Riot
I thought this excerpt from my Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (pages 805-807) might be of particular interest at this particular time.
Arthur Harris, Evening World, August 16, 1900.
All day the twelfth of August 1900, the city roasted through a heat wave. Night brought no relief. In Hell’s Kitchen, sleepless residents perched on stoops or fled to local watering holes. Arthur Harris, a 22-year-old, Virginia-born recent migrant, sought refuge at McBride’s Saloon on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, just down the block from the apartment in which he lived with his girlfriend, 20-year-old May Enoch. At 2:00 a.m., Enoch came by, asked him to “come on up home,” then waited outside for him to join her. On departing, Harris found her struggling in a man’s grip. He leapt to rescue her. The man produced a club and began battering him, shouting racist epithets. Harris pulled a knife and cut his assailant twice. Robert J. Thorpe, a plainclothes policeman who had been arresting Enoch for presumed soliciting, fell mortally wounded.
White Men Beating Lavine Johnson, Evening World, August 16, 1900.
Harris was black. Thorpe was white. Three nights later the neighborhood exploded. Throngs of Irish residents howling “Lynch the niggers!” mobbed Eighth Avenue trolleys, dragged blacks off, beat them with lead pipes. Packs of young white men raced up and down the West 20s and 30s, screaming with rage at “black sons of bitches,” hunting and stomping victims. Finally, the (overwhelmingly Irish) police force arrived — and promptly joined the rioters: smashing heads with nightsticks, shooting at apartment windows, dragging blacks to the 37th Street station house, where they were kicked, punched, and clubbed into insensibility. Before it was over, seventy blacks had been seriously injured, some crippled for life.
The city’s African American community demanded an investigation of police behavior. A grand jury held perfunctory hearings, then refused to indict anyone. The NYPD launched an internal review, a palpable sham that in the end would fully exonerate the accused officers, and indeed commend them for their “prompt and vigorous action.”
Perceiving the whitewash in progress, the city’s leading black ministers, organized by the Reverend Dr. William H. Brooks, pastor of St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal on West 53rd Street, formed a Citizens’ Protective League (CPL) to undertake an independent investigation. On the night of September 12, a massive assemblage jammed into Carnegie Hall to ratify the CPL’s founding, hurrah orators who protested the recent outrage, and denounce the failure of officials to punish those guilty. Brooks, angry but cautious, urged the throng to “fight for our rights,” but “do nothing which will cost us the sympathy of the best people.” Maritcha Lyons, a Brooklynite civil rights activist and the only female speaker, was more combative. “Let every negro get a permit to carry a revolver,” she said. “You are not supposed to be a walking arsenal, but don’t you get caught again.”
With the support of good-government forces, the CPL hired prominent white lawyers — notably Frank Moss, head of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, and a longtime vigorous opponent of corruption and abuse in the Tammany-run police department. Securing affidavits from the victims and testimony from eyewitnesses, including white journalists on the scene, Moss and his associates sued the city for damages. But in the end, though overwhelming evidence of police brutality was presented, no black person received restitution for personal injuries or property losses. “The real offenders,” concluded Police Commissioner Bernard York, “were the negroes who insisted in getting into the disorderly crowds that were pursuing them.”
One unrepentant rioter rejoiced that New York was at last learning to deal with its “niggers” the way whites did “down south.”