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

Raymond Taylor arrested

Officer D. Conn of the 24th Precinct arrested twenty-eight-year-old Raymond Taylor some time during the disorder for "stealing a quantity of groceries from a chain store at 135th St. and Lenox Ave," according to a story in the Home News. The store was likely the A & P grocery store at 510 Lenox Avenue, the only chain grocery store near that intersection in the MCCH business survey. The only reference to the looting was the Home News report of the appearance in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court of Taylor and two other Black men, forty-two-year-old Preston White and fifty-year-old Joseph Payne. White and Payne allegedly smashed the store window and took food. All three men were arrested "in the store." Officer Archbold of the 30th Precinct, not Officer Conn, was recorded as having arrested White and Payne in the Magistrates Court docket book. There was no mention of the value of the merchandise the men allegedly stole. Only one other reported event occurred on Lenox Avenue north of West 135th Street, the arrests of Charles Alston, Edward Loper, Albert Yergen, and Ernest Johnston for allegedly shooting at police at 138th Street at the very end of the disorder. Police likely arrested the three mwn after 12:30 AM, when officers appear to have begun patrolling this far north on Lenox Avenue. Taylor lived at 2228 5th Avenue, a block east of the grocery store.



Taylor, White and Payne appeared in the lists of those charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. When they appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge against them was originally recorded as burglary. The magistrate denied Payne and White bail and Taylor held on bail of $1,000. The Home News mistakenly reported different bail decisions for Taylor and Payne: $500 for Taylor and $1,500 for Payne. No complainant was listed in the docket book.

The three men returned to the Magistrates Court on March 26, at which point all had the charge against them reduced from burglary to disorderly conduct. That change was recorded in the docket book in the same handwriting as the outcome of the case, a quite different hand than the original entry. The new charge indicated that police did not have evidence either that the men had damaged the store or taken merchandise from it. Instead, typically those who faced that charge had been part of crowds in the area of attacks on businesses and looting. Police could have found them in the damaged and looted store, if the Home News reported that detail of their arrest accurately.

Magistrate Ford convicted all three men, and suspended Taylor's sentence, an outcome in keeping with him being part of a crowd. Only a block for his home, Taylor may have been one of the crowds of residents watching the events of the disorder. However, Ford sentenced White and Payne each to the Workhouse for five months and twenty-nine days, one of the longer terms given to individuals convicted as participants in the disorder. There was no information on why Taylor received a different sentence, but it was likely that the other men had clashed with police in some way.

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