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

James Hughes arrested

Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the twenty-four-year-old man, and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted the stones were to defend himself, and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.

Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th St and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue, before returning home for supper, and then heading out again at 9.30pm to go drinking. When he set out for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets, and heard people calling out “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a show repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the Probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked.

The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, Home News, and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the Home News and New York Post reported he was back in the court two days later, one of three men returned to have their original charges dismissed so they could be rearrested and new charges brought. (The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded only that the charges against Hughes had been dismissed, not that he had been rearrested). Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.

When Hughes appeared for sentencing the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from minister named Haynes received by Mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”

Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer determined Hughes to be “an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the probation department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.

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