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

Ernest Barnes arrested

Ernest Barnes, a thirty-two-year-old Black man, was recorded in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book as charged with disorderly conduct on March 20. His appearance in the Washington Heights Court indicated that Barnes was arrested above 130th Street but there was no information on exactly where or when police took him into custody. He appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and lists published in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, all of which recorded him as charged with riot. The change in charge to disorderly conduct cast him not as a participant in inciting others, breaking windows, looting, or assault, but as a member of the crowds police encountered on the street, perhaps near outbreaks of violence, and arrested either mistaking them for participants or to get them off the streets. Barnes did not appear in the stories that reported the hearings in the Washington Heights court in the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and New York Age. Those stories only mentioned those convicted; Magistrate Ford found Barnes not guilty. He was the only one of the fifteen men charged with disorderly conduct in unknown circumstances that the magistrate did not convict.

The docket book and the lists published in the Daily News, and New York Evening Journal recorded Barnes' address as 224 West 124th Street.

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