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Detective Henry Roge assaulted
According to Hughes, he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th St and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue, before returning home for supper, and then heading out again at 9.30pm to go drinking. When he set out for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets, and heard people calling out “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a show repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the Probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked.
As Hughes was being arrested, Roge was dealing with his injuries, which were bleeding profusely. A call for medical assistance brought Dr Fabian of the Joint Disease Hospital to attend to the detective. A New York Evening Journal photographer captured several images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). According to the record of medical attendances, Roge remained on duty after being attended by the doctor, but other sources reported that his injury required two stitches, which involved Roge being taken to Harlem Hospital. Probation report records that Roge was on sick leave for 10 days after his injury, making it more likely his injury required him to leave the scene for treatment.
The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. A grand jury initially indicted him before he appeared in the Magistrates Court, which led to the original charges being dismissed when he did appear so he could be rearrested. Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault. But when he appeared for sentencing the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from minister named Haynes received by Mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed the certainty of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock, against which Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.” Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer determined Hughes to be “an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the probation department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to term of only three months in the workhouse.
As with other assaults, the press coverage of this case was fragmented. Roge appeared on the lists of those injured published by white newspapers such as the New York American, New York Journal, Home News, Daily Mirror and New York Post. Hughes appeared in lists of those arrested published in black newspapers and the New York Journal. The two were linked in only three stories, in the New York Times, Home News and Daily Worker. Even when Hughes was tried, producing additional coverage, only two of the five stories mentioned Roge. But that legal process did generate case files in both the DA’s office and the Probation Department which provided details that are available for only a handful of the events of the disorder.