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

In court on March 22

While Dodge had promised more dramatic action from the grand jury on its second day of hearings on the disorder, the number of indictments it voted failed to even match the results of the first session. After eight witnesses testified, the grand jury indicted just four individuals, all for burglary. Moreover, the seriousness of what Dodge had presented the previous day was undercut when he announced that the five men indicted for riot, including the four alleged Communists, would no longer be tried in the Court of General Sessions, but instead for lesser, misdemeanor offenses in the Court of Special Sessions. Dodge did return to the grand jury room in the afternoon with a typewriter and a mimeograph machine seized from the offices of organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, the ILD and Nurses and Hospital League, and two unnamed witnesses. He apparently claimed they had been used to produce the leaflet circulated in the early hours of the disorder. No indictments resulted from that evidence; the grand jury instead adjourned for the weekend.

As the anti-Communist investigation lost momentum, Magistrates Renaud and Ford continued to move those arrested in the disorder through the legal process. Four men, three arrested after the disorder, appeared in court for the first time, one in the Washington Heights court, three in the Harlem court, joined there by fourteen others returning after being investigated. Although additional police were stationed at the Harlem court, around forty officers the Daily News and New York Times reported, those hearings did not draw the crowds who attended on March 20 even as reporters again filled the courtroom. Nonetheless, police searched several of those who entered the courtroom for weapons, and turned away those who “bore indications of connection with the Young Liberators, the Communist organization which fomented the disorder” according to the Daily News.

The outcomes of the hearings were mixed, revealing again both the varied nature of the events of the disorder and the limited extent to which police had apprehended those responsible for the violence and the indiscriminate nature of their response to the disorder. The three men appearing for the first time in the Harlem court had been arrested after the disorder, Daughty Shavos and Clifford Mitchell the previous evening, and Jackie Ford the same day. Police arrested Shavos and Mitchell in their homes on West 119th Street and on Lenox Avenue respectively with merchandise allegedly taken from Louis Levy’s store and charged them with burglary. Just how police knew to go to the men’s home was not mentioned.  Merchants had called for police to search for stolen merchandise, but these were the only arrests of this kind made after the disorder. In 1943, when the legal response to disorder in Harlem was more narrowly focused on looting than in 1935, one in five of the individuals arrested would be charged with receiving stolen goods. Renaud sent Mitchell and Shavos to the grand jury. Jackie Ford’s arrest came after Julia Cureti identified him as one of those who broke windows in her restaurant, although there is no evidence of where the identification or arrest occurred. Unlike those men, Hashi Mohammed, the only person arrested in the disorder who appeared in the Washington Heights court on March 22, had been arrested on March 20. He had been treated for “internal injuries” so likely had been in Harlem Hospital until this time. Mohammed was one of only four men charged with possession of a weapon but given that he would later be acquitted of that charge, police may have made it to justify the violence by police that led to his injuries. Police had allegedly found either a knife or a gun after arresting Mohammed for breaking windows. They could not substantiate that second charge as on March 22 he was instead charged with disorderly conduct. Magistrate Ford found Mohammed guilty, as he had nineteen others arrested during the disorder two days earlier.

Magistrate Renaud also convicted three of those returned to his court, Elizabeth Tai, Arthur Davis and Herbert Hunter, of disorderly conduct. The three had been arrested by the same police detective for allegedly breaking into a grocery store on Lenox Avenue and taking merchandise. Evidence to substantiate that allegation had clearly not been found as the charge against all three was reduced from burglary to disorderly conduct. That change did not just indicate a lack of evidence that they had broken into the store but also that they had taken merchandise. As such it effectively removed Tai, Davis and Hunter from those who had acted to target property and returned them to the crowds on the street. Police offered some evidence that the three had not simply been spectators as Renaud convicted them all, but there is no indication of just what they did they fell within the "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior" the law encompassed. Renaud did not judge it to be very serious, sentencing Tai and Hunter to only five days in the Workhouse and Hunter to ten days.

Two other men charged with burglary, Henry Goodwin and Frederick Harwell, also had the charges against them reduced, but to petit larceny not disorderly conduct. In their case police were able to produce evidence they had taken merchandise, if not broken into a store to do so, but not goods worth $100 or more necessary for a felony charge. Renaud consequently sent Goodwin and Harwell for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, joining Jackie Ford and another man who allegedly broke windows, William Jones. By contrast, police presented sufficient evidence against five other men arrested for looting and charged with burglary, John Henry, Oscar Leacock, James Williams, Arthur Merritt and Amie Taylor, for Renaud to send their cases sent to the grand jury along with those of Shavos and Mitchell. Nonetheless, police investigations had failed to find enough support to sustain the charges of burglary they had made against half of those who appeared in court on this date.

Paul Boyett was alone among those who appeared in not having his case decided. The need for continued investigation likely resulted from the efforts to find witnesses to confirm Patrolman Conn’s claim that Boyett had been one of those who assaulted Timothy Murphy rather than being among the spectators drawn to the attack on the white man as he claimed. Even with fewer cases, the press reported only some of those appearances, as had happened on March 20, with no mentions of Boyett, those sent to the Court of Special Sessions, and three of those sent to the grand jury.

Dodge’s investigation intersected with the regular legal process both in the Harlem Magistrates Court and in the grand jury. Police served warrants for the arrest of three of the men who returned to the court, James Hughes, Charles Saunders and Isaac Daniels, as they had already been indicted by the grand jury. In doing so they identified the three as among the unnamed individuals whose indictment Dodge had announced over the previous two days, Hughes and Daniels the two men indicted for assault and Saunders one of the five indicted for burglary. Renaud discharged the men, and police then took them into custody. (Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators may also have been brought back to the court as the Home News and Daily Mirror both reported the men were present but did not appear as police awaited warrants based on their indictments). In the grand jury, out of the public eye, cases referred by the Magistrates on March 20 began to be heard alongside those based on witnesses gathered by Dodge. The grand jury indicted all six of the men referred by magistrates, voting charges of burglary against Arnold Ford, Joseph Moore, Robert Tanner, Joseph Wade and Hezekiah Wright.

The first of those arrested during the disorder appeared in the Court of Special Sessions for trial. Both the men, Earl Davis sent by Magistrate Ford from the Washington Heights court and Thomas Babbitt sent by Magistrate Renaud from the Harlem court, faced a charge of petit larceny. While the magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions convicted both men, they sentenced them to only ten days in the workhouse – the same short term that Renaud gave to those he convicted of disorderly conduct on the same day. For all the willingness of police to shoot at looters, those sentences showed judges treated small scale looting – two cases of soap in Babbitt’s case, unspecified merchandise from a tailor in Davis’ case -- no more punitively than being part of crowds in the streets. Neither proceeding was mentioned in the press.

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