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

Henry Goodwin arrested

Officer Le Sage of the 76th Precinct arrested Henry Goodwin, a thirty-one-year-old Black man, who was charged with burglary. There was no evidence of the timing or details of the arrest or his alleged crime, as the only sources in which Goodwin appeared are the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book and the 28th Precinct police blotter. Goodwin was not in the lists of those arrested published in either the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide or the New York Evening News, perhaps because he was arrested after they were compiled. He did not appear in court until March 21, one of only seven arrested during the disorder who was not arraigned on March 20.

Benjamin Zelvin was recorded as the complainant against Goodwin in the docket book. He owned a jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue that suffered extensive looting in the hours after 11:30 PM, when he closed the store. All the windows were broken by 2:15AM, when Officer Astel arrived there with Oscar Leacock and John Henry, whom he claimed had admitted taking goods from the store when he had arrested them several blocks south of the store. Those men allegedly had about $75 of goods in their possession when arrested, according to Zelvin's Magistrate's Court affidavit. When Zelvin joined other merchants in suing the city for losses suffered in the disorder, the World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2,685 in damages. Goodwin was likely to have taken some of the additional missing merchandise. If so, he had traveled some distance from his home at 17 East 119th Street, below Mt. Morris Park, ten blocks south of Zelvin's store.

If Goodwin did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they apparently were of little value. Charged with burglary when he first appeared in court, Goodwin was held on bail, and then returned to court the next day, March 22. At that time the charge against him was reduced to petit larceny, and Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, to be tried for a misdemeanor. The police blotter records that on March 28 the judges convicted him and sentenced him to six months in the workhouse.

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