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

Charles De Souse arrested

Charles De Souse, a twenty-seven-year-old Black West Indian man, was recorded in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book as charged with disorderly conduct on March 20. That appearance was mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune and Home News on March 21 and the New York Age on March 30. He also appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but not in any of the lists published in white newspapers. De Souse was listed among those charged with riot, the initial charge recorded for many of those arrested during the disorder. Several of the others listed as facing that charge were identified as also charged with burglary; that De Souse was not suggests he had not been arrested for alleged looting. The change in charge to disorderly conduct cast him not as a participant in inciting others, breaking windows, looting, or assault, but as a member of the crowds police encountered on the street, perhaps near outbreaks of violence, and arrested either mistaking them for participants or to get them off the streets. His appearance in the Washington Heights Court indicated that De Souse was arrested above 130th Street but there is no information on exactly where or when police took him into custody.

Magistrate Ford convicted De Souse and sentenced him to one month in the Workhouse.

De Souse's address was recorded as 170 East 129th Street, on the eastern boundary of Black Harlem. That was the same address recorded for James Simon, also arrested for riot, charged with disorderly conduct and convicted in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court.



All the newspaper sources recorded De Souse's name as De Soto. As the docket book was an official record of the legal proceedings, the name recorded there is used.

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