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

Rivers Wright arrested

Detective Doyle of the 5th Division arrested Rivers Wright, a twenty-one-year-old Black man for allegedly being part of a group of men who attacked an unnamed white man at 125th St and Lenox Avenue at some point in the disorder. Wright lived at 2137 7th Avenue, a block west and two blocks north of the site of the alleged assault, and in the heart of the disorder.

Only one source provided any details of the circumstances of his arrest. The Home News reported on March 21 that Wright was arrested "after he and a number of others are said to have attacked a white man at 125th St and Lenox Ave." Wright appeared in lists of those arrested during the disorder in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York American, New York Evening Journal, and Daily News.

Among the first arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Wright was charged with disorderly conduct, not assault, as was the case with half of those arrested for assault. The attack cannot have resulted in significant injury if the charge was disorderly conduct: the applicable section of the statute applied only to a person who used "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior." It could also have been the case that police did not have evidence that Wright participated in the assault; he may have been part of a crowd nearby, caught up in police efforts to arrest those responsible for the assault. Those circumstances fitted the definition of the offense. Disorderly conduct was also an offense that could be adjudicated in the Magistrates Court.

Magistrate Renaud convicted Wright and remanded him for sentence on March 23. On that date, he sent Wright to the Workhouse for ten days. His appearance was widely reported, in stories that named him in the Daily News, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and New York Age and stories that did not in the New York World-Telegram, New York American, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Home News. None of those stories mentioned what Wright had allegedly done. Four other men convicted of disorderly conduct sentenced at the same time, after being charged with breaking windows, received terms of thirty days. The disparity in sentence offers further evidence that Wright had not actually committed an assault.

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