#2 aug.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

On August 1, 1943, after a rumor spread that a white police officer had shot and killed a black soldier (he actually had been shot but not killed), residents of Harlem rioted. Most of the targets were white-owned businesses. On August 2, bystanders look at the merchandise torn out of a pawnshop on 145th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Photo: AP via the Denver Post

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The New York Knicks hired Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, seen here on August 2, 1958, as the first African-American player with an official contract in the National Basketball Association.

Photo: New York Daily News

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Greta Garbo en route to her native land, Sweden, from Grand Central Station, August 2, 1932. When she arrived in New York, she donned sunglasses, an upturned collar, and a hat with a downturned brim in an effort to go incognita.

Photo: Associated Press

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Harlem Riot of 1943

On August 1, 1943, a White patrol officer arrested a Black woman in Harlem for disturbing the peace. A Black soldier named Robert Bandy protested. The cop said that Bandy hit him, then tried to flee. Bandy said the cop had thrown his nightstick at him and, when he hesitated to return it, shot him. He received a superficial wound in his shoulder.

Pfc. Robert Bandy, a military policeman, in the prison ward of Sydenham Hospital, where he was taken after he was shot in the shoulder by Officer James Collins.

Rumor spread that Bandy had been killed, and the crowd outside the police station became violent. The riot lasted for two days and involved vandalism, looting, and the destruction of White-owned businesses in Harlem.

Smoke billows from an unoccupied automobile that was set on fire during the morning of August 2, 1943, after a night of destruction and looting.

Mayor LaGuardia met with Black leaders and went with them to Harlem, trying to scotch the rumor. He also made radio appeals to Harlem residents, urging them to return home.

Order was eventually restored after the mayor brought in thousands of police and civilian volunteers, but the damage was estimated at between $250,000 and $5 million ($4.4 million to $88 million in today's dollars). Six people died and over 700 were injured.

Policemen and volunteers recruited from all over the city wait outside the 123rd St. station house on August 2 for orders to help restore peace.

The riot died down by the night of August 2. It took the Department of Sanitation three days to clean up the neighborhood. LaGuardia had food delivered to Harlem residents and the Red Cross added some more. Because this was wartime, food was rationed and scarce.

August 2 was also James Baldwin's 19th birthday and the day of his father's funeral. "It seemed to me," Baldwin later wrote, "that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas."

All photos from the Associated Press; bottom photo by Harry Harris.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Arthur Murray and Louise Brooks (no, not that one) demonstrate his new "Recovery Dance" on August 2, 1933. In this step, they're doing a slow left turn to demonstrate prosperity rounding the corner. Murray dedicated it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Photo: Associated Press