HARLEM SHOOTING BEGINS AGAIN

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30499, 22 July 1964, Page 17

HARLEM SHOOTING BEGINS AGAIN

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, July 21. Shooting broke out in a Harlem tavern early today and police rushed six persons to a hospital in the third outbreak of violence in the Negro area in as many nights, United Press International reported. Gunfire was in and near a bar and grill on Eighth avenue in the area where rioting and looting have occurred since Saturday night.

The extent of the victims’ injuries or the cause of the shooting was not immediately learned. Soon after midnight, a makeshift fire bomb was hurled into a Harlem pharmacy, touching off a fire which was quickly controlled. Whites Warned The situation in Harlem, America’s largest Negro community, was so tense that James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.0.R.E.), warned whites, including white members of his own organisation, to stay out of the area for their own safety. In a separate unrelated incident, police sounded the riot call in the BedfordStuyvesant area of Brooklyn, where a C.O.R.E. rally had been in progress.

Bottles were thrown as a crowd of about 300 Negroes surged through the streets—apparently in sympathy with the Negroes who have been rioting in Harlem in Manhattan—police said, the Associated Press reported. Police gave this description of the scene in the vicinity of Fulton street and Nostrand avenue: “About 100 Negroes, allied with the Congress of Racial Equality, marched several blocks and

jammed the intersection for an hour to block traffic. “The C.O.R.E. demonstrators appeared calm and displayed no violence. “But after they dispersed, the crowd of about. 300 unruly Negroes surged through the streets, and some of them threw bottles. Several store windows were smashed and there was looting.” Shots Over Heads

Earlier police fired shots over the heads of a crowd of about 1000 Negroes who marched down one of Harlem’s main streets chanting such slogans as “We want justice—down with whitey” (a term for white people), Reuter reported. No-one was reported hurt In another incident police clashed briefly with groups of Negroes tossing bottles at them. Some demonstrators carried posters bearing a picture of Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan bearing the caption “Wanted for Murder.”

It was the shooting by Gilligan of a 15-year-old Negro boy last Thursday which sparked off the week-end violence in which one man was killed, more than 120 injured and 108 arrested. New York’s Acting Mayor, Mr Paul Screvane, announced ‘hat Lieutenant Gilligan’s case would be presented to a grand jury today and “all the facts would be brought out.”