"To show who was in charge" Police repression of New York City's black population at the turn of the twentieth century

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 31, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 799-819

  Sacks, Marcy S ^a  

^a ALBION COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

African American; Police; Race relations; Stereotypes; Urban

Indexed keywords

ETHNICITY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; RACE; TWENTIETH CENTURY; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN SOCIETY;

NEW YORK [NEW YORK (STT)]; NEW YORK [UNITED STATES]; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 24644520529     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144205278167     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. Lynne Duke, "Jury Acquits 4 N.Y. Officers," Washington Post, February 26, 2000, A1;
2. Michael Grunwald, "Torture Trial, Shooting Put Giuliani, NYPD on Defensive," Washington Post, March 30, 1999, A2;
3. and Human Rights Watch, "Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States. New York: Incidents," http:// www.hrw.org/reports98/police/uspo102.htm#TopOfPage (accessed February 27, 2002).
4. See, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union, "ACLU and CA Civil Rights Groups Call for Major Police Reforms in Sacramento," http://www.aclu.org/PolicePractices/ PolicePractices.cfm?ID=11853&c=118 (accessed March 3, 2003);
5. and the Institute on Race and Poverty, "Components of Racial Profiling Legislation," http://www.instituteonraceandpoverty.org/ publications/racialprofiling.html (accessed March 3, 2003).
6. Christopher P. Thale, "Civilizing New York City: Police Patrol, 1880-1915" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1995),104-6,109. Thale acknowledges the unique experience encountered by New York's black population in its interactions with the city's police officers. However, by his own admission, his study focuses little on ethnicity as "the driving force under police behavior," leaving us with a continued need to separately study the black experience (p. 110);
7. Seth Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865-1920 (New York, 1965), 222;
8. New York City Police Department Annual Report (New York, 1890-1905).
9. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1963; Chicago, 1996), 3, 8;
10. Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 221.
11. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (New York, 1908), 130;
12. "Negroes Leaving the South," New York Times, March 18, 1901, 2;
13. "Negroes Leave the South," New York Times, November 24, 1892, 1.
14. James McCabe, New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (Philadelphia, 1881), 144;
15. Anonymous Letter to Mayor Seth Low, June 2, 1903, box 5, folder 6, Seth Low Papers, New York Municipal Archives;
16. Frances Legrange to Mayor William Gaynor, 1912, box 56, folder 2, William Gaynor Papers, New York Municipal Archives;
17. and Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana, IL, 1990), 24.
18. Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America: 1860-1920 (Cambridge, UK, 1981), 158;
19. Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 85;
20. Jay Stuart Berman, "Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner of New York: A Study of Progressive Police Reform" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1985), 179;
21. Jesse T. Todd Jr., "Battling Satan in the City: Charles Henry Parkhurst and Municipal Redemption in Gilded Age New York," American Presbyterians 71 (Winter 1993): 243-52.
22. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992), 274-75.
23. Ibid., 274-75.
24. John H. Warren Jr., Thirty Years' Battle with Crime, or the Crying Shame of New York (Poughkeepsie, NY, 1874), 110-11.
25. See, for example, Clifford G. Roe, The Great War on White Slavery: Or Fighting for the Protection of Our Girls (n.p., 1911);
26. George J. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (New York, 1913), 164.
27. Frances Kellor, Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment (New York, 1915), 229-30;
28. Warren, Thirty Years' Battle, 115.
29. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution, 45, 295-96.
30. See, for example, Committee of Fourteen Papers, box 28, folders 1910, 1910-12, 1912, Invest. Rep. 1912, New York Public Library;
31. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 209.
32. George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York City Police Chief (New York, 1887),485, 486-87;
33. H. B. Gibbud, The Story of Nellie Conroy (New York, 1887), 4;
34. McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, 100;
35. Jimmy Durante and Jack Kofoed, Night Clubs (New York, 1931), 15-16.
36. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report, 1912 (New York, 1913), 24;
37. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report, 1913 (New York, 1914), 37;
38. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report, 1914 (New York, 1915), 15;
39. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report, 1915 (New York, 1916), 1, 26, 58;
40. and Augustine Costello, Our Police Protectors (New York, 1885), 351 (emphasis added).
41. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995), frontispiece;
42. Osofsky, Harlem, 45.
43. Interview with Samuel J. Battle, February 1960, pp. 21, 28, 30, Columbia University Oral History Research Office;
44. and Thale, "Civilizing New York City," 107-10.
45. Cornelius W. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights (New York, 1931), 84-86.
46. Willoughby C. Waterman, Prostitution and Its Repression in New York City, 1900-1931 (New York, 1932), 13.
47. George Weekes to Mayor Gaynor, 1912, box 54, folder 3, William Gaynor Papers, New York Municipal Archives.
48. Jacob Riis, The Battle with the Slum (New York, 1902), 110-11;
49. Jeff Kisseloff, ed., You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (San Diego, CA, 1989), 190;
50. Anonymous letter to Mayor Gaynor, 1911, box 35, folder 3, William Gaynor Papers, New York Municipal Archives; and Anonymous letter to Mayor Gaynor, 1912, box 77, folder 3, William Gaynor Papers, New York Municipal Archives.
51. Thomas Jesse Jones, The Sociology of a New York City Block (New York, 1904), 35, 103;
52. U.S. Department of Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Thirteenth Census: 1910, pt. III: Population (Washington, DC, 1914), 253-58;
53. Interview with Samuel J. Battle, February 1960, transcript, p. 35, Schomburg Center Clipping File, Schomburg Library for Research in Black Culture;
54. Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (Boston, 1976), 290;
55. Osofsky, Harlem, 12-13;
56. and Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York, 1951), 275.
57. Mary White Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York, 1947), 35;
58. Seth M. Scheiner, "The New York City Negro and the Tenement, 1880-1910," New York History 45 (October 1964): 307;
59. Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 190, 268;
60. Anonymous letter to Mayor John Mitchell, 1914, box 127, folder 9, John P. Mitchell Papers, New York Municipal Archives; and Interview with Samuel J. Battle, p. 21, Columbia University Oral History Research Office.
61. Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 190.
62. Bureau of Municipal Research, "A Report on the Homes and Family Budgets of 100 Patrolmen, Submitted to the Aldermanic Committee on Police Investigation as of March 31, 1913," in Board of Aldermen Police in New York City: An Investigation (New York, 1971), 4507.
63. New York Times, July 20, 1905, 12;
64. and New York Age, July 27, 1905, 1.
65. New York Times, July 20, 1905, 12;
66. and New York Times, July 25, 1905, 12.
67. Osofsky, Harlem, 96;
68. New York Age, March 7, 1907, 1.
69. Osofsky, Harlem, 107;
70. The Crisis, vol. 9, February 1915, 168;
71. and New York Times quoted in Mary White Ovington, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder Ralph E. Luker (New York, 1995), 51.
72. The New York Times extensively covered the shifting Harlem population and the ensuing tensions in dozens of articles between 1904 and 1912.
73. Joseph S. Fried to Mayor Gaynor, 1913, box 77, folder 1, William Gaynor Papers, New York Municipal Archives.
74. Ludwig Stern to Mayor Mitchel, 1915, box 155, folder 2, John P. Mitchel Papers, New York Municipal Archives; Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem, 1900-1950 (New York, 1981), 59.
75. Frances Blascoer, Colored School Children in New York (1915; New York, 1970), 23.
76. Richard R. Wright Jr., "Recent Improvement in Housing among Negroes in the North," Southern Workman 37 (November 1908): 602;
77. Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, IL, 1976), 48-49;
78. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, chap. 10.
79. A. Clayton Powell, Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York, 1938), 49-57, 68.
80. Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 129.
81. Police Commissioner William McAdoo to Mayor George McClellan, November 6, 1905, box 20, folder 4, George B. McClellan Papers, New York Municipal Archives.
82. W.T. Stead, Satan's Invisible World Displayed, or Despairing Democracy (New York, 1897), 96-97, 102;
83. Osofsky, Harlem, 14. In 1905, Schmittberger was accused of using excessive violence in a raid on a gambling house occupied by white and black patrons. When no complainants appeared at the hearings, the matter was dismissed. McAdoo to McClellan, November 6, 1905, box 20, folder 4, George B. McClellan Papers, New York Municipal Archives.
84. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 64, 72, 111;
85. Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 132.
86. Osofsky, Harlem, 146-47.
87. E. F. Dyckoff, "A Negro City in New York," The Outlook 108 (December 23, 1914): 952.
88. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report, 1915-1916 (New York, 1917), 86;
89. and Osofsky, Harlem, 146.
90. William Fielding Ogburn, "The Richmond Negro in New York City: His Social Mind as Seen in His Pleasures" (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1909), 51-52; New York Times, July 13, 1903, 1.
91. New York State Supreme Court Records, April 25, 1913, box 10546, pp. 16, 17, 29, New York Municipal Archives.
92. Department of Probation Records, 1911, Case 727, Sydney White, box 2, New York Municipal Archives; and Department of Probation Records, 1911, Case 653, John Place, box 2, New York Municipal Archives.
93. Department of Probation Records, 1910, Case 431, Frank Miller, box 1, New York Municipal Archives.
94. Department of Probation Records, 1914, Case 2934, Richard Boyce, box 10, New York Municipal Archives.
95. Department of Probation Records, 1912, Case 1716, Walter F. Saunders, box 5, New York Municipal Archives; Department of Probation Records, 1911, Case 653, John Place, box 2, New York Municipal Archives; Department of Probation Records, 1912, Case 1807, Violet Jones, box 6, New York Municipal Archives; and Department of Probation Records, 1911, Case 924, Frances Fischer, box 3, New York Municipal Archives.
96. Department of Probation Records, 1910, Case 458, Isaac Glasper, box 1, New York Municipal Archives; Department of Probation Records, Case 653, John Place; and Department of Probation Records, Case 924, Frances Fischer.