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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 10:00 PM, 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 man and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted that 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 Street 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, according to details in the probation officer's preliminary investigation that were not included in the report to the court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets and heard people saying “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 shoe 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; in the preliminary report, the probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.

The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested.) Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, 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 a minister named Haynes received by the 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 that evidence 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 J. T. Sloane determined Hughes' participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon 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.

Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to whom he became apprenticed. The probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr. Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year, he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later, he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.



Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."

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