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

Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 48.

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In the Courts By daybreak on March 20, the cells in Harlem’s two police precincts and hospitals held 125 men and women arrested during the disorder. Another two men would be arrested later that day, and one more two days later. The story of the prosecutions of those individuals reveals how the legal process produced a picture of the disorder that distorted its features and diminished its violence. At the same time, the legal process showed the indiscriminate and often ineffectual nature of the police response. Thirteen of those arrested, twelve men and one woman, were released without being prosecuted. Many of those released had likely been spectators rather than participants in the disorder, arrested when police dispersed crowds, a practice that would also be evident in later disorders in Detroit and Harlem in 1943. One in every four who appeared in court went free. Only seventy-seven of 103 of those arrested whose fate is known would be found guilty, and just over half of those would not be convicted of the offenses for which they had been arrested but instead for disorderly conduct, a minor charge that likely indicated that police could only prove that they had been members of crowds on streets, not participants in attacks on stores or assaults (the outcomes of the prosecution of the remaining twelve is unknown). That such a high proportion of prosecutions ended with that outcome highlights how indiscriminately police made arrests during the disorder.

The alleged offenses of the individuals prosecuted did not reflect the events of the previous night. The twenty-nine alleged assaults on white men and women resulted in at most seven arrests, with an additional six men arrested for alleged assaults on police. None of the six men shot and wounded, likely by police, appeared in any legal proceeding or police hearing. They, and likely others among the injured who were victims of police violence, are not recorded as having reported what happened to them, perhaps because they knew such complaints generally came to nothing in Harlem. As a result, interracial violence formed a smaller part of the picture of the disorder presented in the legal system. Difficulties gathering evidence had similarly kept violence out of legal proceedings after the race riots in Chicago in 1919, and would also do so after disorders in Detroit and Harlem in 1943. The attacks on stores that had dominated the early evening of the previous day were also largely absent from the courts. Only twenty of the arrests were for allegedly breaking windows. An additional fifteen men were arrested for inciting crowds and one man for possession of a weapon. The bulk of those arrested, fifty-seven men and three women, had allegedly been looting, causing the theft of property that characterized the final hours of the disorder to overshadow its other elements. At the same time, prosecutions for looting did not predominate to the extent they would after the disorder in Harlem in 1943, when they made up just over three-quarters of the total (424 of 554), including 109 arrested for receiving stolen goods.

The nature of the legal process further diminished the violence of the disorder. While the breadth of the violence, across the neighborhood and throughout the night, made the disorder greater than the sum of its parts, the courts fragmented it into the individual alleged acts of those being prosecuted. Isolated from the larger context, the offenses with which police and prosecutors charged individuals were relatively minor. Those offenses became even less serious as they moved through the legal process, with the charges made by police reduced by prosecutors, magistrates, and the men serving on the grand jury, and numbers of those arrested discharged. The outcomes of the prosecutions reduced the severity of the disorder still further. Just under half of the prosecutions were adjudicated in the Magistrates courts, treated as the offense of disorderly conduct. Magistrates and the grand jury decided that the alleged offenses of most of the others arrested only amounted to misdemeanors, sending defendants to the Court of Special Sessions for trial rather than charging them with the more serious felony offenses tried in the Court of General Sessions. Those men and women found guilty were given short sentences by magistrates and judges, with a term of more than one year imposed on only one man and more than half imprisoned for ten days or less, fined, or put on probation with a suspended sentence. At the same time, the grand jury kept police violence during the disorder out of the courts, twice declining to indict Patrolman John McInerney for fatally shooting Lloyd Hobbs despite seven witnesses contradicting the officer's claim that the boy had been looting a store and that he had called on him to halt before firing his pistol. In this case, unlike the prosecutions of those arrested during the disorder, the all white grand jury had been presented with a white defendant and a Black victim and the testimony of Black witnesses.

The legal process after the disorder differed from the race riots of the early twentieth century in not being centered on a special grand jury. William Dodge, the district attorney, did convene one, but focused it on the pursuit of Communists. While his efforts to hold them responsible for the violence quickly came to nothing, his preoccupations distorted the picture of events presented in the press and removed an opportunity to investigate their details. Dodge largely left prosecutions of those arrested during the disorder to regular proceedings. The extended duration of those proceedings saw prosecutions drop from public view before they delivered outcomes, as the press stopped reporting cases as they were distributed across the courts and spread over a period of more than two months. Investigations of other racial disorders provided an overall picture of resulting legal proceedings that filled gaps in what appeared in newspaper stories. The Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem did not. Its report included no details of the disorder's legal aftermath or of the events highlighted by those prosecutions.

Only later, in claims for damages brought against the city and litigated in the civil courts, did legal proceedings reveal some of the scale of the violence against property and of the ineffectiveness of police. One hundred and six store owners sued the city seeking compensation for the damage done to their businesses. Their claims described the total damage done rather than the result of a single attack or theft on which criminal prosecutions focused. The medium cost of the damage done to those businesses was $733; several store owners reported well over $1,000 in damages. By contrast, the value of the alleged damage and thefts for which individuals were prosecuted was rarely more than $100, and in some cases less than $1. However, as only a handful of those cases went to trial, the legal process provided only glimpses of that violence. While the press reported a claim by Mayor La Guardia that the total amount of damages could reach $1 million, ultimately the city likely paid only about one-tenth of that sum. Whatever the payout, the suits brought into focus how the disorder challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem.

The legal aftermath of the disorder can be explored by following the chronological narrative in the pathway at the bottom of the page, which highlights the unfolding of the legal process, looking in detail at the first week when the press focused attention on the court. The work of the different courts and the legal treatment of different types of events can be explored using the tags or the list of links on the right side of the page.