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

In court on March 27

A week after the disorder, three men appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty, becoming the first of those arrested to be convicted in the city’s felony court. However, the outcome of those prosecutions did not establish the men as major figures in the disorder, distinct from those who had been convicted in the lower courts. While Joseph Wade, Thomas Jackson, and Hezekiah Wright had all been charged with burglary, they pleaded guilty to lesser offenses: Wright and Jackson to unlawful entry, which did not involve breaking into a store; Wade to petit larceny, which involved being in possession of stolen merchandise but not entry into a store. Notwithstanding those differences, both crimes were misdemeanors that carried the same sentence of up to a year rather than up to ten years for burglary. The men were not sentenced at this time, so the consequences of their plea bargains were not immediately apparent. That they had been convicted of “lesser offenses” was noted in the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times, but not in the New York Post and New York Amsterdam News. Plea bargaining was by far the most common outcome of felony prosecutions in this period, so that outcome may not have been perceived as entirely diminishing their actions. Nor did a plea necessarily indicate an admission of guilt. Wright would later assert his innocence, saying that he had pleaded guilty on the advice of his lawyer.

The grand jury added to the picture of the disorder as composed of minor actions by sending all four of the men whose cases were presented to it on this day to the Court of Special Sessions, charged with misdemeanors not felonies. All had faced charges of riot, with Leon Mauraine, David Smith, and John Kennedy Jones also charged with malicious mischief for breaking windows, and John King with assault. Only the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, and the New York Times, reported the hearings, but without names as the grand jury proceedings were closed.

The four men who appeared in the Harlem court appeared to present a countervailing picture. Three were sent to the grand jury on riot charges. One, Raymond Easley, had already been indicted by the grand jury as a result of Dodge’s investigation. He was the last subject of that investigation to appear in court, although only one of the two newspapers that reported the hearing mentioned him. However, the outcomes of the three men's prosecutions would follow the same pattern as the hearings that occurred on same day: James Pringle and Claude Jones would be sent to the Court of Special Sessions, and Easley’s indictment would be dismissed. The magistrate continued the investigation of two other men, Leroy Brown and William Ford. Both would later be sent to the grand jury, and like the others, to the Court of Special Sessions. The magistrate sent the final man, Harry Gordon, directly to the Court of Special Sessions. Two days of additional police investigations had failed to produce enough evidence to send him to the grand jury. With Gordon’s ILD lawyer in attendance, the magistrate would have had little scope to overlook the deficiencies in the evidence. Gordon would not face trial for another seven months, the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in court. In the interim, he would testify in a public hearing of the MCCH and describe being beaten both when he was arrested and while in custody. His testimony persuaded the chairman of those hearings, Arthur Garfield Hays, but not the judges in the Court of Special Sessions. They convicted him; the sentence they imposed is unknown. He was one of only two men known to have been convicted of an assault during the disorder — although there is no evidence that outcome was reported in the press.

Rather than building toward the prosecution of individuals who played major roles in the disorder, then, the legal response to the disorder saw serious charges become misdemeanors and frequently the even lesser offense of disorderly conduct. Those arrested by police proved not to be responsible for much of the violence and damage. Instead, they had been among the crowds drawn to the streets and into encounters with police. The extent of the violence of the disorder consequently was not brought into focus in the criminal courts. Only later, in the civil courts, would some of the scale of the damage, if not the violence and injuries, become part of the legal record.
 

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