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Emmet Williams arrested
The home address recorded for Williams in the docket book, 242 West 127th Street, was only half a block west of 8th Avenue. The meat market was midway between 127th and 126th Streets, on the east side of 8th Avenue. He was likely drawn to the area by the multiple incidents of attacks on windows, looting, and violence reported there during the disorder: the arrest of James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue near 125th Street; the arrest of Rose Murrell for breaking windows in a grocery store three buildings to the north, on the corner of 127th Street; the arrest of Thomas Babbitt for taking soap from Thomas Drug store a block north; and at the very end of the disorder, the arrest of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street for looting and police shooting and killing James Thompson across the street from the store.
Williams appears in the list of those charged with inciting a riot published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. A list published in the New York Daily News, which misreported his name as "Emmet Hughes" and his race as white, listed the charge against him as disorderly conduct. In the court docket book, Williams was recorded as Black. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, directly after Hughes, the charge against Williams was malicious mischief. Several of the other people arrested during the disorder charged with breaking windows likewise were reported as charged with inciting a riot or disorderly conduct, but were then charged with malicious mischief in court. Like Theodore Hughes, Magistrate Renaud sent him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on bail of $500 (indicating that the value of the damage to the building was not more than $250, the level required for the charge to be a felony). There is also no evidence of the outcome of his trial. Williams, and Hughes, are two of the few of those who appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court not mentioned in the Home News story on March 21 that provides brief details of the charges against those arrested in the disorder. Given the location of the market, Williams, and Hughes, should have been taken to the 28th Precinct and appear in their blotter, but they do not. Carrington may have instead taken them to his own precinct, the 32nd, on West 135th Street.
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This page references:
- "List of Dead And Injured In Riot In New York City," Norfolk Journal and Guide, March 30, 1935, 18.
- "Harlem Riot Damage is Figured at Half Million," Afro-American, March 30, 1935, 1, 2.
- "Says Economic Conditions in Harlem Are Bad," Atlanta World, March 27, 1935, 1, 2.
- "1 Dead, 7 shot, 100 Hurt as Harlem Crowds Riot over Boy, 16, and Hearse," New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1935, 1.
- New York Penal Law, § 1433: Malicious Mischief
- "Harlem Riot Prisoners and Charges," New York American, March 20, 1935, 4.
- Harlem Magistrates Court docket book
- "Arrested in Rioting," Daily News, March 20, 1935, 3.