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• 1 2023-03-09T22:02:20+00:00 Dodge grand jury hearings suspended, March 26 18 plain 2024-01-23T20:11:50+00:00 The additional indictments and more serious charges that Dodge mentioned on March 25 did not manifest the next day. To the contrary, stories in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, and Home News reported that Dodge announced that the grand jury would return to “routine” business rather than hearing further witnesses to the Harlem disorder for the rest of the week. When a new grand jury was impaneled in April, this group would “devote much of its time to the riot inquiry,” according to the New York American and Home News, or “devote itself exclusively to the rioting inquiry,” according to the New York Evening Journal. That statement went unreported in newspapers that did not share the anti-Communist editorial position on the disorder of those publications. None of the stories explicitly explained the change. The New York Evening Journal came closest, reporting Dodge as saying that routine work had "accumulated in the last few days."
  
  Also largely unreported was the attack on Dodge invoking the criminal anarchy statute by Arthur Garfield Hays, one of the members of the MCCH investigating the disorder alongside the DA. The New York American’s brief story on Dodge’s statement mentioned Hays as having criticized the DA’s investigation, asserting that “the criminal anarchy law, under which Dodge is seeking indictments, was used 'only when the Governments want to 'get' a man.'" The Home News made the disagreement the focus of its story, headlined “Mayor’s Riot Committee Splits with Dodge as Hays Raps Plan to Invoke Anarchy Law.” Hays was quoted making the same charge as appeared in the New York American, and adding, “They are never used against Fascists.” The New York Evening Journal did not mention Hays. The Daily Worker did report Hays' attack, in a story on the MCCH that did not refer to Dodge’s statement. Both the city’s Black newspapers folded Hays’ criticism into their stories, the New York Amsterdam News on March 30, and the New York Age in a later story on the first public hearing of the MCCH on March 30.
  
  When ADA Alexander Kaminsky appeared at that public hearing on March 30, sent by Dodge to discuss what his investigation had accomplished, he testified that to date it had resulted in 12 indictments, confirming that the grand jury had voted no additional indictments after March 25. Pushed by Hays to name those individuals, Kaminsky said he could identify only the five men who had pled guilty: Carl Jones, James Wade, James Hughes, Thomas Jackson, and Hezekiel Wright. He also mentioned that four others had been charged with unlawful assembly and transferred to the Court of Special Sessions. That those men were widely recognized as being the four Young Liberators was evident in Hays' follow-up questions about whether they had been charged because of their political beliefs. In answer, Kaminsky said he was sure that the grand jury would not do that.
  
  Although a story in the New York Evening Journal the day before Dodge suspended the grand jury hearings had confidently predicted that "at least a dozen more [persons] will be named in bills to be returned within a short time," with most of those charged "Communists or allied radicals," Kaminsky's widely reported appearance was the last mention of Dodge’s investigation and of grand jury hearings related to the disorder in the press.
   
• 1 2022-12-09T03:14:07+00:00 In court on March 26 17 plain 2023-12-16T19:35:27+00:00 Magistrates Renaud and Ford continued to dispose of those arrested during the disorder, but on March 26 for the first time, no newspapers reported any of those hearings (although reporters were likely in the courtrooms, as several newspapers routinely published stories about court proceedings). Each magistrate convicted three men and continued the investigation of an additional man. All six of those convicted had faced more serious charges, burglary in four cases, malicious mischief in the other two, that prosecutors reduced to disorderly conduct when they returned to court. What went unreported, then, were additional instances in which alleged participants in looting or breaking windows were revealed instead to have been only members of the crowds that police encountered on the streets.
  
  Renaud imposed a sentence of five days in the Workhouse or a fine of $25 on the three men he sentenced. Albert Bass and Bernard Smith were able to pay that fine. Smith was not released, however, as he was also charged with riot, for which Renaud sent him to the grand jury. David Terry did not pay the fine, so spent five days in the Workhouse.
  
  The three men Ford sentenced in the Washington Heights court had been arrested together and charged with burglary. Ford suspended the sentence of Raymond Taylor. Preston White and Joseph Payne he sentenced to close to the maximum term in the Workhouse, five months and twenty-nine days. The two men must have had criminal records, as Ford had denied them bail. Given Taylor’s sentence, those records rather than their actions in the disorder, likely led to their sentences.
  
  As the regular legal process continued, Dodge's grand jury investigation suddenly came to halt. Only the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, and Home News reported the announcement that the grand jury would return to "routine business" for the rest of the week. Just the day before, the New York Evening Journal had confidently predicted to the contrary that "at least a dozen more [persons] will be named in bills to be returned within a short time," with most of those charged "Communists or allied radicals." While the statement said the grand jury would return to such work in April, the temporary halt proved to be the end of the investigation. The only Communists charged by the grand jury would be Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators. At the end of the week, on March 30, the first public hearing of the MCCH would hear testimony that they were under arrest by the time the crowds spread beyond the Kress store, at odds with the blame Dodge sought to place on them. In April and into May, it would be the MCCH, not the grand jury, who would investigate the start of the disorder.