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

In Washington Heights court on March 20 (30)

Thirty of those arrested during the disorder appeared in the Washington Heights court on March 20. Magistrate Ford adjudicated over 80% of those prosecutions, twenty-five of the thirty. He rendered verdicts in most cases, convicting nineteen men and discharging four others. That was far more cases than Magistrate Renaud decided in the Harlem Court that day, in large part because those arraigned in the Washington Heights court faced less serious charges. That difference was also apparent in the small number of people Ford sent for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, just two men, and the lack of anyone charged with a felony referred to the grand jury. The remaining four men and one woman he remanded in custody on bail. Those hearings were reported in all Harlem’s white newspapers, but not in Black newspapers, which did not report the disorder until March 30, when they reported later court appearances. The newspaper stories varied in detail, with most only offering general accounts in less detail than they reported the hearings in the Harlem court.

Only the New York Evening Journal, New York Sun, and New York Post provided specific descriptions of the scene at the court. All three noted the building was “heavily” guarded by police. The New York Sun added the details that “Policemen were stationed at all corners surrounding the building, in the corridors of the building and in the court. Forty were on duty.” Typically, the details published in the New York Evening Journal were more sensational as well as describing more police, "53 policemen, nightsticks in hand, patrolling the block," thirty more hidden in a nearby garage, three emergency wagons on hand, and a few policemen stationed on the courthouse roof. The Home News, Daily News, New York Times, New York Post, and New York American offered generalizations about the scene at both the Washington Heights and Harlem courts which described the presence of police keeping crowds away from the building. Given that the stories in which those descriptions appeared focused on events at the Harlem court, they are entirely reliable as evidence of the scene at the Washington Heights court.

No newspaper stories gave details about the crowd size. The only mention of the crowd’s behavior was the general statement in the New York Times — “There was considerable grumbling, some shouting of threats, but no violence” — that fitted other evidence of the crowd at the Harlem court. There were also no photographs published of prisoners arriving at the court, as there were of those scenes at the Harlem court.

Only the Home News and New York Herald Tribune published lists of those being arraigned, neither of which was complete (the list of those arraigned published in the New York Evening Journal appeared to include only those who appeared in the Harlem court, although the copy of this story examined for this study was incomplete). The list in the Home News was more complete than its list of those arraigned in the Harlem court, including twenty-five of those who appeared, omitting only one man remanded on bail and, as had the Harlem list, those the magistrate discharged. However, the list included details of alleged offenses for only five men and one woman, all those either remanded on bail or sent to the Court of Special Sessions included in the list. Only the name, age, and address of the nineteen men convicted was provided. The list in the New York Herald Tribune likewise provided only those details, for fifteen of the nineteen convicted, adding the length of their sentences. That story provided details of the alleged offenses of two additional men convicted by Magistrate Ford, the first two men who appeared in court. It omitted two of those convicted (Salathel Smith and Walter Jones) and made no mention of the cases on which the Home News focused attention, the men and women remanded or sent for trial, while following that publication in not mentioning the four men the magistrate discharged.

There were no cases in the Washington Heights court that attracted reporters as the arraignment of the five alleged Communists in the Harlem court did. The New York Post mentioned the details of one case in its summary account, a man “held in $1,000 bail for stealing a can of coffee from a windowless grocery store.” That man was likely Raymond Taylor, the only one of the three men who allegedly took goods from a grocery store arraigned in the court for whom Magistrate Ford set bail at $1,000 (although none of the other sources that mention Taylor specify that he took coffee). It is not clear why the reporter singled him out for mention.

The other detail that the New York Post reported was that “Up to noon, only four of the persons arraigned in both courts had been discharged. All four of these cases were at Washington Heights.” Those four men were the only prisoners Magistrate Ford discharged. That he discharged prisoners was also mentioned in the New York Sun. That story noted that “Of the first nine arraigned at this court, all charged with disorderly conduct, three were discharged; the others were found guilty and given the alternative of paying a fine of $25 or serving five days in jail.” The Washington Heights court docket book recorded the outcome of those prosecutions slightly differently: Ford discharged three men among the first nine arraigned, but convicted only five of the others. He sent the other man, Lamter Jackson, the eighth arraigned, for trial in the Court of Special Sessions. These were the only stories to mention that any of those arraigned had been discharged.

Those stories gave a misleading picture of the hearings as a whole. The focus on the number of men discharged, and on the first men arraigned, in those stories suggests that the reporters left the court before all those arrested in the disorder had been arraigned. The Daily News reporter likely remained longer, as the newspaper’s story identified that what distinguished the hearings in the Washington Heights court overall was that “Magistrate Michael A. Ford meted out punishment in a majority of cases brought before him.” Where Renaud convicted only 8% of those who appeared before him, Ford convicted almost two-thirds, 63%. That difference was the result of those arraigned in the Washington Heights court facing less serious charges. However, as those convictions were reported without details, just what those convicted had allegedly done is unknown. (Although the statement that “In most instances, the cases were set over for further hearings” in the New York American came directly after a reference to the Washington Heights court being heavily guarded, it likely referred to outcomes in the Harlem court.) The only other reference to arraignments in the Washington Heights court was in the Daily Mirror, which noted that “40 of the 89 arrested during the night were dealt with later in the day,” and “16 pleaded guilty of sabotage charges and received sentences of varying degrees.” None of those details align with the legal records: only thirty of those arrested appeared in the court; one hundred and six of those arrested appeared in court on March 20; no one pled guilty.
 

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