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

In the Courts

By daybreak on March 20, the cells in Harlem’s two police precincts and hospitals held 125 men and women arrested during the disorder. Another two men would be arrested later that day, and one more two days later. The story of the prosecutions of those individuals reveals how the legal process produced a picture of the disorder that distorted its features and diminished its violence. At the same, the legal process showed the indiscriminate and often ineffectual nature of the police response. Thirteen of those arrested, twelve men and one woman, were released without being prosecuted. Many of those released had likely been spectators rather than participants in the disorder, arrested when police dispersed crowds, a practice that would also be evident in later disorders in Detroit and Harlem in 1943. One in every four who appeared in court went free. Only seventy-six of 103 of those arrested whose fate is known would be found guilty and just over half of those would not be convicted of the offenses for which they had been arrested but instead for disorderly conduct, a minor charge that likely indicated that police could only prove that they had been members of crowds on streets not participants in attacks on stores or assaults (the outcomes of the prosecution of the remaining twelve is unknown).

The alleged offenses of the individuals prosecuted did not reflect the events of the previous night. The twenty-nine alleged assaults on white men and women resulted in at most seven arrests, with an additional six men arrested for alleged assaults on police. As a result, interracial violence formed a smaller part of the picture of the disorder presented in the legal system. Difficulties gathering evidence had similarly kept violence out of legal proceedings after the race riots in Chicago in 1919, and would also do so after disorders in Detroit and Harlem in 1943. The attacks on stores that had dominated the early evening of the previous day were also largely absent from the courts. Only twenty of the arrests were for allegedly breaking windows. An additional fifteen men were arrested for inciting crowds and one man for possession of a weapon. The bulk of those arrested, fifty-seven men and three women, had allegedly been looting, causing the theft of property that characterized the final hours of the disorder to overshadow its other elements. At the same time, prosecutions for looting did not predominate to the extent they would after the disorder in Harlem in 1943, when they made up just over three quarters of the total (424 of 554), including 109 arrested for receiving stolen goods. That gap highlights the mix of old and new patterns of racial violence that characterized events in 1935.

The nature of the legal process further diminished the violence of the disorder. While the breadth of the violence, across the neighborhood and throughout the night, made the disorder greater than the sum of its parts, the courts fragmented it into the individual alleged acts of those being prosecuted. Isolated from the larger context, the offenses with which police and prosecutors charged individuals were relatively minor. Those offenses became even less serious as they moved through the legal process, with the charges made by police reduced by prosecutors, magistrates and the men serving on the grand jury, and numbers of those arrested discharged. The outcomes of the prosecutions reduced the severity of the disorder still further. Just under half of the prosecutions were adjudicated in the Magistrates courts, treated as the offense of disorderly conduct. Magistrates and the grand jury decided that the alleged offenses of most of the others arrested only amounted to misdemeanors, sending defendants to the Court of Special Session for trial rather than charging them with the more serious felony offenses tried in the Court of General Sessions. Those men and women found guilty were given short sentences by magistrates and judges, with a term of more than one year imposed on only one man and more than half imprisoned for ten days or less, fined or put on probation with a suspended sentence. At the same, the grand jury kept police violence during the disorder out of the courts, twice declining to indict Patrolman John McInerney for fatally shooting Lloyd Hobbs despite seven witnesses contradicting the officer's claim that the boy had been looting a store and that he had called on him to halt before firing his pistol. In this case, however, the all white grand jury had been presented with a white defendant and a Black victim and the testimony of Black witnesses. Unlike the race riots of the early twentieth century, that legal process was not centered on a special grand jury. Dodge, the District Attorney, did convene one, but focused it on pursuing Communists, which largely left prosecutions of those arrested during the disorder to the regular proceedings. The extended duration of that process saw prosecutions drop from public view before those outcomes were delivered, as the press stopped reporting proceedings as they were distributed across the courts and spread over a period of more than two months. Investigations of other racial disorders provided an overall picture of resulting legal proceedings that filled gaps in what appeared in newspaper stories. The Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem did not. Its report included no details of the disorder's legal aftermath.

Only later, in claims for damages brought against the city and litigated in the civil courts, did legal proceedings reveal some of the scale of the violence against property and of the ineffectiveness of police. One hundred and six store owners sued the city seeking compensation for the damage done to their businesses. Their claims described the total damage done rather than the result of a single attack or theft on which criminal prosecutions focused. The medium cost of the damage done to those businesses was $733; several store owners reported well over $1000 in damages. By contrast, the value of the alleged damage and thefts for which individuals were prosecuted was rarely more than $100, and in some cases less than $1. However, as only a handful of those cases went to trial, the legal process provided only glimpses of that violence. And the total damages paid by the city were apparently not known, with the press reporting only a claim by Mayor La Guardia that the amount could reach $1 million.

The legal aftermath of the disorder can be explored through three pathways. First, following the chronological narrative (using the pathway at the bottom of the page), which highlights the unfolding of the legal process, looking in detail at the first week when the press focused attention on the court. Second, by focusing on the work of the different courts (using the tags or the list of links on the right side of the page). Third, examining the legal treatment of different types of events (using the tags or the list of links on the right side of the page).

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