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

John Vivien arrested

Around 11:00 PM, Detective Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct claimed he saw John Vivien, a twenty-seven-year-old Black laborer, reach through the smashed window of Regal Shoes and take a pair of shoes from the display. Edward Wittleder, the assistant manager, had closed the store, on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10:00 PM, before it was damaged, according to his Magistrate's Court affidavit. However, he would have known that it was likely to be attacked. By that time store windows had been smashed the length of the block of 125th Street to the west, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Police trying to clear people from the street had pushed them toward the intersection on which Regal Shoes sat, creating large crowds, as well as concentrating officers and riot control trucks there. After 10:00 PM, small groups had begun to attack businesses north and south of the intersection on 7th Avenue and further east on 125th Street. When Naton (and Officer Redmond, according to the criminal record) arrested Vivien, he claimed he found shoes which Wittleder identified as coming from the store in Vivien's possession. They had a value of $5.50, according to the affidavit. (Naton made two other arrests around this time, of John King, thirty minutes earlier, at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, and of James Pringle fifteen minutes later, two blocks south on 7th Avenue at West 123rd Street).


Vivien lived at 483 Manhattan Avenue, two blocks west of Regal Shoes, near the corner of West 120th Street, on margins of the Black neighborhood. He was listed among those arrested and charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York Evening Journal, his name misspelled Vivian. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, where Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on bail of $1,000. It was not Vivien's first time in court; he had been arrested for robbery in 1929, a charge dismissed by a magistrate according to his criminal record. The Home News reported those proceedings, also misspelling his name Vivian. The remainder of his prosecution was recorded only in legal records and police records. Vivien appeared before the grand jury on April 4, according to his district attorney's case file, who sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him. That outcome indicated a lack of evidence that he had broken into the store, a requirement for a charge of burglary. The charge Vivien instead faced was likely petit larceny, a misdemeanor, as the value of the items he had taken was well below the $100 required for a charge of felony theft. The judges in that court convicted him on April 10 and suspended his sentence, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter.

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