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• 1 2021-09-08T14:53:39+00:00 Aubrey Patterson arrested 30 plain 2024-01-17T20:20:57+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Baumann of the 11th Precinct arrested Aubrey Patterson, a twenty-one-year-old Black man who lived at 81 East 113th Street. Baumann charged him with burglary, with a note in the 28th Precinct police blotter recording that Patterson "Burglarised store during riot." Patterson was named in the list of those arrested for burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the list in the New York Evening Journal. No one was recorded as the complainant against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  Police transported Patterson and ninety-five others to Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20 after the disorder. That group was then put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters before police put them back into patrol wagons and drove them uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Three of the four newspaper stories about the line-up mentioned Patterson. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle did so to make fun of him: "'I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt,' said Aubery Patterson, colored, of 83 E. 113th St. Manhattan, in explaining (amid laughter) why he didn't want to discuss the charge of burglary against him." The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun by contrast, quoted Patterson answering questions, although only the New York Sun reported the questions: "'Are you a citizen?' Capt. Dillon asked this prisoner, who had identified himself as Aubrey Patterson, of 83 East 113th Street. 'I am a citizen of this great metropolis,' replied Patterson. I was born in this metropolis on 132d Street.' 'What do you do for a living?' 'I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime.'" The story framed that exchange by denigrating Patterson as having "assumed a pompous air when questioned by Acting Capt. Dillon and gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions." The New York Herald Tribune did not offer any similar judgement but did add that Patterson was "a light-skinned Negro." (The only other individual quoted in stories about the line-up was Harry Gordon, one of the white men arrested at the start of the disorder).
  
  In the Harlem Magistrates Court, prosecutors charged Patterson with disorderly conduct, not burglary. That charge likely indicates that police had no evidence that he had either entered a store or taken merchandise, so could not charge him with burglary or even attempted burglary, or with larceny. Patterson was one of a small number of those arrested during the disorder who was recorded as having had an attorney appear for him, in his case "T. French," whose offices were at 200 West 131st Street. He told a MCCH investigator that French was "a friend," and that the ILD had also offered to defend him. Magistrate Renaud remanded Patterson in custody on $100 bail. When he appeared in court again, on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged Patterson, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  Patterson was later interviewed by a MCCH investigator, identified as "A Militant Negro Student of the Harlem Evening High School, 116th St & Lenox Avenue." The questions focused on the existence of a united front and any interracial campaigns being carried on by the National Student League or others, as part of MCCH research into radical groups in Harlem. Patterson told the interviewer he had been a student at the evening high since 1932. "Studying" was the occupation he gave when he registered for the draft five years after the disorder, in 1940. In April of that year a census enumerator recorded Patterson and his widowed mother still living at 83 East 113th Street; by October, when he registered for the draft, their address was several buildings further east, 110 East 113th Street.