Violence, Corruption, and Cover-up: The Story of the New York City Race Riot of 1900

The Story of the New York City Race Riot of 1900

George P. Hall & Son, New York City, 1900, 1900, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

November 7, 2009

History 600

Dr. Godshalk

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States was on its way to becoming a major economic power, and no other city better represented this growth and advancement than New York City. During the thirty-nine year period from 1880 to 1919, the United States received 23 million new immigrants, of which nearly 17 million entered into New York City, a large fraction of which remained there for their chance at the new life promised by the American dream.¹ These numbers do not however take into consideration the vast number of African Americans who migrated northward to escape the increasingly horrid conditions of the Jim Crow South. As these new groups mixed with the older established population, tensions and competitions increased dramatically, and many wondered when these tensions would erupt into violence. Their answer came in August 1900, when the Tenderloin District of New York City erupted into a racially charged riot, which would linger on for days. In order to understand the violence that erupted, it is necessary to not only study the events of the riot, but also delve into the underlying causes of the riot, the motivations of those involved, and what changes were born from the ashes. Careful research of this event points to the fact that past immigration patterns affected the way that the Irish and other residents of the city viewed new comers, as well as show the influence that the corruption of the police department and the city government had on the events surrounding the riot. New York City was not alone in either growth, or the violence that accompanied it, as both New Orleans, Louisiana in 1900, and Atlanta, Georgia in 1906 saw their fair share of racial violence. In what ways did the New York City race riot of 1900 resemble the contemporary racial conflicts in New Orleans and Atlanta, in terms of cause, events, motivations, and outcomes? This comparison will offer up insights into the broader topic of national race relations at the turn of the twentieth century, through the lens of New York City and the lessons, which were traded between these cities and peoples and how they changed the relations between blacks and whites in the decades prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

The New York City race riot, as with other forms of violence, began simply enough in a dispute between two men in the early morning hours of August 13, 1900. The first of these men was Arthur J. Harris, a migrant black worker originally from Richmond, Virginia, who recently migrated to the city in search of stable and more profitable employment.² On his way north, Harris had worked and lived in many places, but his most recent home was Jersey City, where he met May Enoch after she had left her husband.³ The two settled in the Tenderloin District of the city, which stretched between 23^rd Street and 42^nd Street, and had the reputation as a center for vice, with its large cadre of saloons, gambling halls, brothels, and dance clubs.⁴ This region of the city is now sandwiched between Times Square and Rockefeller Center to the north and Madison Square and Greenwich Village to the south, and has a much different reputation today. At approximately 2 a.m., Enoch left their apartment in the Tenderloin District, to bring Harris home from a night of drinking at McBride’s Saloon on 8^th Avenue, but before she could enter the establishment, she was stopped by a man and questioned.⁵

The man was Robert Thorpe, who was a member of the predominately-Irish New York City police force from the Twentieth Precinct, dressed in plain clothes to carryout arrests of prostitutes and other criminals working in that area.⁶ It was at this time that Arthur Harris exited the saloon and saw a white man talking to his “wife”, and according to him approached the man to ask what was happening, at which time Thorpe told him not to meddle.⁷ Harris next took hold of the man and was promptly clubbed by Thorpe, who still had not made his true profession known, and in retaliation, Harris, pulled a pen knife from his pocket and stabbed Thorpe twice, fleeing the scene to let the man bleed to death from his wounds.⁸ Harris later that morning boarded a train bound for Washington D.C., where he went to stay with his mother, and was later arrested on August 16 by officers of the Fifth Precinct, who had known Harris when he resided in the city, and were shocked by his actions, as he was considered a “good kid”.⁹

The death of a well-liked police officer usually elicits a great wave of sadness from members of the community and the police department, and the murder of Robert Thorpe was no exception to this. A great crowd of both police and Irish working class neighbors of the district, gathered at the home of Thorpe’s brother Samuel, where the wake was being held in preparation for the funeral on August 16.¹⁰ It was in this emotion-filled atmosphere that the first actions of the riot to come were played out on the evening of August 15, 1900, as mourners gathered to pay their respects while Arthur Harris was still on the lamb. Spencer Walters, a black man from the area, was walking past the crowd, supposedly “declared an oath”, and pulled a revolver in response to two female mourners speaking about the horrible death of Thorpe.¹¹ This was the most common perception of the events from the residents of the area, but an article appearing in the New York Tribune, reveals a bias towards the residents of the Tenderloin as well as an alternate perspective presented by the New York Times. This article claimed that in fact, a drunken Irish woman, shouting that all African Americans be killed for Harris’s crime was the cause of the violence, and Walters became a convenient victim for the mob.¹² Whether the details recorded in the newspapers are accurate that Walters was in a drunken state and pulled the gun without provocation or if it was a drunken Irish woman, who willed the riot into being is unclear. What is evident, however, is that Thomas J. Healy attacked Walters to gain control of the pistol, which he had pulled, most likely for self-defense and the crowd soon joined in the fight, which was broken up by Officer Kelly, who promptly arrested Walters for the attempted shooting of Healy.¹³ It is from this incident that a four-hour spree of violence would break upon the metropolis, with roving gangs of whites hunting down black residents of the Tenderloin and beating them severely.

The various newspapers of the city created estimates, which placed the number of rioters near 10,000, and argued that these predominantly Irish rioters initiated the vast majority of the violence seen that night.¹⁴ The mobs at first targeted African Americans that were accessible on the streets, most of which were caught unaware of the danger, which they had just entered into. Such was the situation of John B. Mallory, an eighteen year old, who was returning home from a meeting at the Colored Engineers Club with his friend Gordon Jones.¹⁵ The two youths were assaulted by the great sea of angry humanity out for their blood, and were beaten, until a police officer, arrived, pushed through the crowd, and rescued Mallory. This officer placed Mallory on a passing streetcar and told him to get away.¹⁶ John Locket, a cigar maker, was also attacked by the mob and had his face cut to “ribbons” by the crowd, before he was only able to escape them through being arrested by the police, who sent him the Bellevue Hospital for medical attention.¹⁷ Another young man, Jesse Pane, was riding his bicycle home to West 39^th Street, when the mob ripped him from his bike, beat him, and destroyed it before disappearing in search of new blood to fuel their rage.¹⁸ The roving mobs soon found their way to Broadway, which was featuring a concert on the street, with an audience of nearly five thousand, who were soon lured into the violent frenzy of the mob.¹⁹

As the mobs spread out from the Thorpe wake seeking blacks to fill the void left by Arthur Harris’s absence, the aggressors began to swarm the street cars moving up and down 8^th Avenue, pulling any African American seen from the safety of the cars, and beating them.²⁰ George Walker and Clarence Logan found themselves victims of the violence in this manner, as their Irish neighbors stopped and boarded the streetcar, the mob began to beat their victims where they sat.²¹ Captain Burns and his men, entered the car and beat the rioters back with their clubs, until they could reach the two black men inside, and then fought their way out, arresting four of the white members of the mob for inciting a riot.²² The mob next moved from the streets and took their attacks into the bars and restaurants, such as Joe Walcott’s Bar, an establishment known to be frequented by African Americans.²³ The bar was soon filled with rioters, who assaulted the black patrons, and whites who tried to defend the African Americans present. Again, Captain Burns and his police officers came to the rescue and fought back the rioters, using their clubs frequently enough to receive complaints of excessive brutality from Councilman Stewart M. Brice, who witnessed their counter attack.²⁴

As the riot continued to spread from its epicenter, the mob continued to grow into an almost unstoppable wave of humanity. It was into this environment that the police arrived in force led first by Captain Cooney, the soon to be father-in-law to Thorpe, whose men were at the wake for support and security.²⁵ These officers soon found that the riot was out of their power to stop, and within the next hour, all of the surrounding eleven precincts were called into action, along with the activation of their six hundred reserve police officers, which were trained to serve in times of need.²⁶ While the effect of the police wagons arrival, did give some temporary reprieve, the rioters simply moved away from the safe harbor provided to the African American victims, to new areas.²⁷ Throughout the Tenderloin a large portion of the police, who took an oath to protect and serve, instead stood by and allowed African Americans to be abused by the mob. The story of Nathan Arlington, who was attacked by the mob as he passed by on his bicycle, shows this lack of concern as he cried out to six officers on a nearby street corner for help, all of which turned a deaf ear to his plea.²⁸ A witness told the reporters for the New York Tribune that the leader of this mob actually went to the police and asked one of them to lend him a club for the beating, to which the officer told him that he wished that he could.²⁹ Arlington managed to escape the mob, only to be chased down and beaten again, and only to be saved through the actions of a white messenger boy, who fought through the crowd to get Arlington to the safety of a nearby house, at which time the police finally took it upon themselves to disburse the crowd.³⁰ Another incident occurred between 37^th and 38^th Streets, as the police blocked off the ends of the streets allowing twenty-five white men to savagely beat one black man uninterrupted.³¹ One African American woman, of middle class distinction, sought the aid of an officer to escort her home through the crowd, which had encircled her after exiting a street car, but the officer replied “Go to hell, damn you,” before turning his back on her.³²

Another faction of the officers dispatched to stop the riots, actually participated in the events of the night. This was certainly the case with John B. Mallory, discussed earlier, who initially looked upon the police as his savior, but within a few minutes of setting foot upon the streetcar that was to deliver him from danger, it drove him right back into it. A few blocks from the initial incident, another officer pulled Mallory from the car and began to beat him, until the other passengers beset him with guilt of his actions and forced him to stop.³³ Chester Smith also became a victim of the police. He was chased through the streets by a gang of white youths, while trying to return home from work, and as he passed one street, an officer took hold of him and beat him with his nightstick, trying to slow him for the mob.³⁴ Smith managed to loose himself from the officer and fled to a saloon on an adjacent street, where he hid for a few minutes until another officer entered the saloon, and upon seeing Smith hiding, told him that the mob was gone and it was safe to leave. Smith moved cautiously toward the door, peaked out through the gap, and saw the crowd was still gathered, but upon refusing to leave, the officer took him and threw him into the street for the mob, as one would feed hungry birds.³⁵

Perhaps the most blatant injustice performed by the New York City Police Department during the riot is in the case of William J. Elliott. Elliott, who was twenty years old at the time of the riot, was preparing to go to work, but being fearful of the crowds on the street, took an empty pistol, which a friend had given him as a way to protect himself.³⁶ In the streets, he saw a mob approaching, entered a pawnshop until they passed, and then went on his way.³⁷ A white passerby saw him leave the shop and called to an officer, yelling that Elliott had just bought a gun and was planning to use it.³⁸ The police could not standby and allow another black man the opportunity to kill someone else and pursued Elliott and arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Elliott was taken to the West 37^th Street Station for arraignment, and upon arrival, he was escorted through the station’s muster room to the cells, which lay beyond.³⁹ Upon entering the room, the lights were reportedly put out, and the estimated twenty-five reserve officers in the room began to beat Elliott ferociously, but were stopped several minutes later by Captain Cooney who entered the room to stop the beating, but did not punish the officers for their actions.⁴⁰ A New York Times reporter in the station house told Captain Cooney that something needed to be done about the incident, to which Cooney replied that the reporter should file a complaint against the man who did it.⁴¹ A complaint was never filed due to the darkness and the sheer number of individuals involved in the attack, and quite possibly due to fear of further brutality visited upon Elliott or the reporter.

By 12 am, the mobs had moved toward the African American tenement buildings to seek more victims and as a method of keeping blacks isolated in their own neighborhoods through fear. The black residents of the Tenderloin had had enough and they began to attack both the rioters and the police who entered their territory with bricks thrown from the upper floors and the roofs, with the occasional gunshot reported by police and others on the street.⁴² The Irish police force was not willing to standby as their authority was challenged in mass by the African American residents of the Tenderloin and responded by randomly firing bullets into the structures, and invading buildings from which gunshots were heard.⁴³ John Haines was asleep in his bed when the police kicked in the door to search for the person who fired shots at them from his building. Upon searching the apartment, the police did find a firearm, drug Haines from his bed, beat him on the way to the station house, and then attacked him again in front of the sergeant of the precinct.⁴⁴ The fear of the police soon spread through those blacks stuck in the streets and some attacked the police out of self-preservation. Lloyd Lee and David H. Tarr, were moving through the streets trying to avoid the mobs, when they were confronted by Officer Kennedy.⁴⁵ At this time Lee, fearing attack by Kennedy, stabbed him once in the chest and once in the arm, and tried to escape, but was quickly cornered by the mob and beaten, and eventually shot in the leg by Kennedy.⁴⁶

A heavy rain began to fall on the city, which quenched the heat of the violence, and the rioters returned to their homes for the night sated in the blood that they had spilled upon the streets of the city. The police force was left with the mammoth task of keeping people off the streets and arresting African Americans who sought to buy or carry weapons. The African American community purchased an estimated 145 revolvers and a large supply of ammunition in the days following the riot, but the violence did not return in full strength, with only smaller and more localized incidents occurring over the next two weeks.⁴⁷ There were, by the grace of providence, no deaths in the initial riot and only two shooting incidents in the remaining weeks of violence, but it is impossible to tell the true number of people injured and attacked in the four hours of the riot.⁴⁸ As the initial smoke of the riot cleared, it became evident that there would likely be no justice carried out by the police of their own accord. The New York Times reported that on the night of the riot there were only twelve whites arrested for their actions, while the black arrest numbers were much larger.⁴⁹ As the arraignment hearings commenced, Magistrate Cornell, after hearing the charges in several cases where blacks were arrested, stated that it seemed obvious to him it that the lower classes of white residents of the Tenderloin District were the initiators of the violence and that they were the ones to be brought before him, not the African American victims.⁵⁰

In the days and weeks following August 16, 1900, there was a veritable deluge of complaints filed by the victims of the riot, verbal reprimands from the leaders of the African American community, and newspaper articles directed at the crimes of the New York City Police Department and against Tammany Hall, which was the corrupt city government, controlling the police. T. Thomas Fortune, editor of The New York Age lashed out against the corruption of the city by stating that it was the duty of the police and not white mobs to hunt down criminals, like Arthur Harris, and that a legitimate government was lacking to carry out those duties.⁵¹ He went on to say that, no one in the black community supported or would support the actions of Harris, and that the majority of the African American community was law abiding, with only a few exceptions among the recent migrants from the South, which did not exceed the number of criminals found in the white community.⁵²

The most organized effort to create a unified course of action against the atrocities of the police and Tammany Hall came from Reverend W. H. Brooks, pastor of St. Marks’ Methodist Episcopal Street located on 58^th Street. Brooks called upon the African American community to unite in order to fight injustice, but he made it clear that, “We cannot fight lawlessness with lawlessness. We must fight by due process of law.”⁵³ It is clear through this statement that Reverend Brooks feared what implications violence would have on his fellow blacks, both in retaliation from the police as well as the damage that retaliation would have on the social status of blacks within the city. He felt that by using acceptable means to fight injustice, the cause and status of African Americans would be elevated; while at the same time reduce the status and image of the Irish police force and their master, Tammany Hall. In his Sermon from August 26, Brooks told his audience that the police carried out the majority of the violence, and it is at their doorstep that the consequences of the violence against the innocent members of the community must be laid.⁵⁴

Through the efforts of Brooks and several other leaders in the community the Citizen’s Protective League formed to raise the funds needed to hire lawyers and fight the crimes of the police through the court system.⁵⁵ At a meeting held by the League in Carnegie Hall on September 12, Miss Lyons summed up the sentiment of most leaders by stating that there must be unified action to improve the situation, in order to do that she urged them to protect their homes and families, but to avoid becoming walking arsenals.⁵⁶ The New York City Club also took up the discussion of the actions of the police, and with a unanimous vote declared a campaign to clean up the abuses of the police and other areas of corruption within the city.⁵⁷ In order to do this the club president echoed the words of black leaders by asking those victimized during the riots to come forward and file formal charges so that citizens would not fear the police any longer and that the situation would not grow larger.⁵⁸ Members of the African American community, T. Thomas Fortune, and the leader of the United Colored Democracy Committee Edward E. Lee also contacted the acting mayor, Randolph Guggenheimer, and later Mayor Van Wyck about the actions of the police force during the riots.⁵⁹ There were also sixteen complaints filed by Percy Sanderson, of the British Consulate, on behalf of British citizens, such as Alfred A. Akins of Jamaica, who were victimized during the mob violence due to the color of their skin.⁶⁰ On August 24, a meeting was called at the Pequod Club to discuss the recent problems for the city and to agree upon a course of action. At that meeting, Dr. Hamilton Williams accused acting Chief of Police Devery of planning the riots, being an enemy of the peace in a peacekeepers clothing, and of bringing the South to the North.⁶¹ There was no evidence of any larger conspiracy of the police to start the riot, but these accusations show the intense anger and disgust felt by many within the city. Williams went on to lay the blame for the poor condition and corruption of the police at the feet of Tammany Hall, which placed Devery in command in the first place.⁶² The consensus of the meeting was that an official investigation was to be carried out by the Police Board of Commissioners, headed by President Bernard York, who was to compile the charges, summarize the incidents, and hand out punishments fitting for the crimes committed by members of the police force.⁶³

The Citizen’s Protective League followed through with its initiatives to fight by due process and hired Frank Moss, former police commissioner, and Israel Ludlow to represent them in the hearings against the department.⁶⁴ The organization compiled more than eighty affidavits from members of the community, which were handled very closely by Moss, who was also interested in the case as a means to support the cause of the Society for Crime Prevention, of which he was a leader.⁶⁵ The investigation officially began on September 7 with the case of William J. Elliott, the man beaten by a gang of police within the walls of the station muster room.⁶⁶ It became evident very early on that this investigation would be nothing more than an exercise in showmanship to protect the reputation of the department in the eyes of the community. Commissioner York began by hearing the evidence of the prosecution, but when their evidence contradicted the testimony of the police officers present on that day, it was ruled a lie, and Moss and Ludlow were not allowed to cross-examine the defendants, which allowed York to effectively kill the case.⁶⁷