Negro Shot In Harlem Riot

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30497, 20 July 1964, Page 11

Negro Shot In Harlem Riot

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) NEW YORK, July 19. Steel-helmeted police wielding revolvers and batons dispersed rioting Negro youths in New York early today after violence erupted in Harlem.

An unidentified Negro youth was shot and killed by a policeman as he tried- to hurl a brick at police during the sevenhour riot.

Four policemen were injured, none seriously. Hospitals said they had treated more than 80 people for minor injuries sustained in the riots. Police arrested more than 40 demonstrators, on charges ranging from disorderly com duct and assaulting police officers to burglary. The burglary charges .arose out of looting by roving gangs of youths in shops whose windows were smashed during the riots, police said. The rioting broke out after demonstrations late last night against the killing last Thursday of a young Negro schoolboy by an off-duty policeman. The policeman said that the boy had rushed at him with a knife and he shot him in self-defence. A crowd of demonstrators, estimated by police at more than 500, tried to enter the local police station. . When dissuaded from entering they began throwing bottles, stones and other objects at the police. Putting on steel helmets and drawing their truncheons, the police rushed at the demonstrators, firing hundreds of shots into the air in an attempt to . disperse them. It was seven hours before they calmed the angry crowd.

Police reinforcements and extra ammunition were rushed in. A Molotov cocktail was hurled into a police patrol car, slightly injuring one of its occupants.

Police officials . hurriedly called a meeting with leaders of the Harlem Negro community in a bid to end the rioting, the worst of its kind in New York for many years. Mr Louis Smith, an official of the Congress of Racial Equality, said that he saw six people, including one woman, taken to a local hospital with bullet wounds. Police could not confirm his statement. Several hundred Negro youths rioted in west Harlem early today after meeting to protest at the shooting of a Negro youth by a policeman last Thursday. The shooting on Thursday of 15-year-old James Powell by a white policeman set off city-wide protests by civil rights groups. The policeman said the boy threatened him with a knife. Today, shots were fired into a police station. A policeman walked into the station and said: “I have just been stabbed in the back.” His injury was not serious. A Molotov cocktail was thrown into a police patrol car near the station moments later. Papers in the car were burned, and one policeman in the car received minor burns.