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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 stationhouse on West 123rd Street were already full with others arrested during the disorder. Police transported Patterson and eighty-nine others to Police Headquarters, where they were housed in ?. 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. <What Patterson said, according to HT - also Daily Mirror, NY Sun, BDE?> <Harry Gordon the focus of stories of this line-up>

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 be charged 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.

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