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

In court on March 26

Magistrates Renaud and Ford continued to dispose of those arrested during the disorder, but on March 26, for the first time, no newspapers reported any of those hearings (although reporters were likely in the courtrooms, as several newspapers routinely published stories about court proceedings). Each magistrate convicted three men and continued the investigation of an additional man. All six of those convicted had faced more serious charges, burglary in four cases, malicious mischief in the other two, that prosecutors reduced to disorderly conduct when they returned to court. What went unreported, then, were additional instances in which alleged participants in looting or breaking windows were revealed instead to have been only members of the crowds that police encountered on the streets.

Renaud imposed a sentence of five days in the Workhouse or a fine of $25 on the three men he sentenced. Albert Bass and Bernard Smith were able to pay that fine. Smith was not released, however, as he was also charged with riot, for which Renaud sent him to the grand jury. David Terry did not pay the fine, so spent five days in the Workhouse.

The three men Ford sentenced in the Washington Heights court had been arrested together and charged with burglary. Ford suspended the sentence of Raymond Taylor. Preston White and Joseph Payne he sentenced to close to the maximum term in the Workhouse, five months and twenty-nine days. The two men must have had criminal records, as Ford had denied them bail. Given Taylor’s sentence, those records rather than their actions in the disorder, likely led to their sentences.

As the regular legal process continued, Dodge's grand jury investigation suddenly came to halt. Only the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, and Home News reported the announcement that the grand jury would return to "routine business" for the rest of the week. Just the day before, the New York Evening Journal had confidently predicted to the contrary that "at least a dozen more [persons] will be named in bills to be returned within a short time," with most of those charged "Communists or allied radicals." While the statement said the grand jury would return to such work in April, the temporary halt proved to be the end of the investigation. The only Communists charged by the grand jury would be Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators. At the end of the week, on March 30, the first public hearing of the MCCH would hear testimony that they were under arrest by the time the crowds spread beyond the Kress store, at odds with the blame Dodge sought to place on them. In April and into May, it would be the MCCH, not the grand jury, who would investigate the start of the disorder.

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