Sources

District Attorney's Closed Case Files

The DA's files -- the files of the officials responsible for prosecuting offenders -- include all the felony cases in which a Magistrate held the defendant for trial. Each case file includes the Magistrate's Court forms, and can include witness statements, transcripts of trials and grand jury hearings, the prosecutor's notes and memos, and items of evidence. Rather than hardened criminals, most of those who appear in these records are ordinary blacks who had been caught once breaking the law, usually acting out of desperation or poverty. The files also shed light on the lives of witnesses and others only incidentally involved in the alleged crime.

Our sample consists of ???? cases, which constitute all those that occurred within the boundaries of Harlem in 1935.

Probation Department Case Files

The Probation Department was created in 1927, but for two years prior to that the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York funded a bureau to establish the value of probation. Each file contained a 3-4 page investigation report detailing a convicted individual's family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. If the judge subsequently placed that individual on probation, the file would also contain a record of his supervision, consisting of brief notes about those facets of his life for a period of anywhere from 1 to 5 years. Those placed on probation were first offenders deemed not to be anti-social.

According to A Decade of Probation: A Study and Report, a book written by the Chief Probation Officer, Irving Halpern, in 1939, almost 7000 blacks were investigated from 1927 to 1936, all aged over sixteen years, and all but 5% men. The percentage of blacks among those investigated climbed steadily from 23% in 1927 to 38% in 1936. Just how many blacks were placed on probation is unclear: twenty-two percent of all those investigated were placed under supervision, but the available records do not break down that statistic by race.

We gathered all the files from 1935 for residents of Harlem finding ??? individuals, ?? of whom were placed on probation. These records provide the information for maps of individual's lives on the website.

Newspapers

  • These records are available on microfilm at the New York Public Library and/or online in Proquest's Historical Newspaper Collection or at Newspapers.com.

Two major black newspapers were published in Harlem in the 1920s, The New York Age and The New York Amsterdam News. Both were published weekly, the Age on Saturdays, and the News on Wednesdays. The Age was 8 pages in length in 1920, expanding to 10 pages by 1930. Edited in these years by Fred Moore and associated with Booker T Washington, it devoted considerably less space to Harlem news than its competitor, and promoted middle-class respectability. The News was twice the length of its competitor, and published more sensational stories. (What issues around the riot are missing). Our database contains every location mentioned in the all issues of both those newspapers from 1935: we examined not just the news stories, but also the sports pages, social pages, news from churches and fraternal organizations, and advertisements. The only information we did not enter was the classified advertisements, which included very large numbers of rooms and apartments for rent that would have been too time consuming to enter. For reports of the riot, in addition to all the publications in Proquest's Historical Newspaper Collection and Newspapers.com, we also examined the following newspapers available on microfilm at NYPL:

Papers of Mayor LaGuardia

The papers of NYC's mayor include material related to the Mayor’s Committee on Conditions in Harlem, together with clippings collected from NYC newspapers. Among this material is a census of businesses in Harlem gathered in the second half of 1935. All of the information on individual businesses recorded in this census has been entered in the database.

W.P.A. Writers Program Collection (WPA)

Research on institutions and life in Harlem, compiled in the late 1930s, but referring to the history of the neighborhood