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

Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Claudio Diabolo arrested

Around 6 PM, four men arrived at the front of Kress’ store and began picketing. Three of the men, Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels were white and allegedly college students; Claudio Diabolo was black. At some point a fourth white man, Harry Gordon, a member of another group with ties to the Communist Party, the National Student League, arrived in front of the store.<<photographs>>.

At some point the men set up a stand in front of the store and began to speak to the crowd. Shortly after one of the white men - in some reports Miller, in others Gordon -- began to speak, someone in the crowd threw a rock through the store window. Police then moved to arrest the speaker, pulling him down from the stand, and the other members of the group. Police hurried the men into waiting cars and took them to the local precinct. There officers charged Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Claudio Diabolo with inciting a riot, and the fifth man, Harry Gordon, with assaulting one of the arresting officers, Patrolman Irwin Young.

The charges against the men were widely reported. [Which papers identified which] men identified as college students (?) with addresses in the Bronx (?). Diabolo resided at an address in Harlem. The New York Evening Journal sought out Miller and Jamison (and Gordon) after their release on bail, and reported that that Miller's address did not exist and that no one knew Jamison at the address he gave. [which lists are they in, not Diabolo spelling]. Reporters also inquired at City College, which found only Murray Samuels in its records - although the New York Evening Journal reported on March 28 that that Murray Samuels was not the man involved in the disorder.


The four men were arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, charged with inciting a riot. [Note Hearst papers that anticipate violence at their arraignment]. When their names were called, two lawyers from the International Labor Defense Fund rose to represent them, identified by the Daily Mirror as "Miss Yetta M. Aronsky and I. Englander." The Daily Mirror reported that Magistrate Stanley Renaud "demand[ed]" that the men's case be assigned to Richard E. Carey, a Black ADA, but the New York Daily News reported the appointment as coming at the opening of the court, when Renaud announced "that at his request Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, who is colored, had been assigned to prosecute the accused rioters so that "there can be no charge of discrimination."" Carey requested the men be held for a hearing on Friday on the maximum bail of $2500, a sum that drew protests from the ILD lawyers. Renaud dismissed those protests, and complaints by one of the lawyers, reported by the New York Daily News, that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest."

When the four men returned to court, the Magistrate dismissed the charges against them because they had been, or so they could be, indicted. The Magistrates Court docket book records the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted." Reports in the [Daily Mirror, New York Amsterdam News] more explicitly said they had been indicted by the Grand Jury. However, while the grand jury did charge the men, it was for a misdemeanor not a felony, so an information not an indictment. Few reports included that distinction. The New York American reported that after being discharged the men were "turned over to detectives with bench warrants based on the Grand Jury informations voted last week charging inciting to riot." The New York Herald Tribune also reported "two informations charging five persons with inciting riot" without naming them; so too did the New York Daily News, which alone specified that an information charged a misdemeanor and that the men were sent for trial in the Court of Special Sessions.

That charge hardly matched District Attorney Dodge's rhetoric about the threat Communists posed, which is perhaps why he focused on cases being sent to the grand jury rather than their outcomes. The Grand Jury similarly sent all the other cases of inciting a riot that appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions for prosecution as misdemeanors. While New York's riot statute specified one form of the crime that carried a punishment of imprisonment for not more than one year that could be considered a misdemeanor, the New York Appellate Court had held in 1920 that the crime of riot was always a felony, and so should have been prosecuted in the Court of General Sessions. If the men were being prosecuted for the form of the crime punishable as a misdemeanor, their crime was being treated as not involving efforts to prevent the enforcement of the law or incite force or violence, leaving only the broader offense of disturbing the peace.

As other prosecutions resulting from the riot made their way through the courts there were no reports mentioning Miller, Jamison, Samuels and Diabolo. Finally, on June 20, the four men appeared in the Court of Special Sessions -- the New York Amsterdam News reported an additional defendant, a "young sympathizer," Dave Mencher, not mentioned in any other sources, or in the Daily Worker story, the only other report of this trial. Only one prosecution witness testified before the court's three judges, Sergeant Bauer of the West 123rd Street station. Two International Labor Defence lawyers, Joseph Tauber and Edward Kuntz, after cross-examining Bauer to establish that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, moved to have the charges of inciting a riot dismissed. The judges agreed, and freed all four men.

 

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