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In court on March 25
For all of Dodge’s bravado, the day’s grand jury hearing resulted in only one additional indictment related to the disorder. And it was not one that substantiated Dodge’s claims, but rather was “for nothing spectacular,” as a story in the New York Post put it: theft of paper towels with a value 15 cents.
Neither did the return to the Harlem Magistrates Court of Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested in the disorder produce the spectacle that reporters had anticipated it would be. Their appearance was another instance of Dodge’s grand jury investigation intersecting with the regular legal process. On this occasion more than half of those who appeared in court, six men in addition to the four Communists, had already been indicted. While extra police were detailed to the court, the hearings, like those at the end of the previous week, did not attract unusual crowds and were uneventful. Magistrate Renaud discharged the four men after detectives presented him with bench warrants. The officers then rearrested the men without conflict between their attorneys and the magistrate or any more discussion of their alleged activities. None of the newspapers made clear that the men were being taken for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, on misdemeanor charges, not to the Court of General Sessions to face trial for felonies. While Dodge likely hoped that further questioning of the men would advance his investigation, additional evidence proved elusive. It would be almost two months before Miller, Samuels, Jamison, and Viabolo faced trial. During that time Dodge would not only fail to secure more indictments, his account of the role of Communists in the disorder would be contradicted in the MCCH hearings. The other six men discharged and rearrested drew little attention, with Nelson Brock, Reginald Mills, William Grant, and Douglas Cornelius not named in any newspaper stories and Carl Jones and Milton Ackerman identified in only one publication. Although these men faced more serious charges than those sentenced on March 23 — burglary in case of Brock, Mills, Grant, Jones, and Ackerman, assault on a white man in the case of Cornelius — there was apparently less interest in those details by this time.
Harry Gordon, the other white man arrested on 125th Street at the beginning of the disorder, also returned to court. Although he was represented by an ILD lawyer, Edward Kuntz, Gordon was no longer grouped with the four Communists as he had been on March 20. He had not been indicted as a result of Dodge’s investigation. Instead, like most of the remainder of those who appeared in court with him, four other men, he had his case continued as police continued to gather evidence. Several newspapers did report Gordon’s appearance, perhaps because of his prominence in earlier stories or because he had allegedly assaulted a police officer and what proved to be ill-founded assurances from police that they were planning to present his case to the grand jury. Another white man in this group, Louis Tonick, who faced a charge of robbery, went unmentioned. So too did the three Black men, Bernard Smith, Leroy Brown, and Paul Boyett, the former two charged with inciting crowds and breaking windows, the latter with assaulting a white man. The alleged actions of those still appearing in the magistrates court were among the most violent of those arrested during the disorder, which is likely why police spent more time investigating them. Louis Cobb, who once again had his case continued in the Washington Heights court, the only individual arrested during the disorder to appear there that day, stood out not for the charge against him, looting, but for his extensive criminal record. His appearance likewise went unreported.
Just three prosecutions were adjudicated in the Harlem court. Aubrey Patterson, the butt of reporters’ jokes in stories about the police line-up, was released. Arrested for burglary but charged only with disorderly conduct, Patterson was represented by a lawyer, which may explain why the magistrate did not convict him as he did others in similar circumstances. His release removed him entirely from the disorder and cast him as a bystander. Prosecutors reduced the charge against Louise Brown and Warren Johnson from malicious mischief to disorderly conduct. No longer alleged to have broken windows, they became part of the disorderly crowds that police encountered on streets. Whatever evidence police presented that led the magistrate to convict them rather than releasing them as he did Patterson, it was insufficient to warrant imprisonment: he instead gave them suspended sentences. None of those decisions was reported in the press, other than in a New York Herald Tribune story that mentioned the conviction of three unnamed individuals and the release of one other, without providing any details of the charges that they faced or the sentences they received.
One more man, Nathan Snead, was convicted in the Court of Special Sessions, having been sent from the Harlem Court charged with petit larceny. In sentencing him to the penitentiary for a term of up to a year, the judges imposed the most punishment yet handed down to those arrested during the disorder. However, none of Snead’s appearances in court were reported, so just what he did to warrant such a sentence is unknown. A second man, Henry Stewart, charged with malicious mischief for breaking windows, was discharged. Those trials went unreported.
The appearance in the Court of General Sessions of the first six men indicted by the grand jury was reported by two newspapers even though they were simply released on bail. None were indicted as a result of Dodge’s investigation. All were charged with burglary, which promised felony convictions and marked them as major offenders in the disorder, unlike those convicted in the Magistrates Court. However, within a few days the prosecutions would have a different outcome.
The selective reporting of the day’s hearings across the city’s papers was the beginning of the less extensive press coverage of the legal process that would become the norm, with only some of those who appeared named and their offenses described, and soon only some hearings reported. The slow and fitful progress of the legal process lacked the spectacle of the mass hearings in the immediate aftermath of the disorder. To the contrary, it fragmented the disorder into a multitude of prosecutions, few of which involved any acts that on their own amounted to more than minor crimes. Eighteen of those arrested in the disorder appeared in the Harlem court on this date; subsequently, no more than half a dozen of those arrested in the disorder would appear in a court on one day. And even as those charged with more serious crimes moved beyond the Magistrates courts, only a handful of the prosecutions of those charged with more serious crimes resulted in the spectacle of a trial.