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

James Simon arrested

James Simon, a twenty-three-year-old Black man, was recorded in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book as charged with disorderly conduct on March 20. That appearance was mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune and Home News on March 21 and the New York Age on March 30 (where his name was misspelled Simmons). He also appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but not in any of the lists published in white newspapers. Simon was listed among those charged with riot, the initial charge recorded for many of those arrested during the disorder. Several of the others listed as facing that charge were identified as also charged with burglary; that Simon was not suggests he had not been arrested for alleged looting. The change in charge to disorderly conduct cast him not as a participant in inciting others, breaking windows, looting, or assault, but as a member of the crowds police encountered on the street, perhaps near outbreaks of violence, and arrested either mistaking them for participants or to get them off the streets. His appearance in the Washington Heights Court indicated that Simon was arrested above 130th Street but there was no information on exactly where or when police took him into custody.

The docket book recorded T. M. McCabe of the 32nd Precinct as the police officer who arrested Simon. Three other Black men arrested by McCabe appeared in the court at the same time also charged with disorderly conduct: Albert Brown, Roosevelt Dration, and Porter O'Neill. They too appeared alongside Simon in the press as arrested for riot. Police likely arrested the men together.

Magistrate Ford convicted Simon and sentenced him to one month in the Workhouse. He also convicted the other three men and imposed the same sentence on Brown and Dration. O'Neill, however, he sentenced to only five days in the Workhouse.

Brown's address was recorded as 170 East 129th Street, on the eastern boundary of Black Harlem. That was the same address recorded for Charles De Souse, also arrested for riot, charged with disorderly conduct and convicted in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court. The three newspaper stories that reported his appearance in court recorded him as thirty-three years of age. As the docket book was the official record of the legal proceedings reported in the press, the age given there was used rather than the age reported in the press.

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