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

Douglas Cornelius arrested

Police arrested Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old black man, for hitting Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-year-old white carpenter with a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store on 125th Street around 10.30PM. Newspapers reported that a group of men had attacked Wijstem, but police arrested only Cornelius. As Wijstem was knocked unconscious and could not identify himself, he appears in lists of the injured as an "unidentified white man," named only in stories published by the New York Post and New York World-Telegram on March 22. (Three months later, a brief story in New York Herald Tribune reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness).

Like the man he targeted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Gazette, but he is linked to the unidentified man with the fractured skull only in a story in the New York Times, a list of the arrested in the New York Evening Journal, and lists of the injured in the New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Home News.

After being one of the last arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Cornelius is charged with felonious assault. Magistrate Renaud held him until March 25 on bail of $1000, according to the docket book. When he appears again, Magistrate Ford dismisses the charge against him dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct Police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court so they could be indicted. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution.

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