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

Assaults in the courts (13)

While fifty-four assaults appear in newspaper reports and hospital records, only thirteen men appeared in court charged with assault in relation to eight of those reported assaults. Already only encompassing a fraction of the violence of the disorder, those prosecutions resulted in outcomes that produced an even more limited picture. Eight of those men were ultimately not prosecuted for assault. There are no details of one of assaults other than that the same man, Vito Capozzio, made the complainant against two men, Richard Jackson and Salathel Smith, who were arrested by the same police officer. In the docket book the charge against them is annotated "fight," suggesting they may been arrested for fighting each other rather than having been involved in the disorder. They were prosecuted for disorderly conduct, not assault, an offense that did not involve violence. So too were four other Black men arrested for assault allegedly shot at a police officer, that charge, and the failure of police to find weapons in the men's possession and their release after their appearance in court, indicates that shooting did not occur, so only their arrest and appearance in court, not the assault, are included in the analysis as events. One additional man, Rivers Wright, allegedly part of a group that attacked a white man was also charged with disorderly conduct, likely indicating that he had been part of a crowd in the area but that police had no evidence that he participated in the assault. Magistrate Renaud did convict Jackson, Smith and Wright, but imposed very short sentences, two days in the workhouse for Jackson and Smith and ten days for Wright.

Magistrates transferred Harry Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions, to be prosecuted for "simple" (misdemeanor) assault, involving a lesser level of violence, and sent four of the twelve arrested, involved in half the assaults for which an arrest was made, to the Grand Jury. James Smitten, who was arraigned in the Night Court during the disorder, did not appear in any other sources, so the outcome of his prosecution was unknown. Gordon, charged with assaulting a police officer and initially associated with the Communists arrested at the beginning of the disorder, was initially reported as likely to be sent to the grand jury. However, police could not produce evidence to support a charge of felony assault. They did continue to investigate his case for far longer than anyone else arrested in the disorder, with his trial the last, seven months later. Gordon was convicted, but the offense and his sentence are unknown. 

Of the four men Magistrates held for the grand jury, one, Douglas Cornelius, had no case file in the District Attorney's records, and there was no information on the outcome of the prosecution in other sources. All three of the others were indicted. Despite the prevalence of plea bargaining in this period, they all went to trial in the Court of General Sessions. Only one jury voted for a conviction, of James Hughes for throwing a rock that hit Detective Henry Roge, but only for misdemeanor assault. The judge sentenced him to only three months in the workhouse, indicating that he and the jury both believed Hughes' target had been the store window not the detective. Juries acquitted the other two men put on trial, both in cases of assaults by Black men on white men. 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.

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