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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Arthur Bennett arrested

Sometime during the disorder, Detective Perretti of the 6th Division arrested Arthur Bennett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, for allegedly breaking windows in the drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of 127th Street. Perretti likely arrested a second man, James Bright, also a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, at the same time, also for breaking the store's windows. There was no information on the circumstances of the arrests. Police had arrested Julian Rogers for breaking windows in William Gindin's store a few buildings to the south around 11:20 PM, so officers likely arrested Bright and Bennett soon after, around 11:30 PM. Late in the disorder, other officers made arrests for alleged looting at Frank De Thomas' candy store next to the drug store on West 127th Street and at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store two buildings north on Lenox Avenue. Bennett did not live close to the store, but eight blocks south, at 48 West 119th Street.



A story in the Home News was the only evidence that connected Bennett and James Bright to 339 Lenox Avenue. Bennett appeared in lists of those charged with disorderly conduct published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Inexplicably, the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded "Annoyed pedestrians" as the charge against him; no one else arrested during the disorder other than Bright was charged with that offense. Bennett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with disorderly conduct, with Detective Perretti recorded in the docket book as the arresting officer. He alleged that Bennett had thrown "stones through the window of the store at 339 Lenox Ave.," according to the Home News story on those proceedings. However, if police had evidence of such an attack Bright would have been charged with malicious mischief. Charging him instead with disorderly conduct generally indicated that they only had evidence that he had been in the crowd around the store when the windows were broken. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bennett of disorderly conduct. He returned to the court for sentencing on March 23, and received a term of one month in the workhouse "for breaking windows" from Magistrate Renaud in proceedings reported in the Afro-American, New York Age, New York Daily News, and New York Times. None of those stories gave an address for the store whose windows Bennett had allegedly broken.

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