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by Stephen Robertson
I was not intending to write Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 when my University of Sydney colleagues Shane White and Stephen Garton and I returned to the basement of New York City Municipal Archives in 2010 to examine the District Attorney’s files. While this rich collection has not been widely studied, we knew the records well: Shane had scoured files from the early nineteenth century for his books on Black life in New York City; I had gathered over 2,000 prosecutions for sex crimes from the first half of the twentieth century for my first book; and each of us had read files from the 1920s in order to find Black New Yorkers for our collaborative project on everyday life, material that formed part of Digital Harlem, our award-winning map-based website. We had come back to the archive in an effort to extend that project into the Depression by analyzing the unusually well-documented year of 1935.
The wealth of information available for 1935 Harlem was generated in response to the racial disorder in the neighborhood on March 19 and 20. Both as the first large-scale racial violence in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s most prominent Black neighborhood, the evening of violence had provoked investigations seeking to illuminate the rapidly declining conditions in Harlem and prompt government action. Our plan was to map events and places we found to construct a granular spatial context that would provide a fuller view of what changed in the neighborhood in the 1930s. Initially, we adopted the traditional narrative regarding the nature of the disorder itself. We had accepted the prevailing view that it was characterized not by clashes between Black residents and whites but by attacks on property that prefigured a new form of racial violence. However, when we found prosecutions resulting from the disorder in the DA’s files, the evidence did not support that argument, and my focus shifted toward the events themselves.
It was not just that none of the scholars who had analyzed the disorder had looked at the legal records. They also focused on the underlying grievances of participants, a widely adopted approach to the study of collective violence in the United States. In doing so, historians and others had paid too little attention to individual events other than the apprehension of 16-year-old Lino Rivera for shoplifting from the Kress 5 & 10 Cent store on West 125th Street, an incident that fueled rumors he had been killed by store staff and police, drawing crowds and thereby triggering a night of violence. Cheryl Greenberg’s claims in the major study of the disorder, that neither white police officers nor white passersby were attacked and that the violence was confined to attacks on the white-owned businesses on 125th Street, were at odds with the violence alleged in the case files. So, too, were other instances of violence that we discovered when we followed the cases to other collections in Municipal Archives: the Probation Department records of those convicted; the docket book entries for those arraigned in the Magistrates Court; and the newspaper reports of court hearings in the scrapbooks kept by Mayor La Guardia’s staff, which we supplemented with stories from newspapers on microfilm in the New York Public Library.
While press reports offered details on events at the center of legal proceedings often absent from the legal record, they also highlighted that, thanks to the ineffectual and indiscriminate police response, the prosecutions did not reflect the full character of the disorder. Many more businesses were damaged and looted than those identified as the targets of those arrested. White men and women were targeted for violence more often than legal proceedings suggested.
For all the details contained in the press, no single publication reported the complexity of the disorder. The two most comprehensive lists of those arrested and injured were one compiled by the Associated Negro Press and published in Black newspapers based outside New York City and a second that appeared in the racist Hearst publication the New York Evening Journal. The most detailed coverage of the court proceedings was published by the Bronx-based Home News; only La Prensa offered a partial survey of damaged businesses and provided information on violence in the Spanish-speaking section around 116th Street.
When we turned to the records of the investigation commissioned by the mayor, we unearthed hospital records that included white victims of violence and Black victims of police violence who did not appear in legal records or newspaper stories. Other historians had been necessarily more selective in their research than my colleagues and I, as the disorder was only part of their argument or they undertook article-length studies. But even in the broader monographic literature on racial disorder, the focus on causes and underlying conditions generally resulted in the events being covered in a chapter or two, with the simplification that necessarily entailed. Our granular investigation and mapping of these events highlighted the risk of that simplified and selective approach for understanding something as multifaceted as collective racial violence. Details change the picture.
Crucial to helping me understand the significance of those granular details of the disorder was Amanda Seligman’s award-winning article, “’But Burn—No’: The Rest of the Crowd in Three Civil Disorders in 1960s Chicago.” “The study of the actions of the crowd rather than relying on their underlying grievances,” she argued, “would allow historians to describe how they fit into their local social, environmental, and political context without prejudging the moral authority of a diverse group of participants.” “Cracked open” disorders can reveal a broad range of actors pursuing a variety of goals rather than a community unanimous in sentiment, “periods of action punctuated by rest and quiet” in rhythms that were “irregular and staccato” rather than continuous activity.
In Harlem in 1935, what was visible were attacks by Black men and women on white businesses in protest against their refusal to hire Black staff and discrimination and exploitation of Black customers; intermittent attacks by Black residents on white pedestrians in a broader revolt against their privileged presence on Harlem’s streets; looting by poor and desperate people seeking food and goods they had been unable to obtain by other means and by others taking advantage of the disorder to steal merchandise; and indiscriminate police violence against Black men and women who participated in the disorder and those who were spectators, with fatal consequences in at least two cases. This complex picture revealed the disorder was a broader challenge by Black residents to white economic and political power than the existing interpretations recognized.
The Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem (MCCH) did not offer details of the violence in its report, which resulted in later analysis that ignored these issues. No information was included about the number of people arrested during the disorder, the outcome of the legal proceedings against them, or the extent of the damage to businesses. Such material is found in reports on other twentieth-century racial disorders. The report did give attention to the events in and around the Kress store at the beginning of the disorder and the fatal police shooting of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs, but otherwise focused on police violence during other moments in 1935. Such a narrow focus was the result of the concern of mainstream Black leaders and their white allies on the commission that attention to racial violence would distract from their efforts to improve economic and social conditions. It was thanks to Arthur Garfield Hays of the ACLU, the commission member who led the investigation of the events regarding the disorder, and the interventions of the Harlem residents and Communist party members who attended the commission’s public hearings, that the MCCH report nonetheless gave attention to police violence. Although the report was never officially released, Arno Press published it in 1969. It became the source upon which subsequent accounts of the disorder relied, amplifying its distorted and simplified picture of what happened.
Emphasizing the complexity of the disorder and seeking to make transparent the research and analysis that produced that interpretation ultimately led me to develop a digital form for my argument. Using the Scalar platform, I chose to extend the form of the monograph, not radically depart from it, to create a hybrid form—a digital monograph—to make the publication more accessible than the hypertext histories of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Building on Robert Darnton’s vision of a book structured in “layers arranged like a pyramid,” Harlem in Disorder is a multilayered, hyperlinked narrative. The top layer is a chronological narrative that traces the events of the night of March 19, 1935, hour by hour, the prosecutions that spanned the following several months, and the investigation undertaken by the MCCH that culminated in a report submitted to New York City’s mayor more than a year later. Linked to that narrative is a layer of pages on the individual events of the disorder, in the legal process and in the investigation, which are linked to an additional layer of pages that examine categories and subcategories of events, stages and outcomes in the legal process.
Those additional layers extend the research apparatus provided by notes in a print book in order to document my data-driven analysis. Digital methods that rely on data and visualizations, and look at sources expansively rather than selectively, involve more analysis than can be incorporated in a historical narrative or in the current format for notes. Citations of sources and methods sections also do not counter the tendency of data to dehumanize its subjects. For each event I instead created a narrative that examined the evidence, identified those involved, and discussed how the evidence was interpreted to create data and to categorize what happened. The narratives also highlight uncertainty and ambiguity in the sources to counter the apparent certainty about an event that results from it appearing on the map of the disorder.
Navigating the Text
Tags link pages on individual events to the narrative layer that analyzes categories of events to bring patterns in the disorder into focus at multiple scales (see image). In other platforms, clicking on a tag takes a user to a list of all the pages that have that tag; in Scalar, clicking on a tag takes you to a page. As a page, a tag can be not just a means of connection and collection, but also a site for analysis and interpretation that itself can have tags to create subcategories and multiple connections between elements of the argument (below are the subcategories of the Assaults category).
On pages for individual events, tags offer a different perspective on complexity. A tag classifies an event as one of eight types, and additional tags group it based on different features, such as who was involved, the character of the location, and whether an arrest or prosecution followed. The tag list below is for an assault on Detective Henry Roge.
Pages for individual arrests also have tags grouping them in relation to the legal process: the charge, in which courts prosecutions occurred, their outcome, and for those convicted, the sentence imposed. The example below shows the categories of which the arrest of James Hughes, the twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer police alleged assaulted Roge, is part:
Used in this way, tags create a dense web of relationships and contexts for events that convey the complexity at the heart of my interpretation of the disorder.
While the pages of Harlem in Disorder do not echo a print page or exist in a print form, it fits the definition of a monograph in the more important sense of being a long-form study that makes a sustained argument based on in-depth research. It is peer-reviewed, edited, and published by Stanford University Press and assigned an ISBN. The top layer of the narrative elaborates the argument in a linear format readers will find familiar to a print book; the digital medium also provides further layers that allow readers to explore the details from that narrative at different scales when, and to the extent, that they want. When they do so, readers are immersed in the complex mix of violence, gaining a different perspective that highlights the wide-ranging challenge to white economic and political power that the disorder posed. That picture of what happened on March 19 is more closely aligned with the racial disorders of the following decades than broader views revealed. It was in Harlem in 1935 that the character of racial violence in United States first changed to take a new form.
Stephen Robertson is a Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, where from 2013-2019 he served as executive director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Since 2003, digital history has occupied a central place in his research. With colleagues at the University of Sydney he created Digital Harlem, a research tool that maps events and places in the 1920s. The site won the American Historical Association’s inaugural Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the American Library Association’s ABC-CLIO Digital History Prize in 2010. He is also the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960, and Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars, coauthored with Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White.
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