Twenty persons were injured and ten arrested following a riot between Communists and Zionists, in Brownsville, the thickly populated Jewish district of Brooklyn. The fight started when a Negro orator, Harold Williams, addressing an open-air Communist meeting, at Stone and Pitkin Avenues, to protest the anti-Communist attacks in Gastonia, N. C., exclaimed: “Why don’t you all become Communists?”
“He’s an Arab,” several in the crowd shouted. This was the signal for an attack by the crowd of 2,000, in which the orator was pulled from his box and pummeled by the crowd until he was rescued by a policeman.
Three hundred reserves were required to quell the disturbance. Quiet was restored only after many heads had been broken and a number of store windows smashed. Street traffic was halted for twenty minutes.
Among those arrested in addition to to the Negro speaker were Samuel Cohen, Hyman Kusher, Sophie Marion, Bessie Cohen, Harry Yaris. Max Gibel, Herman Gordon, Jack Harris, and Julius Cohen.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
