At Eighth Avenue and West 41st Street in Manhattan, also known as the “Tenderloin District,” plain-clothed Det. Robert Thorpe of the West 47th Street stationhouse was arresting a 20-year-old, local woman named May Enoch with a charge of “loitering.” Her common law husband, a 22-year-old Black man named Arthur Harris, who was in a nearby cigar store, came outside and saw Thorpe, he later said, “manhandling his woman.” It was a sweltering, hot night, August 12, 1900, which reported a temperature of 91-degrees, and a neighborhood which had been brewing bad racial relations for years. A crowd of other Black men gathered and started fighting with the undercover Officer. In the melee, Harris, who later said he was clubbed, pulled a “penknife” and stabbed Thorpe two times. He then fled the scene and later fled the City.
Police arrested Samuel Felneth, a 37-year-old friend of Harris. Felneth was remanded pending investigation. May Enoch, who lived with Harris at 241 West 41st Street, ran home and was later arrested and sent to the House of Detention. Thorpe was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital on Ninth Avenue, where, the next day, he succumbed to his wounds. But, the incident was far from over.
With Police outraged at the death of one of their own, and, as the New York Times reported at the time, race relations in that area between Whites and Blacks “simmering for years,” Hell’s Kitchen exploded into a violent “race riot” that lasted almost a month.
Local White New Yorkers went on a rampage and the riot stretched down Eighth Avenue from West 30th to West 42nd Street. Blacks were randomly dragged from cars, bikes, stores, streets, trolleys, bars, and restaurants, and beaten in the streets, and Whites screamed about lynching. Black men retaliated, arming themselves with guns from pawn shops. Cops were attacked, with objects thrown at them from windows and from crowds while they patrolled. A free-for-all ensued. While initially the riot was able to be brought into control temporarily by a thunderstorm, a second incident reignited the tensions.
While Det. Thorpe was being waked in his sibling’s home, also nearby in Hell’s Kitchen, White female mourners outside the residence were approached by a drunken Black man who reportedly pulled a firearm. A White man nearby then assaulted the drunk, who was arrested. A different Black man with a firearm approached the crowd gathering outside the wake, prompting a group of Whites to attack him, and that set off another brutal melee that lasted for days and days on end.
Four stationhouses were called in to quell the rioting. Blacks, Whites, as well as police, were severely beaten and beat others, including inside the stationhouses, and many people were injured severely, prompting civilian outcry about police brutality, which was chronicled by witnesses and reporters, and later in inquests about the mob violence. In the hub-bub, the police had also arrested the wrong man for the stabbing of Thorpe. But a boy whose brother was a trolley car conductor (who heard gossip) went to one of the police stationhouses to say he knew where the real attacker had fled, south of the City: first to Philadelphia, then to Washington, DC.
On August 16, 1900, Det. Thorpe’s killer, Arthur Harris, was arrested at his mother’s house in the District of Columbia. Harris was unaware there was any riot resulting from his encounter with Thorpe, and he also seemed not to know that Thorpe was even a policeman or had died from his wounds. Eventually, Harris was tried in New York and found guilty of murder in the second degree. He was sentence to life in prison at Sing, Sing, and died December 20, 1908.
Thorpe’s funeral was reported by the New York Times to be, “the largest ever given to a policeman.” While the newspaper noted the small, private wake and funeral service at the home of Thorpe’s brother and sister on Ninth Avenue, they also reported that at least 10,000 people lined the streets of Hell’s Kitchen for the police funeral. Nearly 100 carriages followed the hearse. Det. Thorpe was buried in Green Wood Cemetery. His fiancée, a woman named Lizzie Murray (who was the daughter of the Commander of the 20 Precinct), reportedly fell very ill after the stress of the murder and resulting riots, since she and Thorpe had been making plans for their September wedding in Manhattan.
You can read the fascinating coverage of the incident and resulting riots in the New York Times articles below, which were published in the newspaper in August of 1900:
Thorpe – Race Riot on West Side NY Times
Thorpe – Capture of Arthur Harris NY Times 8-17-1900
Thorpe – Police In Control of Riotous District 1900 NY Times
Thorpe – West Side Riot Broken NY Times
Considered the largest racial riot in New York City since the 1863 Civil War Draft Riots, you can read more information online in the article “Race Riot, 1900: A Study of Ethnic Violence,” by Gilbert Osofsky in the Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1963), now at jstor.org
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2294487
