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Stephen Robertson, "Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935" (Stanford UP, 2024)
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This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good.
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Starbucks Refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Dr. Kishana Soldier. Today I am joined by Dr. Steven Robertson to discuss his book Harlan A Spatial History of How Racial violence changed in 1935. Stephen Robertson is a cultural and social historian of the 20th century United States. Since 2003, digital history has occupied a central place in his research. The violence that spread across Harlem on The night of March 19, 1935, was the first large scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation's leading black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were not a race riot of the kind that marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935. Through granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlan Disorder reveals that Harlem's residents participated in a complex new mix of violence that was multifaceted challenge to white economic and political power. Tracing the legal and government investigations that followed, this project highlights how the violence came to be distorted, diminished and marginalized by the concern of white authorities to maintain the racial order and by the unwillingness of Harlem's black leaders and their white allies to embrace fully such direct forms of protest. Harlan Disorder is a multi layered hyperlink narrative in the form of a digital monograph that connects different scales of analysis. This is an award winning monograph and among its several awards, it is the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prize finalist and the 2025 Angel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph winner sponsored by the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus. Thank you for joining me today.
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B
Stephen, thank you very much for the invitation.
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A
I would love to start this interview with a bit more about the journey to complete this book, both in terms of writing, but more importantly the research process you undertook to transform this into a digital monograph.
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B
So this started off as part of a collaborative project that I was involved in at the University of Sydney in Australia, working on everyday life in Harlem and initially in the 1920s and then expanding to focus on 1935. So I worked with three colleagues to gather information from the municipal archives in New York City, which is where all the DA's records are, and then a lot of work with the city's black newspapers, the New York Age and the Amsterdam News. And because we were interested in everyday life, we were really looking for everything that mentioned life in the neighbourhood, particularly the black residents. And so it was a very granular kind of research from the beginning. And that research fed initially into Digital Harlem, the map based website that we created, which won the first AHA Rosensweet Prize. And then coming out of that, the focus sort of shifted to 1935. We were going to produce a similar kind of site for that that got caught up in a variety of other things. And my sort of focus then shifted to the disorder itself. And we were working on 1935 because the investigation of the disorder produced this immense amount of material on Harlem, unlike what was available in the 1920s. And we were mining it initially for what it told us about the neighborhood in 1935, but then to sort of create a manageable piece of that work on. I zeroed in on the disorder, especially once it became clear that the limited accounts that we had just didn't accurately capture what happened. For us, mapping the neighbourhood, the first thing it didn't capture was kind of where the violence was, which was far more widespread than it recognised. And then when we started drilling down into the newspaper reports across lots of newspapers and into the legal records, we realised there were also a whole range of forms of violence that were being captured in the account. So I had this kind of mountain of legal records of newspaper reports and then a lot of material on the neighbourhood itself. The piece out of that investigation that I don't think anyone else has really used, that became most valuable was that they did a survey of all of the businesses in Harlem in 1935. And this was violence that had initially targeted businesses, but they were more interested after the disorder, just in the state of business. But that survey let me really trace in detail the targets of violence during the disorder in a way that wouldn't have been impossible without the survey.
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And building on that survey, I would love to dive into your choice for using kind of the digital medium to tell the story. I found it so compelling. You're able to see photos, you're able to see newspaper articles, you're able to see maps and you're able to sort of follow the different events of disorder. So can you share with our listeners a bit about why the choice for digital media, but also kind of the advantages, especially for the story that you are telling in Harlem and Disorder?
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B
Yeah, so the idea to do this as a digital project initially came from the fact that we were Making maps. And we were making interactive maps of the kind that you just can't get into print. And so when I first started thinking about this as a digital project, it was, okay, so can I sort of tell this story through maps? As I kind of got deeper into the project, the discussion going on in digital humanities around me was increasingly about data and how to kind of not simply use data, but capture the process of creating data and all of the kind of choices that go into it that tend to be sort of papered over by people outside the humanities who want to create clean data where our sources are inherently messy and uncertain and ambiguous. And so when you're doing something like mapping, you're having to make choices about where to put things, what's happening. And I wanted to try and kind of capture that process as well as the maps that came out of it. And sort of, you know, historians have been talking since really the 1990s about a kind of digital monograph. And what would that look like? And there weren't really a lot of good examples out of it out there of what that might really look like. The vision that never hadn't really been turned into reality, that really caught my imagination as fitting this project was Robert Darton's vision of kind of layered narrative, where you kind of built in all kinds of additional material underneath, if you like, the kind of chronological narrative that we used to driving history. And that sort of caught my imagination as a way of keeping all of those choices about data and in this case, about the events of the disorder, keeping the narrative. And here, one way to think about what the layers I ended up creating are, is kind of a super footnote. And again, I was reading about the history of the footnote. Anthony Grafton's got a great book on the history of the footnote. If you haven't read it, you should. And the original vision for the footnote was that it was a research narrative to accompany the chronological narrative. And our footnotes haven't been anything remotely like that for decades. And in fact, we're increasingly losing the fight to have any footnotes. But certainly the footnotes we've got at the moment are no longer accounts of our research. And that's been a real frustration to me working in digital history, which is, for me, really highlighted what we lose when we don't talk about the process of our research and analysis and our method, which we're loath to do. And we lose really a sense of where our historical narratives come from. And so the digital monograph really appealed to me, me as A way to hold onto all of those interpretive choices without getting in the way of the narrative, to have a research narrative alongside my chronological narrative. And then that really resonated with this project, because ultimately, one of the larger points I wanted to make about racial disorder is about complexity. And in some ways, that's not a new idea. Everybody kind of recognizes the complexity of what goes on in racial disorder. But when we're trying to tell a story on a print page within the bounds of a book, what we tend to do is gesture to the complexity and then simplify and leave out aspects, which is what simplification ultimately involves. And especially in the case of what happened in Harlem in 1935, that simplification really was. Had distorted how we understood the violence. And so I wanted to tell a story that kept all of the complexity there. And so the digital monograph let me do that. It freed me from the constraints of the page. It let me include all of the details of what happened and all of the details about how I made those interpretive decisions about what happened based on the sources. So undily is my chronological narrative. There's a narrative, there's a level of pages that discuss every individual event in the riot, all of the sources I've got on that event, and how I decided to interpret those sources to put that event into my story. And then between that layer and the narrative layer, there's kind of layer of aggregates, which is basically gathering those individual events into various kinds of groupings and categories in order to see the patterns. And again, so this is one of the challenges of doing this, is I'm asking readers to move back and forwards between those layers, to click on the links. But if you do that, you can follow an event from where it appears in the chronological narrative, go down, find out what the sources about that event were, find out how I decided to interpret it, and then go look at any of a range of different categories that that event falls into to see how typical or not it was of the events that we disorder so hopeful. One of the ideas is that moving between those layers is in itself a kind of reading experience that conveys the complexity of what happens. So, again, the digital monograph really lets you keep all sorts of things you have to leave out of a book, and that in and of itself is not necessarily a good or necessary thing. But in the case of a story where I really wanted to emphasize complexity, keeping things rather than leaving them out really fed the narrative of complexity. And that's one of the broader takeaways I hope People take from this is we have made somewhat of a virtue out of simplifying things down to what we can fit in a book. And there's a certain appeal to that, There's a power to that, but there's also a cost to that. And I think we need to really. The digital medium gives us an opportunity to kind of find a form that fits the argument we want to make, rather than fitting our arguments to the form of a print book. And again, there's a lot of kind of mind crunching, rethinking of our assumptions in that which is not in any way easy. But I think there is a way in which we've fitted ourselves to the book, and not in a way that always helps us say what we want to do. And so that, to me, was what I encountered. I wanted to tell a story that didn't fit in print, which I couldn't have fit it in print in the way I wanted to tell it.
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I couldn't agree more. I think I learned a lot more because of the different ways that you have to move in and out of both the narrative and then into the data, then also into the historical kind of resources. But I'm a historian, so I hope that our listeners also enjoy what I consider to be a really exciting treasure hunt, putting all of the pieces together to then walk away with a better understanding and connected to that. I was really compelled by your word choice and thinking about, instead of using, for example, riot or uprising or rebellion, I really would love to hear from you about this choice to use disorder as a way of framing the events that happened on March 19, 1935.
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Yeah, and that's absolutely. You know, that's a key question in all of the historical writing on racial viol is what is a label that captures what's going on? And I think we're well past using riot, which is very much a kind of governmental policing term for what happens. And I don't really think anybody writing about racial violence uses that, other than in the fact that that's the term by which these things are known. So sometimes I'll slip into talking about this as a book on the 1935 riot, because people will recognise what that is, but the cost is they lose sense of what's going on amongst those other choices. I ended up with disorder because I think the challenge of some of those other labels, like rebellion, is that they ultimately end up privileging the motives of some of the people in the crowds in this violence. So disorder, in the end, to me, became the most compelling, and, you know, you could argue this was a cop out. And some of the, understandably, some reviewers, this is a major interpretive point and this is what people will argue about. So I think for some, there are some people in the crowds on the streets of Harlem that night for whom a lot of those other labels would have applied. But I think that choosing one of those is choosing one of those groups viewpoints in a way that overshadows the fact that not everybody on the street was motivated by the same kinds of things. And so in the end, disorder appeals to me because there's a multiplicity of motives for what's going on. Not everybody is moving in the same direction. There's certainly other outbreaks of racial violence where you might be able to perhaps argue for a greater degree of unanimity. But disorder, I think, makes sense of the fact that not everybody is going in the same direction for the same reason. The cost of that label is in some ways to take away the motivations of people who are. Who have a particular direction for it, for what they're doing that disorder implies is not going on. But in this case, I was comfortable that that's a relatively small group of people. This is not one of the. This is not the kind of racial violence that we would see in the 1960s, where a lot more of the labels of rebellion and uprising have been applied more. And I think that there are definite similarities between what's going on in Harlem and there. And part of the argument is that Harlem is really the first instance of something of the form of violence that we're going to recognise in the 60s and 70s, but it's not driven in quite as consistent way, what it shares with that violence is that to the extent that there's a kind of uprising, an uprising against police violence, and I think that that's a kind of key element that's been downplayed a little bit in some of the much briefer accounts we've got of what happened. The target here, the community's grievances were very heavily focused on police, and those are the grievances that the community articulated in the public hearings afterwards. There's also a targeting of white businesses going on here, which again, some of the historiographies picked up on before. And again, I think that in fact that was a much more deliberate targeting of white businesses, not indiscriminate violence against businesses, full stop than some people have argued. And so both those motives get lost arguably a little bit in the argument for disorder. But they're quite different targets for quite different reasons. And so to capture that mix, I went with disorder, order, rather than one of the other kinds of violence. I think one of the reviews that's been out there to date kind of picks apart that argument you summarized at the beginning for kind of implying that there is a stable order in Harlem before here. And to some extent, I think that's a good point, particularly from the kind of police violence that was one of the motivations for the violence that night was an ongoing feature of life in the neighbourhood. I kind of frame that as the white racial order in the neighborhood, but certainly as the community experienced, the kind of indiscriminate nature of the police violence was not kind of an order, it was a disorder. But in some ways, again, that feeds into my sense that it's a mix of grievances, a mix of targets, you know, and in that sense, disorder rather than a, you know, some kind of unified set of grievances that was motivating everybody out on the streets and connected
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A
to that complexity, but also motivation. I would love to talk a little bit about Lino Rivera, because in your telling, he is kind of the catalyst to a lot of the night's events, but there also is a flattening of his identity in terms of categorizing him as both African American, but the reality that he's Puerto Rican, and how that identity both lent community members to be supportive, but also a way of kind of distancing his ethnicity from, let's say, other interpretations. So I'd love for you to kind of situate Lino, especially in terms of his awareness, the lack of awareness that he sort of is the catalyst to this combustion in the neighborhood, and then also his reappearance in the legal proceedings and helping to demystify what I think many community members were concerned about, and that is police violence, particularly upon youth.
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So, yeah, so he's a. He's a very interesting figure.
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A
Yeah.
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Again, you know, the account suggests that, you know, he had been grabbed by the store detectives in Chris's department store and then ultimately released out the back door. And so the reports that came out of the store, primarily delivered by black woman shoppers who were in there, was that a black boy had been grabbed, and most of those observers would have only seen him for a split second or so when he was dragged through the store, and then nobody was aware that he'd been let out the back. So he went back home, you know, and was at home as the disorder was building, and then went back out on the streets to encounter some of that disorder which he had no idea had anything to do with him, and then go back home. And then the police would eventually track him down. Somebody had recorded his address and had phoned his address incorrectly. And so it took them a lot of hours to find him and then present him to the public. And then you get that really interesting moment in kind of racial identity that when he's presented as the. The boy that some people had claimed had been killed and others had claimed had been beaten. And all the discussion on the street was about it being a black boy. There was a, you know, a sizable body of opinion in Harlem that this was not the boy who had been in the store because he was not a black boy. And there were clearly people in Harlem for some time afterwards who thought that the police had just a boy and presented him because he didn't fit that sense of being a black boy. And the newspapers struggled with this as well about how they would report how they characterised him. So he's a dark skinned Puerto Rican. It's pretty clear that him being a black boy was what stirred the crowds on the street as the report circulated. It's not clear if he'd been identified as Puerto Rican, what if that would have made much of a difference in the reaction. You know, Harlem was very much primed to react to violence by the police, violence by white store owners against black shoppers. And so the precise identity of this particular boy may not have mattered too much for them. I think the really interesting wrinkle in here is that the Puerto Rican community didn't really respond to the violence, notwithstanding that Lino was Puerto Rican. And this is one of those interesting moments where they choose to distance themselves from the black community and don't want to be part of being associated with the violence, which I think is interesting given the press coverage. There are innumerable photographs of Lina Rivera published afterwards that would have been very. Made very recognizable as Puerto Rican. But this is a black Harlem problem as far as the Puerto Rican community recognize and respond to it. And the kinds of sources that I could find. I think the other interesting wrinkle here that the sources that I found and that the mapping of the riot turned up was that the attacks on businesses did spill into the Puerto Rican blocks to the south of 125th Street. And in those neighborhoods, Puerto Rican businesses were targeted in a way that black businesses were not being targeted in the rest of Harlem. And so the somewhat combustible politics between black Harlem and Puerto Rican or Spanish Harlem, Spanish speaking Harlem. Those tensions seemed to cut through the disorder. This wasn't something that seemed to bring black and Puerto Ricans together. It seemed to be something in which Puerto Ricans were targets alongside white businesses, not spared alongside back businesses. So there's a real complicated nexus going on around Leno Rivera. And so after those rumblings about the fact that, no, this can't be the boy, it was a black boy, he kind of drops out, he's back in court on some juvenile delinquent offences and been jumping subway gates to go back and forth backwards and forwards. And so he ended up with a far more public juvenile delinquency hearing about that in the aftermath of the disorder than he would have faced beforehand and then kind of receded. And the political and community discussions afterwards went on as if he had been a black boy, not a Puerto Rican. And again, I think that's definitely one of the complexities that I think is striking about this. He was on 125th street, heading south into the Puerto Rican neighborhoods, having got off the subway at 125th for some reason, rather than riding it further downtown. And so he was literally blurring boundaries by being there and crossing over. But those boundaries kind of reasserted themselves in the aftermath of the disorder. So, again, I think interesting for showing that there's more going on around race in Harlem in this period. And yet the political reaction didn't, in the end, retain those complexities. It became much more about black Harlem and Puerto Rican Harlem very much stayed out of it.
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A
And these complexities, I really believe the data and the visualization within the monograph does a really great job showing that and making it apparent. And you analyze eight different events that happen between March 19th and into the morning of March 20th. And I'm wondering, how does using these digital elements complicate the story in ways that I think your book is challenging previous understandings of that night? Traditionally, just focusing maybe on arrest or assault. By bringing in these eight different events, you are doing something different. Can you tell us more about that?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I wanted to categorize what was going on in order to kind of find the patterns, you know, and that's one of the huge challenges of working with data. You know, some of those categories are sort of baked into the sources. Some of them aren't. So you have to make a decision about, you know, how you want to group the events. And so, you know, most of the events we had came through the legal system. So I followed some of those legal categories. And in Other cases, we broke those apart. It obviously matters who's visiting vox violence on who. And so we separated those kinds of things out, but it was also about trying to find the complex patterns in that. And so one of the things that was very much missing from the historiography was the violence that was visited on whites in Harlem during the disorder. And so Sheryl Greenberg's analysis basically said there was no violence against whites in this. This disorder. And that, you know, it became pretty much clear, going through the details, that that was wrong, that there was quite extensive amounts of violence against whites, a little bit against police officers, other violence against storekeepers, and then attacks on people on the streets. And, you know, it had been pretty central to the way that disorder had been understood to leave that out and make this just about property and therefore just a kind of economic riot. And it's clear that while that, again, was true for some of the people on the street, it wasn't true for everybody. And so kind of identifying these different categories of violence and the different targets of them suddenly threw up that there were a whole variety of things going on. Some of that is about dealing with absence. So we can find the violence against whites, what we don't often find directly reported in the sources as police violence against community members on the streets. The police aren't interested in that, even though they're shooting indiscriminately throughout this disorder, you know, and so I spent a bit of time kind of identifying that there are a lot of, you know, black men with gunshot injuries amongst these reports that were not actually linked to police shootings. They're also at least two clear cases where the police shot black men, black boys, and a black boy in one case, on the street as well. And so pulling those out is kind of key to making sense of that. And so, again, it's very much about showing up that complexity, adding in the property violence, adding in the different kinds of violence, adding in the looting, which, again, is an interesting kind of complexity in terms of what's going on. Adding in fires, again, and this is a kind of interesting element versus the stories that will be told. There's a lot of arson and fire damage in the later violence in the 20th century. There's a tiny bit in Harlem, but not as much as the newspaper reports make it sound like, which in some ways makes sense, because most of these businesses are on the ground for residential buildings. So if you set fire to them, you'd be setting fire to large numbers of homes for black community members. And so, again, you Know, that kind of categorization is key to really surfacing the complexities and then mapping that kind of looks at, you know, kind of where that violence is happening. You know, I mentioned before the fact that there's violence down in, you know, down near 116th street, which is not a black neighborhood in this period. It's a Puerto Rican and Spanish speaking immigrant neighborhood and spilling right across to 5th Avenue all the way up into the neighborhoods where the businesses become, where there's greater proportion of black owned businesses. And so it's really spilling beyond those places that the violence had been sort of localized in, which tied it closer to the sort of earlier political protests and things. This violence went lots of places that had not been targets of protest. And then you can really see that the clustering of and targeting of that violence against white businesses when you look at where they're being attacked.
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A
And building on that, I was really compelled by the second half of the monograph where you're looking at the investigations and illegal proceedings aimed at trying to make sense of who did what. And what I really was interested in is this tension between the mayor's condition on the mayor's commission on condition in Harlem in terms of appointments, so the black community feeling like the mayor didn't do a good job selecting representatives. And then on the other side, in terms of legal proceedings, thinking about how the police to a certain extent were able to kind of avoid or evade being held responsible, especially in terms of your focus on Lloyd Hobbs. And I'm wondering if you can kind of reconcile for us what the community thought would happen out of this Mayo Commission. And then thinking about the legal infrastructure and realizing that maybe there were some entities that were able to be scapegoated at the same time.
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B
Right? Yeah. And so those are interestingly quite different stories. You know, one of the really striking things about the, about the legal story is how much the policing fails. You know, so they, you know, they make, they make a bunch of arrests during the disorder. And you know, very few of those people actually make their way through the legal system. A whole bunch of them, they don't even try to charge a whole bunch. They charge and can't provide evidence. And even when they, they do get charges, they're. They're much less than the charges that the police were seeking. And so, you know, the legal, the story told by those prosecutions vastly diminishes the violence because ultimately a lot of the more intense violence, the police just don't make arrests. They can't make arrests. And it's pretty clear and this is a relatively typical practice and disorder that what they seem to have been doing on the streets was basically just grabbing people around acts of violence without real attention to whether they were the people involved or not. And as a result, when they actually came to try and charge them, they couldn't. They had actually no evidence that they had taken part in this. So if you just look at the legal outcomes, the violence just fades away, but also the policing just comes out as massively ineffective, that they just really did not manage to apprehend any, you know, almost any of the people who were involved in the violence. Lloyd Hobbs is the 16 year old boy who was shot in the back and killed by a police officer. And again here the legal system fails to address the violence. So the evidence against him builds and builds. He shot on a street corner where quite a crowd had gathered. And this seems to have been one of the features of the disorder is that people came out to see what was going on and stood on the street and as was the culture at the time, gathered particularly on the street corners. Lloyd Hobbs is shot basically on a street corner running away from police in the back. And so there are innumerable people who saw the shooting. And over time the people in the community investigating that gather half a dozen people to testify that Lloyd Hobbs was shot. And they go twice to the grand jury. The grand jury was almost certainly all white in this period. And the grand jury refuses to indict the police officer who shot Lloyd Hobbs. And so that, you know, remains the other kind of violence that the legal system doesn't put in. And that's the one, as I said, really the one instance of police shooting that even made it into the legal system. It's pretty clear that the police shot innumerable people who only turn up really amongst the injured. And there's no police accountability. And this is again part of what the community was complaining against and would complain very vocally. They would really took over the public hearings afterwards, the mayor's commission, public hearings to make them about police violence in a way that the commission didn't really want them to be. So really an exercise in showing how the, you know, the legal system is not a reliable picture of the violence. But I think the really striking thing here was just how ineffective the police were that they, you know, the arrests they made were not lot of people they could prove were associated with violence. And though therefore the violence just fades away in the courts, the mayor's commission which is kind of operating alongside those is fascinating. I Mean, one of the things that really distinguishes the Commission, this is Mir LaGuardia we're talking about, who has a complicated relationship with the black community in New York. He is, in some ways, an ally. Their expectations of him, I think, were quite high. And so he sets this commission up to have an equal number of black and white members, which is really unheard of in the investigations of racial violence and will continue to be afterwards. It really distinguishes Harlem. But the black individuals they choose are very much establishment figures, and they're chosen very much by LaGuardia's Black allies to kind of represent that there are a lot of the white. There's a lot of liberal whites on this commission as well, from the aclu, people with, again, ties to the naacp, which is one of the reasons their report is, in the end, far more critical of conditions in Harlem than you might have otherwise expected it to be. But it did not include representatives of Harlem that at least some community members felt were really in touch with what the experience on Harlem street would be. And there were a lot of calls for people affiliated with community groups affiliated with the Communist Party to be part of this community group. And that was absolutely not what either the conventional black leadership in Harlem wanted or what LaGuardia wanted or his black allies wanted. They did get a. You know, the clergy were the other people that he initially left out, which was, again, a somewhat inexplicable condition for which they completely roasted him, and he did something about in the end. And again, the commissioners are just a fascinating group. They, you know, they left a lot of people unsatisfied, but they also held these public hearings that gave voice to the community, and the crowds who attended those hearings really hijacked the agenda to their benefit. And so, you know, there's a lot of criticism of the police and the report that's there because that's what the community stood up and asked for. You know, and the openness of those hearings allowed the Communist Party to send lawyers in. It allowed community groups to get. And people literally heckled and screamed and sort of set the agenda. A remarkable kind of set of moments that I think deserves sort of way more attention. That pushed that commission to tackle some things that might have not done otherwise, even though it was, in a lot of ways, a much more establishment group than it might have otherwise been. And people were definitely playing politics. And again, I think this is part of the complexity. The black establishment in Harlem really didn't want to deal with the more radical elements of this protest. They did not want black protests to be associated with violence. And so the NAACP was all over this in the background as well, trying to distance the community from the violence that had taken place on the streets. They didn't see it as serving their agenda and that, you know, they were really very anxious to. You know, they were one of the people arguing that this shouldn't be seen as a race riot. They did not want to be any attention to being drawn to violent conflict between blacks and whites in Harlem, which is something they saw as kind of working against their interests. So, oddly, again, they were struggling, in some ways to tell a story without violence that was sort of similar to the story without violence that the legal system produced. But again, they were interestingly pushed by the community to grapple with that more, and particularly to grapple with police violence. And the white liberals on the commission became absolutely incensed by the refusal to prosecute the policeman who shot Lloyd Hobbes, which was something that wasn't really a priority on their agenda. But when they gathered evidence and presented it and it was thrown out repeatedly, they were. But they really became incredibly angry. And that comes across in the reports that there was going. And again, these are aclu affiliated figures. They're willing to credit state violence, and they wanted accountability for it, and none came. And so I think that that, again, is partly the community and is partly the police and state city government response, Putting that down and pushing that establishment group a little bit, but to some slightly more radical inclusions and building on that.
- [39:14]
A
I think that frustration, but also that realization that violence was ever present is something that your book does a really great job returning to, especially in terms of 1943 and then again in 1964, and realizing that, you know, 1935 might have been maybe the catalyst, but it was never really resolved. So I'm wondering, what do you see as both sort of the synergies between 1935, 43, and 1964, but also what makes 1935 distinct from those other two dates?
- [39:46]
B
Right. Cause I think the key here is that 1935 is the first instance of the kind of violence that's gonna come afterwards. And so that's that. No race riot. So, you know, the quintessential 19th century race riot is white crowds attacking black communities. And that's. That's very obviously not happening here. And this is very much violence in a black community by black crowds. And again, that's what scared the Harlem establishment, that idea of that the violence was actually coming from the black community. And so there's no kind of framework for that before 1935. And so really, 1935 is that first instance. Now it's kind of missing some of the elements that are going to become more dominant. It's a much shorter outbreak of violence, less extensive than the ones that will come beforehand, which is why, in some ways, it hasn't got the attention. There hasn't been a book on it. Like there's been a book on 1943. There's a couple of books on 1964. But part of the way in which that makes sense is that the scale of violence there is much, much larger. It's the same model, I think it's the same kind of mix that I'd label disorder. That there are attacks on. Extensive attacks on businesses in 1943. And one of the things I'd love to have idle time to do is to kind of map the violence of 43 against 35. There's extensive. The information gathered on the 1943 riot by the government, interestingly, I think, is shaped by their understanding what happened in 1935. And so they struggle to really process the violence against property. So there's no real collection of data on what businesses were attacked in 1943. In 1935. In 1943, there's multiple pages that list every business that's attacked. They understand, if you like, what the violence is. And they kind of know what they're looking at and what they're looking for in a way they did not in 35. And so they're very much focused on that. It's also very much, you know, clearly targeted against police violence. But it spreads much further, wildly across Harlem in 43, even more than 35. And then, of course, 64 spreads outside of Harlem. Because the black community is spread outside of Harlem. So you've really got expanding scale, expanding intensity of their violence. So there's much more interpersonal violence in those subsequent riots than you're talking about in 1935. But the key really here is that 35, in a way that's been fuzzily discussed in the literature up to now, is that moment where we suddenly have a new form of racial violence that we're going to see more extensive and intensive versions of in 43 and 64. And again, for me, the fasc thing about looking at 43 and 64 is people know what's happening because they've seen it in 1935. In 1935, they don't know what's happening because they haven't seen it before. And the violence in all of those cases Kind of goes to the boundaries of the black neighborhood and it never encounters the white crowds that have characterized the violence before that. And I think, having said that, one of the things that, that all of that violence against property catalyzes is how much of the economic power in Harlem is still in white hands. They're destroying massive numbers of businesses because Harlem's businesses are overwhelmingly owned by whites, even though those people no longer live in the neighborhood. And that's true in 35 and in 43 in the post war period, a lot of those white business owners begin to sell off and the neighbourhood, you know, becomes, you know, the businesses become more black owned. And I don't have a sense of when that, if it really finishes up, that's something I became really curious about. But, you know, there's a, you know, and I've written about this in other contexts. That was one of the things that really struck us in 1920 is even though Harlem is a black residential neighborhood, there's a persistent white presence in it. And the business owners, you know, in the bus drivers, you know, in the school teachers, which is not just the police, which is the other kind of group that you understand, debt collectors. So all of these whites are coming and going in the neighborhood. And so that makes the tinder for this violence and produces some of the whites who are on the streets and targeted in 1935, but are kind of less present in those neighborhoods. As you go further through later on, one of my pushes for one of the reasons is there are targets for white violence, 35 is that this starts on 125th Street. And one of my pet peeves with popular understandings of Harlem is this idea of 125th street as the heart of Harlem. And it is absolutely not the heart of Harlem in this era. 135th street is the heart of Harlem. 125th street is the home to the big department stores and the theaters and the things that are both white owned but also catered to the white, still white neighborhoods south and west and east of black Harlem. And so it's a very racially mixed crowds on the street around 125th Street. So as the violence spills north, there aren't white targets other than the businesses. And that's going to be true in 43, it's going to be much less true. And 64 in a way that will change the nature of the violence.
- [45:36]
A
You mentioned really briefly that in your spare idle time, you'd love to kind of have that comparison between 1935 and 1943. But what are you working on now? What can listeners look forward to hearing or learning from you in the future?
- [45:52]
B
Very different projects, actually. And here I'm amongst the many people kind of impacted by what's happened to federal grant funding. I would very much have liked and had plans to go back to really reimagine digital Harlem and all this data we have on black life in the 1920s and 30s, particularly using some of the ways of thinking about humanity's data that have developed. But working at that kind of scale is not an individual project and the funding for that is very much gone. And so I've gone back to a project that I put aside a while ago to work on the right project. So. So I'm doing two things at the moment, which is unfortunately one of my tendencies. And so I'm writing a book on the history of undercover surveillance and private detectives between the Civil War and World War II. And what I'm really interested in there is how undercover surveillance was undertaken and the breadth of kinds of activities that are out there. So there's a section on criminal investigations involving Pinkerton detectives. There's a section on labour spies involving. Involving another private detective agency. There's a section on vice investigations involving the committee of 14 in New York. There's a section on divorce detectives. And I'm really interested there. There's a kind of digital spatial element there. I'm mapping investigation again to try and get a sense of its scope and intensity. But I think this is more likely to be a book, an effort to write some kind of narratives from the point of view of the private detectives. And so again, it's, you know, as I'm kind of want to do, this is very much at the granular level, tracking particular investigations and how they did what they did across the country and across those decades, winding up with the federal government taking over a lot of that work, particularly through the FBI. And so I'm in the weeds of writing about Pinkerton criminal investigations at the moment. And we've produced some really interesting maps of those investigations that hopefully will be intelligible enough to put out to the public next year. And then I've just started a project called Law in the Suburbs, looking at the role of the courts in the post 1945 suburbs. And I'm gonna use my local county, Fairfax county here in Virginia, as the focus there. There is a really great historical records centre at our local state trial court. And so I'm going to gather a bunch of those records. And what excites me as A legal historian about the state trial courts. Is there civil courts as well as criminal courts? And I've spent most of my career working on criminal courts. My first book was on the history of sexual violence in New York. Looking at the prosecution of rape and crimes against children. And there's a lot of criminal records. And obviously In Harlem and Disorder, as well as being a source for some of our other work on everyday life, all criminal. And there's a whole lot of other things that go on in the civil courts and a lot of criminal stuff that spills over that boundary that I've never been able to follow before. Because civil records are really hard to work on. So I'm really excited about looking at the whole cross section of law. Because where things end up in the law, what legal categories they end up in, is super arbitrary. So even something like violence doesn't just end up in murder or assault. It can be all sorts of places. And so if you're not looking broadly, you can't really see where it's happening. And so I'm interested in the first instance and just what's ending up in the courts. Cause we know almost nothing about what's happening in trial courts before the 1980s. But I'm also really interested in the kind of perspective on suburban life that the courts can tell us. And working with court records is really labour intensive. There's an awful lot of cuff you've got to wage through and understand about the law that I think puts off a lot of historians even. I'm certainly not a doctrine law person. I'm very much a social cultural historian. But I've been really captivated throughout my career by the kinds of stories that are lurking in the law, whatever the law is doing to them. And so I'm really interested in. No one else has tried to really mine what legal records tell us about suburban life. Notwithstanding that a lot of the questions that animate the historiography of the suburbs are about conflict and transition in those neighbourhoods. And so, again, I've really started at the very early stages of seeing what's in those legal records. And they've turned up some really fascinating things. There's a lot of interesting stuff on burglary and the criminal records that I sort of wasn't expecting. That really gets us inside people's houses. And then over on the civil side, there are divorce records, which are a really interesting source for kind of understanding the place of woman and their experiences in the suburbs. And then a whole lot of personal injury stuff around automobile accidents and things like that that I think take us into some of the realities about moving around. And then obviously one of the big questions is one of the things that's underlying all the work on Harlem, which is who gets to use the courts and in what ways. And so Fairfax county is a suburbanizing county in the 50s. It doesn't really become a major suburban county until the 70s and 80s. It's got a sizable black population in those earlier periods, and then by the 70s and 80s, a growing immigrant population. And I'm really interested in who is getting into the court system and in what ways and what kind of access they have and who's been targeted in ways that are, again, a part of what's going on there. And I think everything that I've read so far and everything I've done in my career suggests that it's a totally different kind of picture waiting to be found in the courts about just what the suburbs were like and, you know, who had the ability to play their conflicts out in different kinds of ways. So a different period for me, the post war period, but very much gathering records there while I write about my private detectives.
- [52:20]
A
Both projects sound incredibly fascinating, so I can't wait to read them whenever they're ready for the public. Thank you again for taking some time to share more about Harlem and a spatial history of how racial violence changed in 1935. And I look forward to welcoming you back to the show. If you'd like to come back, I'd love to.
- [52:39]
B
I really appreciate the chance to talk about these projects. Thank you so much for the invitation.
- [52:43]
C
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