#aug. 1

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The Fifth Bombing Squadron of the U.S. Army flies over Manhattan on August 1, 1939, on its way to the air display at Dayton, Ohio.

Photo: Associated Press

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Kids group around the striking exhibition of life on earth 120,000,000 years ago, in Tyrannosaurus Hall, opened to the public at the American Museum of Natural History on August 1, 1956. The hall, named for the king of the dinosaurs, is said to have the world's most comprehensive display of cretaceous dinosaurs. This tyrannosauus is 45 feet long and 20 feet high.

Photo: Robert Kradin for the AP via Insider.com

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Maxine Brown, who was said to have the largest number of dolls in the city, takes them all for a ride through the park, August 1, 1922. Miss Brown had more than 200 dolls in her collection, and each received special attention in the matter of dress.

Photo: Getty Images via Fine Art America

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More than 30,000 people turned out at Union Square for a Communist demonstration celebration the founding of the Soviet Union, August 1, 1929. Placards read "Defend the Soviet Union" and "In Unity With the Revolutionary Masses We Will Defeat the Imperialist War." Communists around the city "struck" for one hour to attend the demonstration.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images/Fine Art America

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U.S. military planes fly in formation high above the mooring mast at the top of the Empire State Building, August 1, 1947. This was part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the establishment of a special air branch within the Army Signal Corps, which eventually became the Army Air Forces and then the U.S. Air Force.

Photo: NY Sun via the Associated Press

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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.

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Rusty Eads's enthusiasm for the water doesn't match his sister Beatrice's as they play at the East 23rd Street pool in Manhattan, August 1, 1947.

Photo: Tom Watson for the NY Daily News

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Women under an umbrella at Coney Island, August 1, 1935.

Photo: Lusha Nelson via Fine Art America