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• 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.