On this day in New York · July 16, 1964
A Police Killing Ignites Harlem
The shooting of a fifteen-year-old boy by an off-duty police lieutenant set off six nights of unrest in Harlem, a preview of the summers that followed across urban America.
The facts
- Dates
- July 16 to 22, 1964
- Location
- Harlem, and then Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
- Trigger
- The fatal police shooting of 15-year-old James Powell
- Toll
- One dead, more than 100 injured, hundreds arrested
On the morning of July 16, 1964, an off-duty New York police lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan, shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-year-old Black student, outside an apartment building on the Upper East Side. Within hours the anger moved uptown to Harlem, where crowds confronted police outside the station house on West 123rd Street. Six nights of unrest followed across Harlem and then Bedford-Stuyvesant, leaving one person dead, more than a hundred injured, and hundreds arrested. It was the first of the urban uprisings that would come to define the mid-1960s, and it happened in New York first.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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It began after James Powell, a 15-year-old African American, was shot and killed by police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan in front of Powell's friends
Harlem riot of 1964, Wikipedia
Source: Harlem riot of 1964, Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Harlem 1964 came a year before Watts and set the pattern for a decade of long, hot summers: a police killing, a community's fury, and a city caught unprepared. The questions it forced open about policing and Black New York have never fully closed.
Sources
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