This page was created by Anonymous.
James Williams arrested
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 that 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 pfolice 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.
This page has tags:
This page references:
- "Transcripts of Police Blotter - Precinct 28, March 19 & 20, 1935," MCCH - Juvenile Delinquency - 1935-36, Departmental Correspondence. Box 34, Folder 1 (Roll 171), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945.
- New York Penal Law, § 404, 407: Burglary in third degree.
- New York Penal Law, § 1298-1299: Petit larceny
- District Attorney's Closed Case Files, 204036 (1935) (New York City Municipal Archives).
- [Photograph] "Stores Pillaged by Maddened Rioters," New York Evening Journal, March 20, 1935, 14.
- Harlem Magistrates Court docket book