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

Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store looted

Benjamin Zelvin locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11.30 PM on March 19. When he returned to open the store on March 20, he found the store windows smashed and jewelry valued at $75 missing. Zelvin lived far from Harlem, at 2159 83rd Street in Brooklyn, so apparently had not heard news of the disorder in time to return to his store earlier. Officer Astel of the 25th Precinct had arrested two men, John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, and Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, earlier that morning, around 2.15 AM, at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street, and reported that he found on them a quantity of jewelry, which the men admitted they had taken from Zelvin's store. The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where he found all the windows broken. Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock the value of the jewelry is initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. The value may have been even less, as the grand jury reduced the felony charge against the men to a misdemeanor, a change only possible if the goods they had taken were worth less than $25.

There is no newspaper coverage of the looting; Henry and Leacock appear only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested published in black newspapers and the New York Evening Journal. The details come from the District Attorney's case file; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information is from the Magistrate Court affidavit.  The 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men.

Zelvin appears in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge an additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary (the only other individual charged for an offense related to the disorder in the court that day is John Henry, although Zelvin is not listed as the complainant in that case). Goodwin appears only in the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; there are no details of his alleged crime. If he did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they were of little value. When Goodwin appears again the charge is reduced to petit larceny and the Magistrate transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. Like Henry and Leacock, the Police Blotter records that the judges convicted him.

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