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

In court on March 21

On March 21, with the arraignments of 122 men and women arrested during the disorder completed, around seventy witnesses, mostly police officers together with a few Black residents, responded to subpoenas to appear before the grand jury convened by District Attorney Dodge. Who among that group actually testified, what evidence they provided, and who the grand jury voted to send for trial are not known as such proceedings took place behind closed doors. Only the number of people indicted was provided to journalists, twelve individuals named in seven indictments. At odds with what legal records indicate were the details of those charges, outside the grand jury room Dodge took the opportunity of the legal proceedings to expand the claims he had made the previous day that Communists were responsible for the disorder. So focused was he on Communists that a story in the New York Post noted that the “inquiry threatened to turn into a red-baiting campaign.”

Before the grand jury convened at 10:30 AM, Assistant District Attorney Saul Price interviewed several witnesses, including Lino Rivera, with whom he posed for photographs. Speaking to reporters, Price displayed a threatening postcard that had been sent to the boy’s home. It read: "Get out of this city or we will burn you alive. Fair Warning." Who might be responsible for the threat went unexplained, although it was largely only the anti-Communist press and tabloids who reported it. The journalists in attendance did not agree on whether Rivera was among the gathered witnesses who actually testified before the grand jury. Nor did they agree on how many testified, reporting numbers of witnesses ranging from twenty-five to thirty, suggesting the lack of an official source for that information.

Price was to have presented the witnesses to the grand jury, but Dodge changed his mind and took on that task himself. That gave the district attorney the opportunity to speak to reporters on his way in and out of the grand jury room. He offered up a series of staple anti-Communist charges and remedies to them that echoed the line taken by the Hearst newspapers. “The Reds have been boring into our institutions for a long time,” Dodge stated in his most widely reported claim, “but when they begin to incite to riot it is time to stop them.” More specifically, he charged that “Half the troubles in labor unions are caused by Reds” and that they had sent threatening letters to several judges who served in the Court of General Sessions. "They have been safe because we are sticklers for free speech, but when that free speech undermines our laws and causes riots drastic action must be taken.” Dodge promoted removing those found guilty from Home Relief rolls and deporting any found to be aliens. At that time he did not mention invoking the criminal anarchy law, an approach promoted in questions journalists from the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York American later asked Police Commissioner Valentine. That would come the next day, after Dodge had to withdraw several indictments charging riot he would secure in the day’s hearing.

The grand jury voted a total of seven indictments charging twelve individuals in response to the evidence that Dodge presented to them. Two of those indictments charged five men with riot, almost certainly among them Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested at the beginning of the disorder. Two additional indictments each charged an individual with assault, likely James Hughes, who had allegedly thrown rocks with hit a police officer, and Isaac Daniels, who likewise had allegedly thrown rocks, in his case hitting a white storeowner. The remaining three indictments charged five individuals with burglary, for looting. Neither Hughes nor Daniels nor any of those indicted for burglary had any connection to the Communist Party.

While less than half of those indicted having any connection with the Communist Party suggests that only a minority of the evidence presented to the grand jury related to their activities, they were still who Dodge wanted to talk about on his way out of the hearing. "We have evidence that within two hours after that boy stole a knife the Reds had placed inflammatory leaflets on the streets. We know who printed those leaflets and where they were printed.” Pressed on his focus on Communists after a meeting with police officials later in the day, Dodge asserted, "I am not interested in the labels by which they are known. We are interested in any people, no matter what they call themselves, who believe and advocate the overthrow of the Government.” He went on, “A challenge has been made thrown down to law and order, and the Grand Jury, the District Attorney and the Police Department have accepted that challenge.” Despite the unity of purpose Dodge claimed with the police department, Commissioner Valentine did not echo the DA’s plans to target Communists. At the same press conference he summarized a police report that while identifying the Young Liberators disseminating "untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature" as one cause of the disorder also pointed to three other causes that did not appear to be the responsibility of the Communist Party, "a Black youth caught stealing, a woman who screamed, and the appearance of a hearse." Such a disjunction between Dodge’s rhetoric and the details of the disorder being reported led the New York Sun to editorialize dismissively that “seeing red is an official privilege, diversion and avocation at the moment; no disorder can occur without being attributed to those terror-inspiring Communists whose shadows darken the sky at noonday.”

While Dodge focused on the role of Communists and the grand jury hearing began the process of deciding who should be tried and in what court, police brought two additional men arrested during the disorder to the Harlem Magistrates Court. They charged both with looting Benjamin Zelvin’s jewelry store. It is not clear why they had not been arraigned the day before. John Henry had been arrested in the company of Oscar Leacock, who had appeared in court the previous day. Henry, however, was only sixteen years of age, so police may have been confirming his age in case he was young enough to be sent to the juvenile court. Henry Goodwin was older, thirty-one years of age, but was missing from lists of those arrested police circulated to the press, so perhaps had been arrested later. Both were remanded to appear again the next day. No additional individuals arrested during the disorder appeared in the Washington Heights court, although one man, Louis Cobb, appeared again as police still did not have the information on his criminal record needed to set bail.

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