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

"Riot Looting Brings a New Indictment," New York Times, March 29, 1935, 9.

In the New York Times

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Harry Lash's 5 and 10c store looted and set on fire Around 11:15 PM, Harry Lash closed his 5c & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 130th Street. He likely then went home to his residence at 536 West 178th Street, north of Harlem in Washington Heights. Wherever he was, Lash apparently got news of the disorder in Harlem and returned to the store around two hours later, at approximately 1:20 AM, according to the affidavit he gave later that day in the Magistrates Court. He found the store windows broken, fixtures damaged, and "general merchandise" valued at $1,000 missing. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store that faced West 130th Street, as well as those that faced Lenox Avenue, could be seen smashed in the Associated Press photograph published in the New York Sun. Significant damage to the window displays was also visible. However, large amounts of merchandise could be seen still inside the store, indicating limits to the scale of the looting. Lash's store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street where reported looting was concentrated. Disorder continued in this area after the time Lash returned to his store.

The store windows were likely broken and merchandise taken starting around 11:30 PM and continuing until Lash returned to the store. The rear of Lash's store on West 130th Street had also been set on fire, by a "group of 35 blacks...soon after midnight," according to the New York Herald Tribune. That crowd "tried to prevent policeman from sounding an alarm - 'let it burn' they shouted," the report continued. "When firemen came, they hindered them too, bustling about hydrants and shoving hose lines about - when firemen threatened to turn the hose on them, they dispersed." Some of those details also appeared in the New York Evening Journal, but its story combined the fire and those at 429 and 431 Lenox Avenue two blocks to north: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. 'Let them burn. Let them burn.' The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd were larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeated and gave more prominence to the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn." The New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters because some individuals who pressed forward to see the fire got in their way. The New York Evening Journal more sensationally characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations were in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds.

An ACME agency photograph published in the Daily News showed flames in the last section of the store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters could be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the Daily News). They appeared to have quickly extinguished the fire. Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. A Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great” fit that image. There were no other newspaper stories or photographs of this fire, but it attracted the attention of newsreel cameramen. Some of the limited footage from the night of the disorder showed the fire burning in the store and firefighters crossing in front of the camera. No bystanders were visible. Cameramen returned the next day to shoot footage of the burned section of the building both from Lenox Avenue, and, for the Universal newsreel, West 130th Street by the fire-damaged section looking toward Lenox Avenue. Debris was visible on the sidewalk in front of the fire-damaged section in the footage from Lenox Avenue. Several Black men and women walked by the store in the footage from West 130th Street.

Lash's store was misidentified in several sources including the caption to the Associated Press photograph in the New York Sun: headed "Harlem Rioters Break Every Window in Radio Store," it read "Not a pane of glass was left unbroken in this West 125th Street establishment. The Harlem Church of the Air on the second floor escaped raiders." The New York Herald Tribune also described the store as a Raffer's Radio store. Some of the confusion resulted from the large sign on the store advertising Raffer's Radio Service. By the time the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, that sign had been changed to read "Harry's 5 and 10c Store." The details of the windows and the shape of the sign in the Associated Press photograph matched those in the Tax Department photograph. Signs for the You Pray for Me Church of the Air visible in the second story windows confirmed that match. Sister Rosa Horn's Pentecostal Church occupied the upper floors of the building spanning 392-400 Lenox Avenue by September 1932, remaining there for several decades. Additionally, the Acme agency caption and the caption published by the Afro-American identified the store as being on Lenox Avenue. The Daily News and New York Herald Tribune captions of the photograph of the store on fire mistakenly located it at 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, but the windows matched the distinctive details of Lash's store, as did the presence of the Hope Wo Chinese Hand Laundry next to the store. A Chinese laundry appeared in the MCCH business survey at 68 West 130th Street, and the sign that was visible in the newspaper photograph could be seen in the Tax Department photograph.

Around 1:50 AM, an arrest for looting the store was made five blocks to the east, on the Third Avenue Bridge connecting the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Patrolman Louis Frikser observed a Black man, nineteen-year-old Arnold Ford, "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation. Ford was likely going home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large as it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted being part of a group of men who had entered Lash's store and stolen goods. Later, Ford made clear that he had not broken the store windows but only joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." "A few minutes later" the officer stopped a second man crossing the bridge from Harlem, Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, and also arrested him for looting Lash's store. None of the reports of this case described what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Like Ford, Moore was likely returning home; he lived next door to Ford, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx. Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).

Police charged both Ford and Moore with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Ford pled guilty to petit larceny. Moore, however, was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared for him. Ford was the only individual of the ten men convicted in the Court of General Sessions as a result of the disorder placed on probation rather than incarcerated. He remained under supervision under April 1938.

Police also arrested a third man for looting who likely also allegedly took merchandise from Lash's store. Lash was recorded as the complainant when Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." It seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred to in the story, especially given that Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store. Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There was no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.

Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court on March 25, when the charges against him were dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury, and he was held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, where Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither of the sources for that outcome, the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the New York Times, provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
James Hughes arrested Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10:00 PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the man and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted that the stones were to defend himself and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.

Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th Street and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue before returning home for supper and then heading out again at 9:30pm to go drinking, according to details in the probation officer's preliminary investigation that were not included in the report to the court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets and heard people saying “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a shoe repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked; in the preliminary report, the probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.

The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested.) Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.

When Hughes appeared for sentencing, the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from a minister named Haynes received by the mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later, Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”

Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes' participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.

Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to whom he became apprenticed. The probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr. Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year, he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later, he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.

Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."
Completing the legal process (March 28-November) A week after those arrested during the disorder began to appear in the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates court, the prosecutions of approximately sixty-four of those men and women had been completed. It would take almost eight months for judges and juries to come to decisions regarding the fate of the remaining forty-nine men and two women. Those proceedings went largely unreported, further diminishing the violence in the picture of the disorder presented by the press. After the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, New York American, and New York Amsterdam News published stories about cases in the Harlem court and Court of General Sessions on March 28, only four other trials were mentioned in the press. The Daily Worker published stories on the trials of Communist Party members or at least those represented by ILD lawyers: the only story about Joseph Moore and one of only two stories about the trial of Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators in the Court of Special Sessions. The involvement of ILD lawyers and the verdict in their favor made those trials an obvious vehicle for promoting the Communist Party. It is less clear why the other story about the later trial was published in the Black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News. It also published the one story about the trial of Paul Boyett. Boyett was acquitted of assaulting a white man, suggesting that the editors of the Black newspaper were concerned to give attention to outcomes that discredited the idea that the disorder had been a race riot. The story mentioned only Boyett's defense, so literally kept the alleged assault out of the story. The New York Amsterdam News may have also published the story about the trial involving the Communists because the same publications and individuals who had sought to blame them had also cast the disorder as a race riot. The New York Times rather than either of those publications reported the one other case that attracted attention, the trial of James Hughes. Unaffiliated with the Communist Party and found guilty of throwing a rock that hit a police officer, that case did not align with the apparent agendas of those publications. Why the New York Times reported the trial is not clear; it was the only legal proceeding related to the disorder that the newspaper reported after March 28.

Unreported, the final eight of those arrested during the disorder trickled out of the Magistrates courts over the next three weeks as police completed investigations. Magistrate Ford disposed of the last of those arrested in the jurisdiction of the Washington Heights court on April 9, when Charles Alston was sufficiently recovered from injuries suffered fleeing police to appear and have the assault charges against him dismissed, the same outcome as the three men arrested with him. Magistrate Renaud did not dispose of the last case before him in the Harlem court for nearly two more weeks. The extended police investigation of that case likely was a result of the defendant, Frank Wells, having ties to the Communist Party. However, police did not produce evidence to support the allegation that Wells had broken the window of a store on 125th Street, resulting in the charge against him being reduced to disorderly conduct. On April 20, a month after the first of those arrested in the disorder appeared in his court, Renaud convicted Wells and sent him to the Workhouse for 30 days.

The grand jury continued to vote for charges in all of the final twenty cases involving individuals arrested during the riot presented to them, as they had with almost all the previous cases, but those decisions did not signal that they had been presented evidence of significant violence or that police had apprehended those most responsible for the disorder. The grand jury sent only seventeen of those arrested in the disorder to the Court of General Sessions charged with felonies, and only one of the final twenty cases. All the remainder, and just over half of all the cases related to the disorder, the grand jury sent to be tried on lesser misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions. The last case involving an arrest during the disorder presented to the grand jury was the one case presented after March 27 for which the grand jury voted an indictment. On April 23 it charged Paul Boyett with assaulting a white man. The grand also twice heard evidence about the killing of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs by Patrolman John McInerney, first on April 10, and then again on June 10, after the MCCH found additional witnesses. On both occasions the all-white grand jury dismissed the case, finding the white officer justified in killing of the Black boy.

The combination of cases sent from the grand jury and those sent directly to the court by magistrates made trials in the Court of Special Sessions the proceeding in which most of the remaining cases were decided. Those trials received almost no attention from the press even as the panel of three magistrates who presided convicted three out of every four of those who appeared. Eight of the nine men not convicted appeared in the court in the weeks after March 27. A single trial, of the four Communists, produced half of those acquittals, two months after the disorder, on June 21. A further five months later, the final trial did result in a conviction, of the other white man arrested at the beginning of the disorder, Harry Gordon, for assaulting a police officer.

Convictions were almost as often the outcome for those those sent to the Court of General Sessions as for those sent to the Court of Special Sessions, but the process was different. All but one of those convicted accepted the plea bargains that prosecutors offered as a standard practice at this time, eight after March 27 following Carl Jones, Hezekiah Wright, Joseph Wade, and Thomas Jackson earlier. They pled guilty to a lesser offense, which for all but one of those arrested was a misdemeanor, which effectively erased the distinction between being convicted in the Court of General Sessions and in the Court of Special Sessions. Two other men were released without trial, Milton Ackerman and Raymond Easley. All five of the men put on trial in this court appeared more than a week after the disorder, reflecting the multiple steps involved in prosecuting a felony. Only three had their guilt decided by a jury. The judge directed the acquittal of Joseph Moore, while Arnold Ford pled guilty during his trial. Just one man was convicted by a jury, James Hughes, but he too was found guilty of only a misdemeanor. Despite being charged with assaulting white men, both Isaac Daniels and Paul Boyett were acquitted. Boyett was the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Court of General Sessions, on May 29. That left Edward Larry as the only individual convicted of a felony, having pled guilty to attempted grand larceny rather than face trial on a charge of robbery. While he was only person charged with that offense, his previous felony conviction had more to do with the outcome of this prosecution than what he allegedly had done in the disorder. That the most severe legal response should be to an offense as unrepresentative of the events of the disorder as robbery—one committed by a defendant with a criminal record that set him apart from the others arrested—demonstrated the extent to which prosecutions in the legal system did not reflect the events of the disorder.
Edward Larry arrested At 1:00 AM, Patrolman William Clements observed Edward Larry, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer, traveling in a taxi at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue. He stopped the taxi, and found that Larry had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Not satisfied with Larry’s explanation that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, Clements took him to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. The Magistrates Court affidavit simply described Clements as arresting Larry; the Home News report of Larry's appearance in the Magistrates Court described Clements arresting Larry "as he was about to get into a taxicab with two boxes containing a dozen shirts." The more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation described Clements stopping the cab.

Larry was one of nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged crime, a group making up one third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60). Although he was the only one arrested in a vehicle, a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal indicated that this was not the only instance in which police stopped vehicles. Larry told police he was returning home to the Salvation Army shelter at 224 West 124th Street, behind Kress' store (some reports listed the address as 218 West 124th Street; the MCCH business survey records that the Salvation Army operated in both buildings). He had lived there for a month, after spending two weeks at the Belmont Hotel on the Bowery, and the previous thirty days in the workhouse serving a sentence for pickpocketing.

At the police station, Morris Towbin saw Larry and identified him as one of a group of men who had threatened him and robbed his haberdashery store at 101 West 125th Street at 10:30 PM the previous evening. Towbin also identified the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store, part of $2,000 of merchandise stolen, $1,000 of fixtures destroyed and $226.89 worth of plate glass windows smashed. Towbin's encounter with Larry was described only in the more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation. The Magistrates Court affidavit recorded only that Towbin had identified the shirts, a standard feature of a charge when an individual had not been seen stealing goods, and that he could "positively identify the defendant as one of the men" who had robbed him. In the police blotter, the charge against Larry was recorded as burglary. That record suggested that Towbin's identification came after his initial booking and after police provided that information to reporters, as the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, both included Larry among those charged with burglary. Towbin's allegation of force changed the offense to robbery, which is the charge made against Larry in the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, there was no mention of force or robbery in the story covering his court appearance in the Home News or in reports of Towbin's statements as president of Harlem Merchants Association in the Daily News and Home News. Nor did police find a knife in Larry's possession, the weapon with which Towbin said he had been threatened. Larry's criminal record did not suggest he would have used a weapon as none of his convictions involved the use of force.

When Larry was arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held him without bail for the grand jury. He was one of only seven of those arrested during the disorder for which magistrates did not set bail. Nine days later, on March 29, the grand jury indicted him for robbery in the first degree. It was likely this was the indictment mentioned in stories in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York American: while the latter two stories gave no details of the case, the New York Times referred to the unnamed defendant being "charged with burglary in the looting of an East 125th Street store." No one else arrested in the disorder was indicted on March 29. Rather than go to trial, Larry agreed to a plea bargain. On April 5, he appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to attempted grand larceny in the second degree, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison rather than up to twenty years, the punishment for robbery in the first degree. Ten days later, after an investigation by the Probation Department, Judge Nott sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the state prison. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded a different sentence of six months to two years, but the Probation Department investigation and a response to the parole board in the district attorney's case file both record the longer sentence). That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record. He had been convicted three times for picking pockets in New York City in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, convicted for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928. New York's Habitual Offender statute, commonly known as the Baumes Act, required that in cases involving individuals with a previous conviction for a felony that a plea bargain be to a felony and set minimum sentences based on the previous felony conviction.

Larry had been born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1909. His mother died when he was three years of age, leaving his father, and later stepmother to raise him. In 1921, a year after leaving school at age eleven to work in a cotton press, Larry left home. In the only response the Probation Department received to the letters they sent inquiring about Larry's history, the Wilmington Public Welfare Commission reported an interview with his half-sister Rose, in which she said he found work in a coal mine in West Virginia. Larry himself told the Probation Department officer G. H. Royal that he first worked briefly for a transportation company, traveling to Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent two months in a fish factory, followed by time on a truck in Far Rockaway, New York, then in a steel mill in Pittsburgh and a coal mine in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1924, aged fifteen, he began working irregularly for carnival companies that traveled the North in the summer and the South in the winter.

In February 1928, carnival work, or perhaps coal mining, brought Larry to Welch, West Virginia, where he was convicted of grand larceny. The court did not respond to the Probation Department's request for details of the case; Larry told them that he and another man were accused of stealing money from a drunken man in a poolroom (given Larry's record, the theft was likely accomplished by pickpocketing). Sentenced to six years in the state prison, Larry said he served four years and eight months, which would have seen him released in June 1932. By May 28, 1933, Larry was in New York City; he also said that earlier that month, while working in a carnival, he married Cora Temple, a dancer, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In New York City, Larry was arrested for pickpocketing — the criminal record in the district attorney's case file specifying "lush," slicing open the pocket of a drunken individual — and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse. After his release, he remained in New York City for at least six months, presumably with his wife Cora, but without a home and relying on charity. According to his half sister, Larry returned to Wilmington in December 1933, and found work as a stevedore until July 1934; he told the Probation Department he did not visit until July 1934, and left his wife there while he looked for work.

Almost as soon as Larry arrived back in New York City, on July 29, police arrested him for pickpocketing, again lush, according to the criminal record in the District Attorney's case file. On this occasion, he was sentenced to six months in the Workhouse. Released in January 1935, it was less than a month before officers from the police pickpocket squad arrested him again, and he spent a further 30 days in the Workhouse. In the month between his release and the disorder, he told the Probation Department that he spent a week working on a Salvation Army project in Flushing, Long Island.
Viola Woods arrested Officer St. Louis of the 28th Precinct arrested Viola Woods, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, for allegedly smashing the window of a vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue with an umbrella sometime during the disorder. There was no information on when during the disorder the arrest took place. The most likely time would be around 10:00 PM, when the disorder intensified and many of those at the nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and 125th Street began to move up and down the avenue. Only a New York Amsterdam News story identified the store as vacant; a list in the New York American and stories in the Home News and New York Times provided only the address. The vacant store was in the block between 125th and 124th Streets, where four other stores had windows broken, including two other empty stores at 2320 8th Avenue and 2324 8th Avenue, the Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue and Andy's Florist on the southeast corner of 125th Street. Those other damaged stores were all included in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked west along 125th Street and and up and down 8th Avenue a block north and south of the intersection on the day after the disorder. It was possible the store whose window Woods allegedly broke was not on that list because it suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

Woods name was misrecorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as Viola Williams, a mistake repeated in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. The New York American misreported Woods' name as Loyola Williams. Another woman named Loyola Williams was arrested during the disorder and charged with burglary. Both women were recorded as being twenty-eight-years of age and living at 301 West 130th Street. While these overlapping details might indicate the reports refer to a single woman, both Loyola Williams and Viola Williams [Woods] appear in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, with Viola Williams [Woods] charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving the destruction of property used in the prosecution of those alleged to have broken windows during the disorder. That is the charge recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter, with a note reading "Broke window with umbrella." However, when that woman appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book and stories about her two appearances in court in the New York Amsterdam News, Home News, and New York Times recorded her name as Viola Woods.

When Woods appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge against her was disorderly conduct. The change from malicious mischief indicated police did not have evidence that she had broken the window, but only that she had been in the crowds in the area of the attack. Disorderly conduct was a charge that the magistrate could adjudicate, unlike misdemeanor and felony charges that required referral to other courts. Magistrate Renaud ordered Woods held on bail of $100, a court appearance reported in the Home News. Unusually, she was represented by a lawyer, future alderman Eustace Dench of 207 West 125th Street. Dench was one of several prominent members of the Harlem Lawyers Association who represented those arrested during the disorder. When Woods returned to the court on March 28, Magistrate Ford discharged her. The New York Amsterdam News reported that she "was freed for lack of evidence." The New York Times story simply reported that she had been discharged, the outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter. That outcome suggests Woods was not part of a crowd that clashed with police but likely simply a bystander.

The woman arrested may be the woman named Viola Woods a census enumerator found at 123 West 133rd Street on April 16, 1940. She was the same age and had been in Harlem in 1935. Born in South Carolina, in Hilton Head, she gave birth to a son, William, in 1923, and a second son, Samuel, in 1925, according to their draft registrations. At that time her last name was Bligen. She arrived in Harlem sometime between 1925 and 1930, when she was recorded in the census living at 255 West 143rd Street, with a cousin, working as a domestic servant (both her sons are recorded as living with their father, William Bligen and his wife in Hilton Head until at least 1940). In 1931, she married Chester Woods, a West Indian longshoreman. At the time of the 1940 census, they had four children, aged between ten and two years. When her sons William and Samuel registered for the draft in 1942, Viola Woods was living at 49 West 133rd Street.
Milton Ackerman arrested Officer Brown of the 40th Precinct arrested Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, some time during the disorder. According to the Home News he had taken "several radios" from a store at 400 Lenox Avenue. By contrast, the New York Times, reported Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." Harry Lash was recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book, confirmation that Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location from which Ackerman allegedly took merchandise. Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store. There was no mention of where or when police arrested him. The attacks on Lash's store occurred from around 11:30 PM to 1:20 AM, likely interrupted around midnight when firefighters arrived to extinguish a fire lit in the storefront facing West 130th Street. Police officers would have converged on the store in response to the fire, so Ackerman was most likely arrested around midnight.

Ackerman was named in the lists of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud had him held until March 25. When Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court the magistrate discharged him as the grand jury had indicted him in response to evidence presented as part of District Attorney Dodge's investigation. That proceeding was reported only in a story in the Home News. He was then rearrested and held on $1,000 bail. Three days later Ackerman appeared in the Court of General Sessions, an appearance reported only in the New York Times. Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released Ackerman. Neither that story nor the 28th Precinct police blotter provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
Loyola Williams arrested Sometime during the disorder, Loyola Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who lived at 301 West 130th Street, was arrested and charged with burglary. Williams' name appeared among those charged with burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list in the New York Evening Journal, which also included her age, race, and address. However, Williams did not appear in 28th Precinct police blotter, the 32nd Precinct police reports, or the docket book of either Magistrates court or any newspaper stories, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that she allegedly looted. That was also the case with nine men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their failure to appear in court could mean that police questioned and released them the next day.

In the case of Loyola Williams, it was also possible that whoever compiled the list had confused her with another Black woman arrested during the disorder, Viola Woods, who was identified as Viola Williams in several sources. Both women were recorded as being twenty-eight-years of age and living at 301 West 130th Street. However, both Loyola Williams and Viola Williams appeared in the list published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, with Viola Williams charged with malicious mischief. Viola Williams also appeared in the 28th Precinct police blotter with the same age and address, and a note that recorded her alleged offense as using her umbrella to break a store window. However, when that woman appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book and stories about her two appearances in court in the New York Amsterdam News, Home News, and New York Times recorded her name as Viola Woods.
In court on March 27 A week after the disorder, three men appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty, becoming the first of those arrested to be convicted in the city’s felony court. However, the outcome of those prosecutions did not establish the men as major figures in the disorder, distinct from those who had been convicted in the lower courts. While Joseph Wade, Thomas Jackson, and Hezekiah Wright had all been charged with burglary, they pleaded guilty to lesser offenses: Wright and Jackson to unlawful entry, which did not involve breaking into a store; Wade to petit larceny, which involved being in possession of stolen merchandise but not entry into a store. Notwithstanding those differences, both crimes were misdemeanors that carried the same sentence of up to a year rather than up to ten years for burglary. The men were not sentenced at this time, so the consequences of their plea bargains were not immediately apparent. That they had been convicted of “lesser offenses” was noted in the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times, but not in the New York Post and New York Amsterdam News. Plea bargaining was by far the most common outcome of felony prosecutions in this period, so that outcome may not have been perceived as entirely diminishing their actions. Nor did a plea necessarily indicate an admission of guilt. Wright would later assert his innocence, saying that he had pleaded guilty on the advice of his lawyer.

The grand jury added to the picture of the disorder as composed of minor actions by sending all four of the men whose cases were presented to it on this day to the Court of Special Sessions, charged with misdemeanors not felonies. All had faced charges of riot, with Leon Mauraine, David Smith, and John Kennedy Jones also charged with malicious mischief for breaking windows, and John King with assault. Only the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, and the New York Times, reported the hearings, but without names as the grand jury proceedings were closed.

The four men who appeared in the Harlem court appeared to present a countervailing picture. Three were sent to the grand jury on riot charges. One, Raymond Easley, had already been indicted by the grand jury as a result of Dodge’s investigation. He was the last subject of that investigation to appear in court, although only one of the two newspapers that reported the hearing mentioned him. However, the outcomes of the three men's prosecutions would follow the same pattern as the hearings that occurred on same day: James Pringle and Claude Jones would be sent to the Court of Special Sessions, and Easley’s indictment would be dismissed. The magistrate continued the investigation of two other men, Leroy Brown and William Ford. Both would later be sent to the grand jury, and like the others, to the Court of Special Sessions. The magistrate sent the final man, Harry Gordon, directly to the Court of Special Sessions. Two days of additional police investigations had failed to produce enough evidence to send him to the grand jury. With Gordon’s ILD lawyer in attendance, the magistrate would have had little scope to overlook the deficiencies in the evidence. Gordon would not face trial for another seven months, the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in court. In the interim, he would testify in a public hearing of the MCCH and describe being beaten both when he was arrested and while in custody. His testimony persuaded the chairman of those hearings, Arthur Garfield Hays, but not the judges in the Court of Special Sessions. They convicted him; the sentence they imposed is unknown. He was one of only two men known to have been convicted of an assault during the disorder — although there is no evidence that outcome was reported in the press.

Rather than building toward the prosecution of individuals who played major roles in the disorder, then, the legal response to the disorder saw serious charges become misdemeanors and frequently the even lesser offense of disorderly conduct. Those arrested by police proved not to be responsible for much of the violence and damage. Instead, they had been among the crowds drawn to the streets and into encounters with police. The extent of the violence of the disorder consequently was not brought into focus in the criminal courts. Only later, in the civil courts, would some of the scale of the damage, if not the violence and injuries, become part of the legal record.
Vacant store windows broken (2314 8th Avenue) The windows of a vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue were broken sometime during the disorder. Smashing glass was reported in the area around 8:00 PM and then again around 9:30 PM. The vacant store was in the block between 125th and 124th Streets, where four other stores had windows broken, including two other empty stores at 2320 8th Avenue and 2324 8th Avenue, the Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue, and Andy's Florist on the southeast corner of 125th Street. Those other damaged stores were all included in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked west along 125th Street and up and down 8th Avenue a block north and south of the intersection on the day after the disorder. It is possible this store was not on that list because it suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

Officer St. Louis of the 28th Precinct arrested Viola Woods, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, for allegedly smashing the store window with an umbrella. There is no information on when during the disorder the arrest took place. Only a New York Amsterdam News story identified the store as vacant; a list in the New York American and stories in the Home News and New York Times provided only the address. After being charged with disorderly conduct in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Woods was ordered held on bail of $100 by Magistrate Renaud. When she was returned to the court on March 28, Magistrate Ford discharged her, the New York Amsterdam News reporting that she "was freed for lack of evidence."

By the second half of 1935, when the MCCH business survey was conducted, a white-owned restaurant was located at 2314 8th Avenue. The Tax Department photograph shows a one-story building constructed after 1935.
Indicted by Dodge's grand jury (17) Five of the seventeen men indicted by the grand jury in response to District Attorney Dodge's investigation were identified by Assistant District Attorney Alexander Kaminsky in testimony before the first public hearing of the MCCH on March 30: Carl Jones, James Hughes, Thomas Jackson, Joseph Wade, and Hezekiah Wright. He was prepared to identify those men because they had pled guilty. The closed nature of grand jury hearings prevented the other men from being named. However, those that were initially held for investigation in the Magistrates Court are identified in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book: when they reappeared in court, as they had been indicted, a Magistrate had to discharge them so they could be rearrested on those charges. That outcome is recorded for fourteen men; it was not necessary in the case of Thomas Jackson, Joseph Wade, and Hezekiah Wright, who Magistrate Renaud had sent to the grand jury when they first appeared in court. In other words, Dodge preempted the normal legal process in the cases of just fourteen men.

The charges against the seventeen men do not line up with those reported in newspaper stories about the grand jury hearings on Dodge's investigation. The stories reported ten men indicted for burglary, five for riot, and two for assault. Only four of the seventeen men, the four Young Liberators, not five, faced charges of riot. Three men, not two, faced charges of assault: James Hughes, Isaac Daniels, and Douglas Cornelius.

If the reported charges are correct, which of the men were indicted on which days can only be determined with certainty in the case of the four Young Liberators, as indictments for riot were only voted on March 21, the first day of hearings. Indictments for assault were also only voted on that day, but there is no evidence of which of the three men charged with that offense were named in those indictments. It was most likely James Hughes and Isaac Daniels as they were discharged so they could be rearrested on March 22; Douglas Cornelius was not similarly discharged until March 25. However, as the four Young Liberators were not discharged until March 25, the timing of that process is not certain evidence. As there were only seven indictments on March 21, at least one more had to name more than a single individual, as the indictment naming the Young Liberators did. Nelson Brock, Reginald Mills, and William Grant were indicted together for burglary, so they were likely among those indicted on March 21. Milton Ackerman was the most likely of the men to have been the single person indicted on March 25, as the New York Times reported Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store," close to the 15 cent value of the theft mentioned in stories about that indictment.
In the grand jury on March 27 (4) The two Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and the New York American, and the New York Times, were the only newspapers to report these grand jury hearings. All three stories were published on March 29 and referred to the hearings occurring on March 28. However, the district attorney's case files for the men all record the date of the grand jury decision as March 27. As the legal record is more reliable as evidence of the legal process, the hearings are treated as having occurred on March 27.

As grand jury proceedings are closed, none of the stories identified the men involved, a detail that the Hearst newspapers mentioned. The New York Times provided a very precise description of the outcome: "The grand jurors also sent to Special Sessions 'informations' against four persons accused of unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor, for trial in that court before three justices instead of a jury." That story did not make clear that the men had been charged with riot; unlawful assembly was the misdemeanor form of that charge. The New York Evening Journal and New York American published identical stories about the hearing. It more briefly mentioned four informations returned by the grand jury, described as "investigating last week's Communist-inspired rioting in Harlem." That description was at odds with the previous day's stories reporting Dodge's announcement that the grand jury investigation had halted. The end of that investigation is likely why the other publications that had reported the earlier grand jury hearings did not publish stories on these cases.

All three stories also referred to one indictment returned on the same day, likely that of Edward Larry, the one person arrested during the disorder whose district attorney's case file recorded his grand jury hearing took place on March 29.
In Harlem court on March 28 (2) The New York Amsterdam News published a brief story about Viola Woods' return to the Harlem Magistrates court, under the headline, "Freed on Riot Charge." The story noted that her discharge was due to "lack of evidence." Such an explanation of a decision by a magistrate to release an individual arrested during the disorder was not part of stories about other cases. Woods was also mentioned in a New York Times story that covered legal proceedings involving individuals arrested in the disorder in the grand jury, the Court of General Sessions, and the Harlem court. The story noted her discharge on a charge of disorderly conduct without any explanation. It made no mention of Louis Tonick's case being continued or William Cobb's case being continued in the Washington Heights court.
In the Court of General Sessions on March 28 (2) The appearances of both James Hughes and Milton Ackerman were reported in a New York Times story that covered legal proceedings involving individuals arrested in the disorder in the grand jury, Court of General Sessions and the Harlem court. It mentioned that Hughes pleaded guilty to third degree assault of a police officer, and the judge's discharge of Ackerman on a charge of burglary for taking rolls of paper and a napkin. The story, the only one to mention the appearance, contained no information on why the judge released Ackerman. (The New York Times would later report Hughes subsequently withdrew his guilty plea and was tried and convicted.)

The two Hearst newspapers the New York Evening Journal and New York American published essentially the same story that reported Hughes' plea, together with the grand jury proceedings, but not the Harlem court case. The New York American added the date when Hughes would be sentenced. All three newspapers identified him as a shoemaker.