This page was created by Anonymous. 

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

James Smith arrested

Sometime during the disorder, Officer C. G. Weiler of the 32nd Precinct arrested James Smith, a seventeen-year-old Black man. Smith appeared in the lists of those arrested in the disorder charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal, and in the New York Daily News. By the time that Smith appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge against him had been reduced to Disorderly Conduct. That change suggests that police did not have any evidence that Smith had taken any merchandise, or had been trying to take merchandise, but only that he had allegedly broken the window of a store that was looted. The New York American reported that Smith had been charged with Disorderly Conduct.

Magistrate Ford convicted Smith and sentenced him to six months in the Workhouse, an outcome recorded in the docket book and reported in the New York Herald Tribune and later in the New York Age.

There is considerable variation in Smith's age and home address in as reported in the press. The docket book recorded him as seventeen years of age and living at 125 West 123rd Street, near the heart of the disorder. The New York Evening Journal and New York Daily News reported that home address, but Smith as eighteen years of age. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Age reported Smith was forty-eight years of age, living at 112 West 136th Street, while the New York American reported his age as twenty-six years and his home as 158 West 123rd Street. Based on the docket book, the stories could not refer to anyone else who appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 other than James Smith.

This page has tags:

This page references: