Report of Subcommittee which Investigated the Disturbance of March 19th
(New York, 1935).
The Harlem Riot of 1935 has been called by several scholars the first modern race riot. A Black Puerto Rican boy, Lino Rivera, was apprehended by a Harlem shop employee and accused of stealing a penknife. The boy bit the employee but was later released by police. A false rumor that Rivera had been beaten to death in the shop led to a riot the same night, during which more than one hundred were injured and arrested, and three Black Americans were killed. In response, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia set up a commission of noted figures to investigate the causes of the riot.
The subcommittee report included here cites officers for avoidable and unnecessary deaths and other instances of violent misconduct. Among remedies, it recommends the creation of a biracial committee in Harlem, to report misconduct directly to the office of the Police Commissioner, and asks that all police shootings be thoroughly investigated and taken up by the District Attorney in cases of criminal misconduct. The report concludes by arguing, as the general report would examine in greater detail, that in Harlem the wider social inequalities faced by the Black community in relation to housing and rent, employment and schools had to be addressed in order to restore social order. One other copy of this subcommittee report is recorded, at the New York Public Library. (For more on the report, see a Riesenfeld Center blog post.)
