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

Elva Jacobs arrested

Sometime in the disorder, Officer L. W. Adamie of the 46th Precinct arrested Elva Jacobs, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, and charged her with burglary for allegedly having "broken a store window at 1 W. 137th St. and taken groceries," according to a story in the Home News. At a subsequent court appearance, the prosecutor reduced the charge against Jacobs to unlawful entry, an offense used when there was not evidence that she had taken any merchandise. However, that charge did not fit with the allegation that Jacobs had broken a window, as the charge in that circumstance would have been malicious mischief. Most likely, Adamie had allegedly seen or found her in the grocery store. Like almost all of those arrested for looting on the eastern boundary of Harlem north of 130th Street, Jacobs lived relatively near the store. Her home was at 56 West 142nd Street, between 5th Avenue and Lenox Avenues, five blocks north of the store, which was just off 5th Avenue.



The only information on the circumstances of the arrest was the statement in the Home News, reporting Jacobs' arraignment in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20. It is possible that Adamie arrested a second person for looting the store, and that Jacobs had been part of a larger group. Adamie was recorded in the docket book as the officer who arrested Courtney Marsh, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man who appeared in court immediately after Jacobs, facing the same charge of burglary. Like her, he lived north of the store, but further away, at 263 West 152nd Street. Based on other cases recorded in the docket book, the charge of burglary indicated that Marsh was also arrested for looting the grocery store, but he was not mentioned in the Home News story on the arraignments in the court, nor did he appear in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide in which Jacobs appeared (neither of them are in the list published in the New York Evening Journal). Given that absence, and without a complainant recorded in the docket book to confirm a link between the two, Marsh was not included among those arrested during the disorder.

Magistrate Ford remanded Jacobs in custody. When she returned to court the next day, Ford set her bail at $1,500 according to the docket book. Two days later, on March 23, Jacobs was back in court. This was likely when the charge against her was reduced from burglary to unlawful entry; in the docket book, the original charge is crossed out and "Red. to unl. entry" written in its place, in a different handwriting than the original charge. The same handwriting records that on this date Ford sent her to the Court of Special Sessions, which adjudicated misdemeanors such as unlawful entry, reducing her bail to $50. It took a month before Jacobs was tried in the that court. On May 3, the magistrates convicted her, suspended her sentence, and put her on probation, an outcome found only in the 32nd Precinct records. (The prosecution of Marsh followed the same process until March 23, when Magistrate Ford discharged him rather than sending him for trial as he did Jacobs.)

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