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

James Williams arrested

Around 2:00 AM, police arrested James Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old West Indian cook, at Lenox Avenue and West 118th Street. He allegedly had in his possession a “quantity of hardware” taken from Herman Young’s hardware store at 346 Lenox Ave, ten blocks to north, an hour earlier. It was not clear how Williams was carrying the collection of four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box and a cloth lamp. Young identified those goods as his property. With a combined value of $12.55, they represented only a small portion of the $500 of hardware reported stolen from his store. Williams may have been going to his home. For the last two years he had lived a block further south and west at 153 West 117th Street. Williams was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one third (9 of 29) of the arrests for which that information is known (29 of 60).



There was no mention of what caused the officer to arrest Williams. Young told police that he “was seen taking property from the store,” phrasing that suggests someone other than Young witnessed the theft. Young was unlikely to have been directly involved in the arrest. Half an hour earlier he had been in Harlem Hospital receiving treatment for a wound to his head received when a man assaulted him during the attack on his store. Williams may be the individual in a photograph of man arrested for looting published in the New York Evening Journal carrying a large bin from which pots and pans are sticking out (the caption did not name the man).

Charged with burglary the morning after the disorder, Williams appeared in only the list of those arrested published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in one list published in the New York Evening Journal. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder represented by a lawyer, in his case John Lewis, a member of the Harlem Lawyers Association. The Harlem Magistrates Court Docket Book recorded him as being remanded to appear again on March 22. He was not brought before a Grand Jury until April 10. They transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, according to the District Attorney's case file. That decision indicated they had not charged Williams with burglary, a felony which required evidence of breaking and entering. Instead, the charge would have been larceny given the evidence provided by the goods allegedly found in his possession. Those items had a value of less than $100 so would only have support the misdemeanor charge of petit larceny. Two days later, on April 12, the judges acquitted Williams, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter. The likeliest explanation for that verdict would be that the jury had not been convinced that the items Williams was carrying had come from Young's store.

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