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

Claudius Jones arrested

Sometime early in the disorder, Claudius Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black man who lived at 306 West 120th Street, was arrested. The two sources that mention Jones' alleged offense provide different descriptions. The note on the 28th Precinct Police Blotter described his offense as "Threw ash can in store window," whereas a story in the New York Herald Tribune that mentions his arraignment in the Night Court described Jones as "refusing to obey police order to move away from a Harlem corner.”

Neither the charge brought against Jones nor the outcome of his prosecution help resolve that contradiction. Both the 28th Precinct Police Blotter and the story in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as lists of those arrested during the disorder in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York Evening Journal and the New York American agree that he was charged with disorderly conduct (the Daily News did not include a charge). Only the 28th Precinct Police Blotter and the New York Herald Tribune mention the outcome of the prosecution, agreeing that Magistrate Capshaw found Jones guilty and gave him a suspended sentence. Both the charge and the outcome were common for those arrested for breaking windows and refusing to move on.

Arraignment in the Night Court, which opened at 8.00 PM and closed no earlier than 1.00 AM, suggests that Jones was arrested early in the disorder, and certainly before midnight, as the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded the arraignment as occurring on March 19, and likely before 10.00 PM given when the others arraigned on March were arrested. Five individuals recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter as arraigned on March 19 were arrested before 10.10 PM: Margaret Mitchell, arrested around 5.00 PM; Claudio Diabolo, arrested around 6.45 PM; Paul Boyett, arrested around 9.00 PM; James Hughes, arrested around 10.00 PM; and Leroy Gilliard, arrested around 10.10 PM. For fur others, like Claudius Jones, there was no information on the time of their arrest: Louise Brown, William Jones, Rose Murrell and Viola Williams. Six other men that other sources show were arrested before 10.00 PM, Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels, arrested with Diabolo, the two speakers arrested before that group, Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon, Frank Wells and Leroy Brown, are missing from the transcript of the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.

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