This tag was created by Anonymous. 

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

Assault in the courts (9)

While fifty-four assaults appear in newspaper reports and hospital records, police made arrests in only nine cases, arresting twelve men and all one Black men.

Three of the arrests involved alleged assaults of police officers, including one for which a white man was arrested: Harry Gordon, one of the Communists who had picketed Kress' store at the very beginning of the disorder. The alleged assaults resulting in arrests were a mix of the forms reported in the disorder - two assaults by individuals, three by groups, two hit by objects, and one shooting (with no details surviving of the circumstances of Jackson's arrest). That mix suggests that no form of assault was more likely than another to lead to arrest.

<Add circumstances of arrests - anything distinctive vs what is in arrests page>

Magistrates held four of the twelve arrested, involved in half the assaults for which an arrest was made, for the Grand Jury. In one case, James Smitten, there is no information on the legal outcome. Of the men prosecuted for Disorderly Conduct in the Magistrates Court, the circumstances are unknown in one case, in one a man was allegedly part of a group that  attacked a white man, and in the others, charged as a group with shooting at police, there is no evidence anyone was injured and no weapons were found in the men's possession. The magistrate transferred Harry Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions, to be prosecuted for "simple" (misdemeanor) assault, involving a lesser level of violence, but he was discharged, likely because the officer he allegedly assaulted was the only witness. Of the four men Magistrates held for the grand jury, only one man had the charges against him dismissed - Douglas Cornelius, who was arrested for an attack by a group. The issue in that case was likely the identification of Cornelius as one of the assailants rather than a bystander. Thomas Wijstem, the victim of that assault, died several months later.

District Attorneys pursued more severe outcomes in assault cases than in other offenses coming out of the disorder, taking three of the four cases to trial (compared to only two of sixteen looting cases). However, strikingly few of the prosecutions produced convictions: a Magistrate convicted Richard Jackson and Rivers Wright of the lesser offense of disorderly conduct, and a jury convicted James Hughes of third degree (misdemeanor) assault for throwing a rock that hit Detective Henry Roge. None of those men received a prison sentence: a Magistrate sent Jackson sent to the workhouse for two days, and Wright for ten days, while a judge sent Hughes to the workhouse for three months. Those sentences reflected the limited violence of the assaults in the disorder in terms of both the lack of weapons and the limited injuries inflicted. A magistrate acquitted three of the group of men who allegedly shot at police of the lesser charge of disorderly conduct, unsurprisingly given the lack of any evidence they had committed a crime (The outcome of the prosecution of the fourth member of the group, Charles Alston is unknown as he was injured and did not appear in court with the others). Despite the prevalence of plea bargaining at this time, none of these men pled guilty to lesser offenses. Two juries also acquitted men put on trial, both in cases of assaults by blacks on whites. This was not a circumstance in which juries usually voted for acquittal unless there was a question about the identification of the defendant as the person who committed the assault. As the cases involved alleged assaults by groups, identification was likely an issue.

How do these outcomes compare with assault prosecutions outside the disorder?

As Part of Related Categories:

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag: