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

Aubrey Patterson arrested

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 is named in the list of those arrested for burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the list in the New York Evening Journal. No one is recorded as the complainant against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.

By the time Baumann brought Patterson to the 28th Precinct, the cells in the station house on West 123rd Street were already full with others arrested during the disorder. Police transported Patterson and eighty-nine others to Police Headquarters; even there the cells were insufficent, with some held in the Photographic Gallery, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. On the morning of March 20, police put this group in a line-up and detectives questioned them in front of reporters before they were put into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Two newspapers quoted Patterson's responses. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle did so to make fun of him: ""I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt," said Aubert 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, by contrast, quoted Patterson answering questions:  "Aubrey Paterson, of 83 East 113th Street, a light-skinned Negro, told Captain Dillon: "I am a citizen of this great metropolis. I was born on 132d Street. I do laboring in the day time and I go to school at night."" (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. Magistrate Renaud remanded him in custody on $100 bail. When Patterson appeared in court again, on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged him, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.

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