This tag was created by Anonymous. 

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

Completing the legal process

A week after those arrested during the disorder began to appear in the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates court, the prosecutions of 77 of those men and women had been completed. It would take almost eight months for judges and juries to come to decisions regarding the fate of the remaining 49 men and two women. Those proceedings went largely unreported. After the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, New York American and New York Amsterdam News published stories about cases in the Harlem court and Court of General Sessions on March 28, only four other trials were mentioned in the press. The Daily Worker published stories on the trials of Communist Party members or at least those represented by ILD lawyers: the only story about Moore and one of only two stories about the trial of Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators in the Court of Special Sessions. The involvement of ILD lawyers and the verdict in their favor made those trials an obvious vehicle for promoting the Communist Party. It is less clear why the other story about the later trial was published, in the Black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News, which also published the one story about the trial of Paul Boyett. Boyett was acquitted of assaulting a white man, suggesting that the Black newspaper was concerned to give attention to outcomes that discredited the idea that the disorder had been a race riot. The story mentioned only Boyett's defense, so literally kept the alleged assault out of the story. The New York Amsterdam News may have also published the story about the trial involving the Communists because the same publications and individuals who had sought to blame them had also cast the disorder as a race riot. The New York Times rather than either of those publications reported the one other case that attracted attention, the trial of James Hughes. Unaffiliated with the Communist Party and found guilty of throwing a rock that hit a police officer, that case did not align with the apparent agendas of those publications. Why the New York Times reported the trial is not clear; it was the only legal proceeding related to the disorder that the newspaper reported after March 28.

Unreported, the final eight of those arrested during the disorder trickled out of the Magistrates courts over the next three weeks as police completed investigations. Magistrate Ford disposed of the last of those arrested in the jurisdiction of the Washington Heights court on April 9, when Charles Alston was sufficiently recovered from injuries suffered fleeing police to appear and have the assault charges against him dismissed, the same outcome as the three men arrested with him. Magistrate Renaud did not dispose of the last case before him in the Harlem court for nearly two more weeks. The extended police investigation of that case likely was a result of the defendant, Frank Wells, having ties to the Communist Party. However, police did not produce evidence to support the allegation that Wells had broken the window of a store on 125th Street, resulting in the charge against him being reduced to disorderly conduct. On April 20, a month after the first of those arrested in the disorder appeared in his court, Renaud convicted Wells and sent him to the workhouse for 30 days.

The grand jury continued to vote for charges in all of the final [20] cases presented to them, as they had with almost all the previous cases, but those decisions did not signal that they had been presented evidence of serious/felonious acts. The grand jury sent only seventeen of those arrested in the disorder to the Court of General Sessions charged with felonies, and only one of the final twenty cases. All the remainder, and just over half of all the cases related to the disorder, the grand jury sent to be tried on lesser misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions. The last case related to the disorder presented to the grand jury, on April 23, was the one case presented after March 27 for which the grand jury voted an indictment. Paul Boyett was charged with assaulting a white man, the only such offense to be presented to the grand jury.

The combination of cases sent from the grand jury and those sent directly to the court by magistrates made trials in the Court of Special Sessions the proceeding in which most of the remaining cases were decided. Those [31?] trials received almost no attention from the press even as the panel of three magistrates who presided convicted almost all of those who appeared. [summary of timing, with Communists and then Harry Gordon as the last trials]

Most of the twelve sent to the CGS did not go to trial, instead accepting the plea bargains that prosecutors offered as a standard practice at this time as had Carl Jones, Hezekiah Wright, Joseph Wade and Thomas Jackson in earlier. [result was that those men were not convicted of felonies but, like those in lower court, of misdemeanors. [Only Larry pled to a felony = record – and as such one of few of those arrested who fitted that stereotype]. Trials on felony charges produced similar outcomes. Ackerman tried, March 28. Ford and Moore soon after, April 1. Joseph Hughes tried a week later, having withdrawn from a plea bargain. It would be almost two months later before the final trial in the CGS, that of Paul Boyett.
 

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

Contents of this tag:

This page references: