Harlem Magistrates Court, 170 East 121st Street, c. 1939-1941.
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2022-12-06T03:27:27+00:00
In the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20
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2024-05-31T18:58:58+00:00
Around two dozen uniformed patrolmen kept people away from the city block housing the Harlem Courthouse. Inside, ten more officers lined the stairs leading up to the courtroom, within which an additional fifteen officers were stationed. So many people had crowded into the courtroom by 9:30 AM that for the remainder of the day only those who could prove they had business in the court were admitted. Hundreds of others were left standing in crowds on the sidewalks outside the police cordon. Many had come from the Black neighborhoods to the west; the sprinkling of white spectators likely included members of the Communist Party as well as residents of the white section around the courthouse. While no one in those crowds turned to violence against people or property as white observers clearly worried they might, they did express dissatisfaction with the white authorities. “Boos and jeers” greeted the arrival of the police wagons, and “considerable grumbling, [and] some shouting of threats” continued throughout the day. Just what people were calling out went unreported by white observers of these events. The men and women exiting the police wagons at the courthouse yet again found themselves in front of press photographers, some on the street, others shooting out of windows on the upper floors of the building, one of whom took this image of a group of men arriving.
Inside the courthouse, clearly aware that the eyes of Black Harlem were on him, Magistrate Stanley Renaud began the hearing by announcing that “at his request," a Black Assistant District Attorney, Richard E. Carey, had been assigned to prosecute the accused rioters so that "there can be no charge of discrimination." Carey had only been sworn in as a district attorney a month earlier, after practicing as a defense lawyer for ten years. During that time he had served as the legal advisor for the group that organized the picket and boycott campaign in 1934, and represented John Johnson, one of the protesters that the Beck shoe store had successfully sued in the New York Supreme Court to have the picketing declared unlawful. Active in the Democratic party, Carey’s decision to become a prosecutor was reported by the New York Amsterdam News to have been an effort to position himself to be a magistrate.
Police brought sixty-three Black men, eight white men, and five Black women before Renaud for arraignment, beginning with James Bright, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man accused of breaking windows in a Lenox Avenue drug store. Just over half of the arrested men who appeared after him were, like Bright, between twenty and twenty-nine years of age. Only twenty were older, with just six over forty years of age, Leroy Gillard and Joseph Moore the oldest at age forty-six. Thirty years separated them from the youngest of those arrested, sixteen-year-old Joseph Hayes, one of only fourteen men less than twenty years of age. Among that group were four of the eight white men arrested during the disorder, eighteen-year-old Louis Tonick, nineteen-year-olds Murray Samuels and Sam Jamison, arrested in front of the Kress store, and Leo Smith. Three of the other four white men who appeared before Magistrate Renaud were between twenty and twenty-four years of age, with the oldest white man, Jean Jacquelin only thirty-three years old. The five Black women arraigned in the court were similarly young. Margaret Mitchell was the youngest, eighteen years of age; Viola Woods the oldest, only thirty years old.
The accusation of breaking windows made against James Bright that began the arraignments proved not to be typical of the allegations made over the course of the court session. Only fifteen others were alleged to have committed that act, although they were a diverse group, including three Black women, Viola Woods, Louise Brown, and Rose Murrell, and one white man, Leo Smith. Unlike most of those arrested for breaking windows, Bright was charged with the offense of disorderly conduct. Only four others faced that charge; the other ten were charged with the offense of malicious mischief. The later was an offense that included the destruction of property, with the punishment determined by the value of the property or damage done. The threshold for a felony charge was $250; store windows were generally valued at less than $100, so fell within the lesser, misdemeanor form of the offense. Disorderly conduct, by contrast, encompassed a variety of forms of breach of the peace, none of which involved damage to property. It carried a lesser sentence than a misdemeanor and fell within the jurisdiction of the magistrate: Renaud would determine guilt and, if necessary, punishment. Carey's decision to charge men and women accused of breaking windows with disorderly conduct likely indicated a lack of evidence that they were responsible for that damage. Their arrest would have resulted from being nearby when windows were broken, part of crowds on the streets, which police could portray as being involved in the "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior" that constituted disorderly conduct.
After a second man accused of breaking windows, Arthur Bennett, followed Bright, police brought Rivers Wright before Magistrate Renaud. Detective Doyle accused the twenty-one-year-old Black man of assault, alleging that he was part of a group of men who attacked an unnamed white man. With no arrests in forty-seven of the reported assaults during the disorder, such allegations were an infrequent part of the court hearing, made against only five other men. However, the offense with which the prosecutor charged Wright was disorderly conduct. As with Bright, that charge likely indicated that police did not have evidence that Wright participated in the assault, only that he had been part of a crowd nearby. Wright was the only one of the men arrested for assault who faced that charge in the Harlem court; Carey charged the other five men, including one white man, Harry Gordon, accused of assaulting a patrolman arresting him for trying to speak to the crowd in front of the Kress store, with the offense of assault. The use of a weapon and the extent of the injury inflicted defined the different degrees of that offense.
Twenty-two-year-old Theodore Hughes, who appeared after Wright, was accused by Patrolman Carrington of having committed an act more typical of those brought before Renaud: looting items from a store. Police accused thirty-six others, just under half of those arraigned that day, of such theft. They were a less diverse group than those police alleged had broken windows, Black men apart from two white men, Louis Tonick and Jean Jacquelin, and one Black woman, Elizabeth Tai. Those men were also older than those alleged to have committed other acts: fifteen were over thirty years of age, more than two thirds of those arrested of that age, including the two oldest who appeared in the Harlem court, Gillard and Moore. As with Bright and Wright, the offense with which Carey charged Hughes, petit larceny, proved not to be typical of those accused of looting. Only four others faced that charge. A substantial majority, twenty-seven, instead were charged with burglary, including Elizabeth Tai. Carey charged two others, Louis Tonick, the eighteen-year-old white man, and Edward Larry with robbery. The offense of burglary involved breaking into a building to commit a crime; in the context of the disorder, that applied to those alleged to have both broken a store’s windows, entered the store, and taken items from inside. The value of the items taken did not matter. That act became robbery if the property was taken from a person. The offense of larceny fitted circumstances in which items were taken without breaking a store window. The value of that property determined the form of the offense, with petit larceny involving goods worth $100 or less. In the case of Hughes, the man accused of breaking the windows of the meat market from which he took two pieces of pork, Emmett Williams was arraigned directly after him, charged with the offense of malicious mischief. Two of those accused of looting, Albert Bass and James Smith, faced charges of disorderly conduct, indicating that police had no evidence that they had taken any merchandise, broken windows, or entered a business. The definition of disorderly conduct included only various forms of breach of the peace, so police had likely arrested them in a crowd near a looted store.
Following Emmett Williams, police next brought Margaret Mitchell before Magistrate Renaud. Her early appearance in court was fitting as she had been the first person police arrested, inside the Kress store around 5:00 PM, accused of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect.” Those arrested for inciting crowds made up a far smaller group than those arrested for looting. The fourteen others were all men, including the three white men, Daniel Miller, Murray Samuels, and Sam Jamison, arrested in front of the Kress store, and the Black man who picketed with them, Claudio Viabolo. All but one of those men were charged with the offense of riot. To fall within that offense, the men had to be part of a group of three or more who threatened to use, attempted to use, or did use violence against a person or property. In the context of the disorder, police accused them of calling on groups of which they were members to break store windows or attack police. Carey, however, charged Mitchell with disorderly conduct; only John Hawkins of those accused of riot also faced that charge. In Mitchell’s case, that offense fit what police alleged she had done. While she had been part of a crowd in the store, she had not acted with any of those women or men, nor had she sought to damage property. Mitchell may not have intended to cause any disturbance. According to the Times Union she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” Police likely could also only place Hawkins in a crowd, not acting with others or calling on them to attack property or people.
Four more men and one woman arrested during the disorder appeared before Renaud before he heard Officer Ramos accuse Jose Perez of having a gun in his possession, the least frequent charge made against those arrested during the disorder. Only Perez, recorded by the court clerk as a white man but given his name likely Puerto Rican, faced just that charge; the two Black men alleged to have had weapons in their possession who appeared before Renaud later in the day had also been accused of other acts, breaking windows in the case of Arthur Killen and looting in the case of Raymond Easley. Police had found weapons in those men’s possession after arresting them for those other actions. Perez attracted police attention in some other way.
Magistrate Renaud remanded just under half of those arrested in the disorder, twenty-eight Black men, five white men, and three Black women, for further investigation of their alleged offenses. That group included all the men charged with assault other than Rivers Wright. Most of the rest, thirty-one of those arrested, he referred for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, in the case of nine Black men, one white man, and one white woman, or a hearing in the grand jury for the other nineteen Black men. None of the seven accused of having broken windows in that group had allegedly done enough damage for the charge against them to be a felony punished by longer terms of imprisonment; they were all sent to the Court of Special Sessions. By contrast, all four of those accused of inciting crowds that Renaud referred on March 20 were sent to the grand jury to face felony charges. Most of those accused of looting were likewise sent to the grand jury to face felony charges. Renaud referred only four of the nineteen to the Court of Special Sessions, all of who had been charged with petit larceny not burglary. In those cases, like the prosecutions for breaking windows, the value of the property determined that outcome.
The magistrate took little time to make those decisions, surprising many of the reporters in the courtroom — and perhaps making it difficult for them to gather information on all the cases, as even the most comprehensive list, published in the Home News included only thirty-seven of those who appeared before Renaud. The lack of lawyers representing those being charged contributed to how quickly the magistrate made his decisions. Only sixteen attorneys appeared in the hearings before Renaud. Among them were several high-profile Black lawyers, even though it was not obvious that their clients had the resources to pay them. Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney, represented Margaret Mitchell. Her father, Thomas E. Thompson, may have retained Christian to represent her. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. Eustace Dench and John Lewis, who represented Viola Woods and James Williams, were both leaders of the Harlem Lawyers Association, an organization with around one hundred members that may have, may have offered their services as part of the group’s commitment to protecting the Black community’s civil rights. Carey, the prosecuting assistant district attorney, was also a member of the association. Two other lawyers were active in social organizations in Harlem and may also have been members of the association: Pope Billings, a former state assemblyman and member of the Elks Lodge, who represented Douglas Cornelius; and West-Indian born Hutson Lovell, also an Elk and prominent in the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, who represented William Ford. The lawyers for Frederick Harwell, Claude Jones, Arthur Merritt and Oscar Leacock could not be identified. The presence of this group of prominent Black attorneys in the courtroom would have contributed to Magistrate Renaud’s concern to involve Carey and try to blunt any charges of racial discrimination in the proceedings - and was likely one reason the men were there. Such an approach would have continued the strategy historian David Krugler argued was adopted in the wake of the racial disorders in 1919, when African American groups had acted to ensure that Black men and women arrested for riot-related offenses received unbiased treatment.
Aubrey Patterson identified his lawyer, T. French, as a friend. He may have been affiliated with the Communist Party, as the International Labor Defense offered to defend Patterson. White lawyers from that Communist Party organization, well-known in 1935 thanks to their role defending the Scottsboro Boys, did represent the four Communists arrested at the beginning of the disorder, Daniel Miller, Murray Samuels, Sam Jamison and Claudio Viabolo. The two attorneys, Yetta M. Aronsky and Isidore Englander, clashed with Renaud and drew the attention of reporters. When Carey asked that bail for the men be set at the maximum, $2500, higher than for any of the others arrested during the disorder, Aronsky and Englander, "protested vehemently." Renaud was unmoved; nor did he act on Aronksy's complaint that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest." Another ILD lawyer, Edward Kuntz, who would later take a leading role in MCCH hearings, represented Frank Wells. Kuntz would also appear for Harry Gordon at later hearings. Gordon on several occasions insisted he was getting his own lawyer, not being represented by the ILD lawyers who appeared for the other white men, as he was not connected with them. On March 20, however, he did not have a lawyer. That the lawyer who later represented him, Kuntz, was affiliated with the ILD, would not have helped Gordon's effort to distinguish himself from the Communists arrested in the disorder. He would later testify before a hearing of the MCCH that he knew Kuntz through the lawyer’s son rather than a shared affiliation with the Communist Party.
At least one other white lawyer appeared in the hearings, to represent Leo Smith, the youngest of the white men arrested by police. For some reason the lawyer’s name was not recorded in the court docket book, but he earned a rebuke from Renaud that attracted the attention of reporters from the Daily News and Times Union. The case would have stood out even before that clash as it reversed the racial dynamics of the vast majority of the hearings. Smith had been arrested by a Black patrolman, one of only five Black officers among the police who made arrests. Neither of the white journalists who reported the incident recounted just what Smith’s white attorney said while the Black patrolman was testifying — he “sought to inject a question of race,“ according to one, and “hinted the trouble was started by Negroes and was racial in origin” according to the other — but it prompted “muttered disapproval” from the predominantly Black spectators and a rebuke from Renaud: "The patrolman in this case happens to be colored, the Judge happens to be white and the prosecutor is colored." said Renaud. "We recognize no race, color or creed here. We are looking for justice and law and order." That clash occurred early in the session; only eight men and women arrested during the disorder had appeared before Smith. What impact it had on the hearings that followed went unrecorded.
In just nine cases did the Magistrate adjudicate a prosecution. Three additional defendants charged with disorderly conduct whose cases he could have decided, Viola Woods, Frank Wells, and Albert Bass, he had investigated. Renaud convicted Margaret Mitchell and John Hawkins, arrested for inciting crowds, James Bright, Arthur Bennett, and Leo Smith, arrested for breaking windows, and Rivers Wright, arrested for assault. But he did not sentence any of them, instead ordering they be investigated and returned to court on March 23 for sentencing.
Renaud also acquitted Jacob Bonaparte, Oscar Austin, and Sam Nicholas, decisions that went unreported by the press. All three of those men had been arrested by the same police officer, on the complaint of the same person, J. Romanoff, the proprietor of a drug store on Lenox Avenue. There was clearly some confusion about what Romanoff and the officer alleged the men had done as the charge against them was changed from attempted burglary, which suggested the men had been involved in looting but had no stolen items in their possession, to disorderly conduct, which suggested that they had simply been part of a crowd around the drug store. Given that Renaud was not willing to hold the men for investigation as he did all the others arrested in the disorder who came before him on that day, it seems likely that neither Romanoff nor the police officer had seen the men do anything and that they were arrested too far from the store to be connected with what happened there. Newspaper stories about the hearings offer no insight on Renaud’s decision; they did not mention any of those who were acquitted or released. -
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2022-12-03T20:38:38+00:00
In court on March 22
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2024-05-31T19:08:31+00:00
While Dodge had promised more dramatic action from the grand jury on its second day of hearings on the disorder, the number of indictments it voted failed to even match the results of the first session. After eight witnesses testified, the grand jury indicted just four individuals, all for burglary. Moreover, the seriousness of what Dodge had presented the previous day was undercut when he announced that the five men indicted for riot, including the four alleged Communists, would no longer be tried in the Court of General Sessions, but instead for lesser, misdemeanor offenses in the Court of Special Sessions. Dodge did return to the grand jury room in the afternoon with a typewriter and a mimeograph machine seized from the offices of organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, the ILD and Nurses and Hospital League, and two unnamed witnesses. He apparently claimed the equipment had been used to produce the leaflet circulated in the early hours of the disorder. No indictments resulted from that evidence; the grand jury instead adjourned for the weekend.
As the anti-Communist investigation lost momentum, Magistrates Renaud and Ford continued to move those arrested in the disorder through the legal process. Four men, three arrested after the disorder, appeared in court for the first time, one in the Washington Heights court, three in the Harlem court, joined there by fourteen others returning after being investigated. Although additional police were stationed at the Harlem court, around forty officers the Daily News and New York Times reported, those hearings did not draw the crowds who attended on March 20 even as reporters again filled the courtroom. Nonetheless, police searched several of those who entered the courtroom for weapons, and turned away those who “bore indications of connection with the Young Liberators, the Communist organization which fomented the disorder” according to the Daily News.
The outcomes of the hearings were mixed, revealing again both the varied nature of the events of the disorder and how few of those responsible for the violence had been apprehended by police in their indiscriminate response to the disorder. The three men appearing for the first time in the Harlem court had been arrested after the disorder, Daughty Shavos and Clifford Mitchell the previous evening, and Jackie Ford the same day. Police arrested Shavos and Mitchell in their homes on West 119th Street and on Lenox Avenue, respectively, with merchandise allegedly taken from Louis Levy’s store and charged them with burglary. Just how police knew to go to the men’s home was not mentioned. Merchants had called for police to search for stolen merchandise, but these were the only arrests of this kind made after the disorder. In 1943, when the legal response to disorder in Harlem was more narrowly focused on looting than in 1935, one in five of the individuals arrested would be charged with receiving stolen goods. Renaud sent Mitchell and Shavos to the grand jury. Jackie Ford’s arrest came after Julia Cureti identified him as one of those who broke windows in her restaurant, although there is no evidence of where the identification or arrest occurred. Unlike those men, Hashi Mohammed, the only person arrested in the disorder who appeared in the Washington Heights court on March 22, had been arrested on March 20. He had been treated for “internal injuries” so likely had been in Harlem Hospital until this time. Mohammed was one of only four men charged with possession of a weapon but given that he would later be acquitted of that charge, police may have made that allegation to justify the violence that led to his injuries. Police had allegedly found either a knife or a gun after arresting Mohammed for breaking windows. They could not substantiate that second charge, as on March 22 he was instead charged with disorderly conduct. Magistrate Ford found Mohammed guilty, as he had nineteen others arrested during the disorder two days earlier.
Magistrate Renaud also convicted three of those returned to his court, Elizabeth Tai, Arthur Davis, and Herbert Hunter, of disorderly conduct. The three had been arrested by the same police detective for allegedly breaking into a grocery store on Lenox Avenue and taking merchandise. Evidence to substantiate that allegation had clearly not been found as the charge against all three was reduced from burglary to disorderly conduct. That change effectively removed Tai, Davis, and Hunter from those who had acted to target property and returned them to the crowds on the street. Police offered some evidence that the three had not simply been spectators, as Renaud convicted them all, but there is no indication of just what they did that fell within the "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior" the law encompassed. Renaud did not judge it to be very serious, as he sentenced Tai and Hunter to only five days in the Workhouse and Hunter to ten days.
Two other men charged with burglary, Henry Goodwin and Frederick Harwell, also had the charges against them reduced, but to petit larceny, not disorderly conduct. In their case police were able to produce evidence they had taken merchandise, if not broken into a store to do so. However, what they had taken did not have a value of $100 or more so did not warrant a felony charge. Renaud consequently sent Goodwin and Harwell for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, joining Jackie Ford and another man who allegedly broke windows, William Jones. By contrast, police presented sufficient evidence against five other men arrested for looting and charged with burglary, John Henry, Oscar Leacock, James Williams, Arthur Merritt, and Amie Taylor, for Renaud to send their cases sent to the grand jury along with those of Shavos and Mitchell. Nonetheless, police investigations had failed to find enough support to sustain the charges of burglary they had made against half of those who appeared in court on this date.
Paul Boyett was alone among those who appeared in not having his case decided. The need for continued investigation likely resulted from the efforts to find witnesses to confirm Patrolman Conn’s claim that Boyett had been one of those who assaulted Timothy Murphy rather than being among the spectators drawn to the attack on the white man as he claimed. Even with fewer cases, the press reported only some of those appearances, as had happened on March 20, with no mentions of Boyett, those sent to the Court of Special Sessions, and three of those sent to the grand jury.
Dodge’s investigation intersected with the regular legal process both in the Harlem Magistrates Court and in the grand jury. Police served warrants for the arrest of three of the men who returned to the court, James Hughes, Charles Saunders, and Isaac Daniels, as they had already been indicted by the grand jury. In doing so they identified the three as among the unnamed individuals whose indictment Dodge had announced over the previous two days, Hughes and Daniels the two men indicted for assault and Saunders one of the five indicted for burglary. Renaud discharged the men, and police then took them into custody. (Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators may also have been brought back to the court as the Home News and Daily Mirror both reported the men were present but did not appear as police awaited warrants based on their indictments.) In the grand jury, out of the public eye, cases referred by the magistrates on March 20 began to be heard alongside those based on witnesses gathered by Dodge. The grand jury indicted all six of the men referred by magistrates, voting charges of burglary against Arnold Ford, Joseph Moore, Robert Tanner, Joseph Wade, and Hezekiah Wright.
The first of those arrested during the disorder appeared in the Court of Special Sessions for trial. Both the men, Earl Davis, sent by Magistrate Ford from the Washington Heights court, and Thomas Babbitt, sent by Magistrate Renaud from the Harlem court, faced a charge of petit larceny. While the magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions convicted both men, they sentenced them to only ten days in the Workhouse — the same short term that Renaud gave to those he convicted of disorderly conduct on the same day. For all the willingness of police to shoot at looters, those sentences showed that judges treated small scale looting — two cases of soap in Babbitt’s case, unspecified merchandise from a tailor in Davis’ case — no more punitively than being part of crowds in the streets. Neither proceeding was mentioned in the press. -
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2022-12-09T03:13:40+00:00
In court on March 25
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After the weekend, District Attorney Dodge continued to work to focus attention on Communists. He displayed to reporters pamphlets seized from raids on the offices of Communist Party organization. Claiming he had found “good clues” in them, Dodge raised the possibility of bringing charges of criminal anarchy connected with the disorder, an approach promoted by the Hearst newspapers. Dodge also claimed to be discussing new legislation with the grand jury to “define” free speech to exclude promoting the overthrow of the government.
For all of Dodge’s bravado, the day’s grand jury hearing resulted in only one additional indictment related to the disorder. And it was not one that substantiated Dodge’s claims, but rather was “for nothing spectacular,” as a story in the New York Post put it: theft of paper towels with a value 15 cents.
Neither did the return to the Harlem Magistrates Court of Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested in the disorder produce the spectacle that reporters had anticipated it would. Their appearance was another instance of Dodge’s grand jury investigation intersecting with the regular legal process. On this occasion more than half of those who appeared in court, six men in addition to the four Communists, had already been indicted by that grand jury. While extra police were detailed to the court, the hearings, like those at the end of the previous week, did not attract unusual crowds and were uneventful. Magistrate Renaud discharged the four men after detectives presented him with bench warrants. The officers then rearrested the men without conflict between their attorneys and the magistrate or any more discussion of their alleged activities. None of the newspapers made clear that the four Communists were being taken for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, on misdemeanor charges, not to the Court of General Sessions to face trial for felonies. While Dodge likely hoped that further questioning of the men would advance his investigation, additional evidence proved elusive. It would be almost two months before Miller, Samuels, Jamison, and Viabolo faced trial. During that time Dodge would not only fail to secure more indictments, his account of the role of Communists in the disorder would be contradicted in the MCCH hearings. The other six men discharged and rearrested drew little attention, with Nelson Brock, Reginald Mills, William Grant, and Douglas Cornelius not named in any newspaper stories and Carl Jones and Milton Ackerman identified in only one publication. Although these men faced more serious charges than those sentenced on March 23 — burglary in case of Brock, Mills, Grant, Jones, and Ackerman, assault on a white man in the case of Cornelius — there was apparently less interest in those details by this time.
Harry Gordon, the other white man arrested on 125th Street at the beginning of the disorder, also returned to court. Although he was represented by an ILD lawyer, Edward Kuntz, Gordon was no longer grouped with the four Communists as he had been on March 20. He had not been indicted as a result of Dodge’s investigation. Instead, like most of the remainder of those who appeared in court with him, four other men, he had his case continued as police continued to gather evidence. Several newspapers did report Gordon’s appearance, perhaps because of his prominence in earlier stories or because he had allegedly assaulted a police officer and what proved to be ill-founded assurances from police that they were planning to present his case to the grand jury. Another white man in this group, Louis Tonick, who faced a charge of robbery, went unmentioned. So too did the three Black men, Bernard Smith, Leroy Brown, and Paul Boyett, the former two charged with inciting crowds and breaking windows, the latter with assaulting a white man. The alleged actions of those still appearing in the magistrates court were among the most violent of those arrested during the disorder, which is likely why police spent more time investigating them. Louis Cobb, who once again had his case continued in the Washington Heights court, the only individual arrested during the disorder to appear there that day, stood out not for the charge against him, looting, but for his extensive criminal record. His appearance likewise went unreported.
Just three prosecutions were adjudicated in the Harlem court. Aubrey Patterson, the butt of reporters’ jokes in stories about the police line-up, was released. Arrested for burglary but charged only with disorderly conduct, Patterson was represented by a lawyer, which may explain why the magistrate did not convict him as he did others in similar circumstances. His release removed him entirely from the disorder and cast him as a bystander. Prosecutors reduced the charge against Louise Brown and Warren Johnson from malicious mischief to disorderly conduct. No longer alleged to have broken windows, they became part of the disorderly crowds that police encountered on streets. Whatever evidence police presented that led the magistrate to convict them rather than releasing them as he did Patterson, it was insufficient to warrant imprisonment: he instead gave them suspended sentences. None of those decisions was reported in the press, other than in a New York Herald Tribune story that mentioned the conviction of three unnamed individuals and the release of one other, without providing any details of the charges that they faced or the sentences they received.
One more man, Nathan Snead, was convicted in the Court of Special Sessions, having been sent from the Harlem Court charged with petit larceny. In sentencing him to the penitentiary for a term of up to a year, the judges imposed the most punishment yet handed down to those arrested during the disorder. However, none of Snead’s appearances in court were reported, so just what he did to warrant such a sentence is unknown. A second man, Henry Stewart, charged with malicious mischief for breaking windows, was discharged. Those trials went unreported.
The appearance in the Court of General Sessions of the first six men indicted by the grand jury was reported by two newspapers even though they were simply released on bail. None were indicted as a result of Dodge’s investigation. All were charged with burglary, which promised felony convictions and marked them as major offenders in the disorder, unlike those convicted in the Magistrates Court. However, within a few days the prosecutions would have a different outcome.
The selective reporting of the day’s hearings across the city’s papers was the beginning of the less extensive press coverage of the legal process that would become the norm, with only some of those who appeared named and their offenses described, and soon only some hearings reported. The slow and fitful progress of the legal process lacked the spectacle of the mass hearings in the immediate aftermath of the disorder. To the contrary, it fragmented the disorder into a multitude of prosecutions, few of which involved any acts that on their own amounted to more than minor crimes. Eighteen of those arrested in the disorder appeared in the Harlem court on this date; subsequently, no more than half a dozen of those arrested in the disorder would appear in a court on one day. And even as those charged with more serious crimes moved beyond the Magistrates courts, only a handful of the prosecutions of those charged with more serious crimes resulted in the spectacle of a trial.
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2022-12-03T20:38:55+00:00
In court on March 23
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2024-05-31T19:01:18+00:00
While none of those arrested in the disorder faced trial on Saturday, the six convicted of disorderly conduct by Magistrate Renaud on March 20 returned to the Harlem court for sentencing. While the hearing was widely reported in the city’s newspapers, the details hardly warranted that attention. Only the New York Evening Journal story made that clear in commenting that those who appeared were “minor offenders in the outbreak." At the same time, District Attorney Dodge continued to assert that Communists had been responsible for the disorder and could provoke further violence, affirming to reporters his commitment to having the grand jury investigate those who advocated the overthrow of government by force and violence. So even as the legal outcomes indicated the limited extent to which the police response had encompassed the violence of the disorder, Dodge's preoccupations ensured that the grand jury investigation would not address the missing details of what had happened.
Margaret Mitchell, the one woman in the group, drew the most attention, with her reaction in Kress’ store to Rivera being taken away by staff presented by the press as having had a role in starting the disorder. Those stories continued to confuse her with a woman on 125th Street who screamed that Rivera had been killed some time after Mitchell’s arrest. In court she said “sorry.” That would be the only public statement Mitchell would make about the disorder, as she refused repeated requests to testify at one of the MCCH’s public hearings in the following weeks. Her silence worked to disassociate her from disorder, perhaps to protect the respectability of her family or to avoid putting herself at odds with police and white authorities. While other women shopping in the store did speak to MCCH investigators, they also ultimately did not testify. Their silence contributed, in combination with the apparent unwillingness of police to arrest women, to historians overlooking the role of Black women in the early hours of the disorder.
Magistrate Renaud determined that Mitchell had not intended to provoke violence, describing her actions as not “malicious.” He was likely encouraged in that conclusion by Mitchell’s lawyer, Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney. At the same time, the magistrate evidently did believe Mitchel had contributed to the disorder in Kress’ store. That was not immediately obvious in the sentence he imposed of three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10, a lesser sentence than he gave the others who appeared in court that day. However, Mitchell's sentence proved to be more punitive than those given to most of the others arrested for inciting crowds: six of the seven received suspended sentences, the other a month in the Workhouse. In Mitchell’s case, she (or her family) was able to mitigate that difference by paying the fine. That they had the financial resources to do so sets Mitchell apart from most of those arrested in the disorder, reinforcing the sense that the politics of respectability motivated her silence.
The other member of the group being sentenced who would have stood out was Leo Smith, a white man, but he did not receive the attention given to Mitchell. The Hearst newspapers, New York Evening Journal and New York American, did not mention him at all, avoiding distracting from their emphasis on white victims of violence. The other newspapers simply identified his race. Smith’s attorney apparently did not repeat the claims that the disorder had been a race riot started by Black residents, so not something a white man could have been involved in, that had provoked the Magistrate and Black spectators at his first appearance on March 20. Like three Black men who appeared with him, John Hawkins, James Bright, and Arthur Bennett, he received a sentence of one month in the Workhouse. Newspapers reported they had all broken windows, even though they would have been convicted of malicious mischief, not disorderly conduct, if police had evidence to support that charge. There was no suggestion that he had broken windows in Black rather than white businesses or otherwise been in conflict with Black residents during the disorder, so his presence among those convicted did not undermine efforts to present the disorder as “not a race riot,” but added to the variety of those involved in the disorder and to economic rather than racial motivations. The three men’s sentences of a month in the Workhouse were among the more punitive given to those accused of breaking windows, only half of whom served terms of one to six months.
The final man sentenced, Rivers Wright, received a term of only ten days. He had been arrested for assault, but as he had only been charged with disorderly conduct in court, police clearly did not have evidence he had participated in such violence. While not released, his short imprisonment cast him as someone police encountered in the crowds on the streets, not a participant in assaults or attacks on businesses.
Up in the Washington Heights court, unreported in the press, another of those arrested in the disorder joined those in the Harlem court in being removed from the ranks of those precipitating violence. Elva Jacobs was returned to court to have the charge against her reduced from burglary to unlawful entry. In other words, police only had evidence that she had entered a store, not that she had broken in or taken any merchandise. She was sent to the Court of Special Sessions for trial as that charge was still a misdemeanor. However, the magistrate set bail for Jacobs at only $50, the lowest for anyone arrested during the disorder.