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

Elva Jacobs arrested

Officer L. W. Adamie of the 46th Precinct arrested When Elva Jacobs, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with burglary, the Home News added the details that she had "broken a store window at 1 W. 137th St. and taken groceries." No complainant is recorded in the docket book, nor is the name of the storeowner recorded after the disorder by the MCCH investigator.

Magistrate Ford remanded Jacobs in custody. When she returned to court the next day, the docket book records that Ford set her bail at $1500. Two days later, on March 23, Jacobs was back in court. This is likely when the charge against her was reduced from felony 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, to be tried for a misdemeanor, reducing her bail to $50. There is no evidence of the outcome of that trial. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter records outcomes for trials in the Court of Special Sessions for the individuals taken there, but the MCCH records do not include the police blotter for the 32nd Precinct, to which Adamie would have taken Jacobs having arrested her north of 130th Street. 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.

Officer Adamie also arrested Courtney March, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man who appeared in court immediately after Jacobs, facing the same charge of burglary. Based on other cases recorded in the docket book that indicates that Marsh was also arrested for looting the grocery store, but he is not mentioned in the Home News story on the arraignments in the court, nor does he appear in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette in which Jacobs appears (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 is not included among those arrested during the disorder.

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