided at 348 West 118th Street.
  
  
• 1 2021-09-01T12:18:04+00:00 William Grant arrested 9 plain 2024-02-03T17:31:33+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Redmond of the 28th Precinct arrested William Grant, a thirty-year-old Black man, likely near 1974 7th Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 119th Street. The charge Redmond made against Grant recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter is burglary, together with the note "Burglarized store during riot," indicating that he had allegedly looted a business. There are no details of circumstances of the arrest in the other sources. Redmond arrested two other Black men, Reginald Mills and Nelson Brock, in relation to the same location, also charging them with burglary, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. All three men were also identified as having been charged with burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide (but not the list in the New York Evening Journal).
  
  The address recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for James Marshall, the complainant in the prosecutions against three Black men, was likely the location of the looted store. Although that column of the docket book is headed "Residence," clerks commonly put the address related to the charge in that space rather than the home of the complainant. A branch of the white-owned James Butler Food Market chain occupied that location between 1939 and 1941 when the Tax Department photograph was taken, and was likely there at the time of the disorder as chain stores were an established part of the neighborhood's business landscape. (That side of the street is missing from the MCCH business survey conducted in the second half of 1935.) Grant lived at 19 East 134th Street, some distance north and east of 1974 7th Avenue, unlike Brock and Mills, who lived nearby.
  
  
  
  Grant, Mills, and Brock appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud remanded them in custody. When they were returned to court on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged them so they could be rearrested as they had been indicted by the grand jury, and then held them on $1,000 bail. No further records mention the outcome of those prosecutions. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only the discharge on March 25.
• 1 2022-11-18T03:04:14+00:00 William Jackson arrested 8 plain 2024-02-03T17:38:24+00:00 William Jackson, a twenty-eight-year-old man of unknown race, was arrested during the disorder. There were no details of the circumstances, timing, or location of his arrest other than that it occurred below West 130th Street as it was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. Jackson was one of three men, together with Roger Scott and Edward Hughes, who appeared in the police blotter and in the list of those arrested for riot published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. The police blotter recorded that Jackson and the other men were discharged on March 20, but their names did not appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on that date. It is therefore likely that they were not prosecuted.
  
  Jackson resided at 223 West 122nd Street.
  
  
• 1 2022-12-08T15:40:40+00:00 In Harlem court on March 26 (4) 7 plain 2024-01-12T20:58:11+00:00 No newspapers reported these hearings. All the information comes from the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book and the 28th Police Precinct blotter.
• 1 2023-04-04T15:01:30+00:00 In the Court of Special Sessions on March 25 (2) 7 plain 2024-01-26T22:54:32+00:00 No newspapers reported these trials. The information on the outcomes was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter, transcribed by staff from the MCCH.
• 1 2022-11-18T03:04:33+00:00 Roger Scott arrested 6 plain 2024-02-01T00:41:04+00:00 Roger Scott, a thirty-five-year-old man of unknown race, was arrested during the disorder. There were no details of the circumstances, timing or location of his arrest other than that it occurred below West 130th Street as it was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. Scott was one of three men, together with William Jackson and Edward Hughes, who appeared in the police blotter and in the list of those arrested for riot published in the in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, Norfolk Journal and Guide. The police blotter recorded that Scott and the other men were discharged on March 20, but their names did not appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on that date. It is therefore likely that they were not prosecuted.
  
  Scott resided at 156 West 123rd Street.
  
  
• 1 2022-12-09T02:15:32+00:00 In Washington Heights court on March 26 (4) 5 plain 2024-01-12T21:13:59+00:00 No newspapers reported these hearings. All the information comes from the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book and the 28th Police Precinct blotter.