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In the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20
Julius Hightower, an eighteen-year-old Black man that police alleged had broken windows was first of those arrested to appear before Magistrate Ford. He was one of the youngest of those arrested; two other eighteen-year-olds appeared after him, James Smith and Elva Jacobs, the only woman to appear in the Washington Heights courtroom. Well over half of the arrested men, eighteen of the thirty, were aged between twenty and twenty-nine years, a similar proportion as appeared in the Harlem. Fifty-year-old Joseph Payne was the oldest of those arrested, one of nine men over thirty years of age, the others evenly split between those aged in their thirties and those in aged their forties.
Hightower faced the same allegations as the first defendant in the Harlem court, breaking windows, as did the man who followed Hightower, forty-two-year-old Robert Porter. The assistant district attorney initially charged him with the offense of malicious mischief, which punished damage to property, but foreshadowing how the prosecution of those who appeared in the Washington Heights court would differ from what happened in the Harlem court, the charge was changed to disorderly conduct. That was also the offense with which Porter was charged. The decision to charge the men with disorderly conduct likely indicated either that they caused minimal damage or a lack of evidence that they were responsible for that damage despite being nearby when windows were broken, part of crowds on the streets.
Whether Magistrate Ford heard other accounts of windows being broken in the rest of the day’s proceeding cannot be discerned from any of the surviving sources. None of the twelve men and one woman who appeared later in the day whose alleged offenses were recorded had been arrested for breaking windows. However, for fifteen other men charged with the offense of disorderly conduct – half of all those who appeared before Ford – there is no record of what police alleged they did. The offense itself was not a guide to the reason for their arrest. Over the course of the day, the prosecutor used the charge of disorderly conduct not only in cases of men arrested for breaking windows, but also for men arrested for assault and looting. In the Harlem court, ADA Carey took the same approach, with men arrested for assault, looting and inciting crowds, as well as breaking windows, charged with the offense of disorderly conduct. What was different in the uptown court was how extensively the charge was used, in two-thirds of the prosecutions compared to less than one in five, 15%, of the cases Carey prosecuted in the Harlem court.
Twenty-seven-year-old Richard Jackson followed Porter. Police had arrested him for assault. The next four men to appear before Ford after Jackson faced the same allegation. However, where in the Harlem court Carey charged only one of the men arrested for assault, Rivers Wright, with disorderly conduct, all six men in the Washington Heights court faced that charge. Those decisions could indicate that the alleged acts of Jackson and the other men did not result in significant injury or that police did not have evidence that they participated in an assault. That was most likely the situation of the final three men in that group, Albert Yerber, Ed Loper, and Ernest Johnson, arrested just before daylight on March 20 (together with Charles Alston, who was injured and would not appear in court for several weeks). Police officers had pursued and arrested the group after claiming to have heard shots fired from a building at patrolmen stationed on a street corner but found no guns in their possession. The short sentences of two days in the Workhouse that Ford gave to Jackson and the other man arrested for assault, Salathel Smith, suggests that they too had not been involved in violent assaults.
After the string of men arrested for assault, police brought Lamter Jackson before the Magistrate. The twenty-four-year-old man had been arrested for looting. That was the accusation that Ford likely heard most frequently over the course of the day, as was Renaud’s experience in the Harlem court. Jackson faced a charge of petit larceny, as Earl Davis did later in the day, indicating evidence they had taken merchandise but not that they had broken into a store to do so. As in the Harlem court, an arrest for looting more often resulted in being charged with burglary, which involved breaking into a business in addition to taking merchandise: four men, including the fifty-year-old Joseph Payne, and Elva Jacobs faced that charge. the prosecutor charged one man arrested for looting, James Smith, with disorderly conduct. If anyone arrested for inciting crowds or possession of a weapon appeared before Ford, they were among those charged with disorderly conduct for who there is no record of their alleged offense.
Magistrate Ford departed from Magistrate Renaud in remanding only one in six of those who appeared before him, four men and Elva Jacobs, a third as many as Renaud did in the Harlem court. All five had been arrested for looting. He also sent only two for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, Earl Davis and Lamter Jackson, the men arrested for looting who faced charges of petit larceny, and referred no one to the grand jury. None of the men arrested for assault was remanded or sent for trial, nor were any of those arrested for breaking windows or unknown offenses. In all twenty-three cases where men were charged with disorderly conduct Ford adjudicated the prosecutions. Renaud had held a quarter of those facing that charge in his court for investigation, which contributed to him adjudicating only nine cases. However, it was the significantly higher proportion of defendants who faced charges of disorderly conduct that produced the disparity in outcomes: as reporters noted, the cases that appeared before Ford were not as serious as those on Renaud’s docket. Perhaps because of the lesser charges they faced, none of those who appeared in the Washington Heights court was represented by a lawyer, as fourteen men and two women were in the Harlem court.
Ford handed down guilty verdicts to nineteen of the men he put on trial, including both Hightower and Porter, arrested for breaking windows, James Smith, the one man arrested for looting charged with disorderly conduct, and all but Ernest Barnes of the fifteen arrested for unknown offenses. Yerber, Loper and Johnson, Ford acquitted. The testimony that Ford heard must have been quite different from the sensational stories about snipers targeting police that reports of the arrests generated in several white newspapers. Unlike the acquittals in the Harlem court, those in the Washington Heights court were mentioned in two newspaper stories but with no details. While the sentences that the convicted men received would prove to be typical of those given to those arrested during the disorder, that they had been convicted only of disorderly conduct created a picture of the events above 130th Street, where those who appeared in the Washington Heights court had been arrested, as less violent than in the blocks to the south where those who appeared in the Harlem court had been arrested.