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

Homer Thomas arrested

Homer Thomas, a twenty-one-year-old Black man, was recorded in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book as charged with disorderly conduct on March 20. That appearance was mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune and Home News on March 21 and the New York Age on March 30. He also appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but not in any of the lists published in white newspapers. Thomas was listed among those charged with disorderly conduct, a charge that 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. His appearance in that court indicated that Thomas was arrested above 130th Street but there was no information on exactly where or when police took him into custody.

Magistrate Ford convicted Thomas and sentenced him to three days in the Workhouse. Half of those convicted after being arrested for unknown activities received a similar short term of fewer than ten days in the Workhouse.

Thomas' residence was well outside Harlem, downtown at 330 East 23rd Street.

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