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• 1 2021-08-07T18:20:54+00:00 Charles Saunders arrested 75 plain 2024-02-12T20:30:49+00:00 Around midnight, as Detective Jeremiah Duross of the 6th Division drove a police car on 7th Avenue, the sound of breaking glass drew his attention to a group of people in front of Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store at 1985 7th Avenue, according to a Probation Department investigation report. The store windows had been damaged earlier, between 11:30 PM and midnight, the superintendent of the apartments above 1985 7th Avenue, Mr. C. T. Berkeley, reported. As the detective pulled his car up next to the store, the crowd in front of it scattered. He jumped out of the car and claimed he saw Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator, jump out of the store window and run down the street. Duross gave chase and arrested Saunders, who he claimed had been drinking and had a fresh cut on his hand, which he implied had resulted from breaking glass in the window. While the report stated that the arrest took place at 2:00 AM, that appeared to be an error as the remainder of the narrative referred to events between 11:30 PM and midnight.
  
  
  
  Saunders offered a different account than Duross, according to the Probation Department investigation report. He lived nearby, in a furnished room at 1967 7th Avenue, a block south of the store, with his wife Anna Gregory. Around midnight, Saunders left home to buy cigarettes. Walking toward a crowd in front of Sirico's store, he saw shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window on to the street, where people in the crowd were picking them up. Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those around him, and picked up a pair of shoes, cutting his hand on glass on the street in the process, and headed home. At that point Duross arrested him. Saunders denied having been drinking; the detective said Saunders did not have a pair of shoes in his hands when arrested. Berkeley supported Saunders' account to the extent that he said he was not "one of the two men who went through the broken window" of the store. The building superintendent said he could identify those men.
  
  None of stolen goods were recovered, according to the Probation Department investigation report. Nonetheless, Saunders appeared to have been charged with taking all the goods that Sirico reported had been stolen: "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces," with a total value he estimated as $66.75. While the District Attorney's case file was missing, the Probation Department investigation report summarized the indictment against Saunders as accusing him of taking merchandise worth $66.95. The Home News and Daily Worker reports less specifically reported Saunders was charged with stealing "several pairs of shoes."
  
  Saunders was included 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 Magistrate's Court on March 20, at which time Magistrate Renaud held him on $1,000 bail to reappear, an outcome recorded in the docket book and reported only in the Home News. When Saunders was brought back to the court on March 22, detectives presented bench warrants that indicated that the grand jury had already indicted him as a result of witnesses presented by District Attorney Dodge as part of his investigation of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud consequently dismissed the charges against Saunders so the detectives could rearrest him, as happened that day with two other men, James Hughes and Isaac Daniels, an appearance reported in the Home News and New York Post. On April 1, Saunders appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to petit larceny. That plea was at odds with the statement in the report that none of the stolen property had been recovered. A district attorney generally offered such a plea bargain to those indicted for burglary after the disorder found with stolen goods in their possession; those found with nothing in their possession, as the Probation Department investigation report implied Saunders was, generally pled guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful entry.
  
  Immediately prior to Saunders' appearance for sentencing in the Court of General Sessions on April 12, the Probation Department notified the judge of a letter from the Savannah Juvenile Court. Saunders' older sister Vable Greatt had offered to provide a home for him in Savannah, Georgia, and the Juvenile Court Probation Department would assist in his supervision, should the judge place him on probation. After a delay, presumably to confirm those arrangements, Judge Nott gave Saunders a suspended sentence and placed him on "indefinite" probation on the condition he go to Savannah (the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only the suspended sentence, not the probation). Of the nine other men sentenced in the Court of General Sessions, only Arnold Ford was also placed on probation. Both men remained under supervision for the maximum period of three years, until 1938.
  
  Saunders told a probation officer that he had been born in Dublin, Georgia, the youngest of six children. His mother died when he was five years of age, and around that time he and his family moved to Savannah. After leaving school at age thirteen, Saunders did odd jobs and worked with his father, a carpenter. In 1929, his father remarried, and Saunders decided to go to New York City, where his brother Albert and sister Lola lived. After eighteen months living with Albert at 215 Edgecombe Avenue and working as a porter in a barber's shop at West 135th Street and 7th Avenue, ill health forced him to return to live with his sister in Savannah for six months. Returning to New York City in 1931, Saunders lived with an aunt at 162 West 143rd Street until May 1933, when he met and then moved in with Anna Gregory. The Probation Department investigation report described her as "separated from her husband"; a letter in the file from the Brooklyn Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, to whom the Family Court had referred Gregory in 1922, said her husband had abandoned her, leaving the state with funds provided by his mother. Saunders and Gregory were "known as man and wife," the probation officer reported. In the fluid marriage patterns still practiced in working-class communities such informal relationships were not uncommon but the Probation Department did not recognize them, instead describing Gregory as Saunders' "mistress" and "sweetheart." Dr. Charles Thompson of the Court's Psychiatric Clinic also saw a problem in Gregory being ten years older that Saunders, labeling him as immature for looking to her "for direction." In response to questions by a probation officer, Gregory described Saunders as a good provider and their life as "harmonious."
  
  Gregory worked as a laundress, Saunders in a barber's shop at 142nd Street and 7th Avenue, then part-time for a moving company based at 143rd Street and 7th Avenue, and beginning in September 1934 as an elevator operator at 385 Edgecombe Avenue. After living for two years at 268 West 146th Street, the couple moved to 1967 7th Avenue in December 1934. Two months later, Saunders lost his job after a dispute with the new building superintendent; the management company fired the superintendent soon after and told a probation officer that they saw him, not Saunders, as at fault. That fit with the opinions of Saunders' employers and coworkers, which the probation officer summarized as considering him honest, industrious and dependable; he and Gregory were similarly "well regarded" by their neighbors. The Probation Department investigation report followed Dr. Thompson's examination report in attributing his alleged looting to "mob spirit." Thompson explained that concept as being "in company with several others under the influence of prejudice and aggressiveness," in the case of events in Harlem against "a background of racial antagonism, occasioned largely by the present lack of employment." Saunders' sister Vable Greatt explained his alleged looting, according to a letter from the Savannah Juvenile Court, as probably a result of him becoming "pretty well discouraged in his search for work," a "spiritual condition [that] caused him to fall to the temptation to steal."
  
  While a good reputation and steady employment would have helped make Saunders a candidate for probation, Judge Nott's decision appears to have been largely a response to an offer from his sister and Savannah Juvenile Court Probation Department to supervise him. His sister Vable followed through on that offer, sending funds for Saunders' railway fare to Savannah; the Juvenile Court Probation Department did not do their part. Saunders' probation officer's letters to his Georgia colleagues went unanswered for six months. During this time, the only news the probation officer received of Saunders were reports Saunders himself mailed weekly, using a form and stamps sent to him by the department. Soon after Saunders arrived in Savannah, his sister became very sick, causing him to move in with his brother. In perfunctory answers to the questions on the form, he reported being unemployed, and involved in no education or social activities other than attending weekly services at a Protestant church.
  
  As an alternative to the Juvenile Court, the Probation Department secured the help of the Savannah Family Welfare Society. Their worker's investigation in February 1936 solicited a very different picture of Saunders' life in Savannah from his sister and sister-in-law than he provided in his reports. Both complained he "never stayed home at night," was "drunk most of the time" and had become "lazy and shiftless," not willing to "keep a job when given one." The caseworker did not interview Saunders himself. The Probation Department responded by writing directly to Saunders, warning that his behavior was in violation of the terms of his probation, and the judge could take "disciplinary action" against him unless he improved his conduct and made "diligent efforts to obtain employment." They also requested the Savannah Family Welfare Society let Saunders report to them in person. In August 1936, Mrs. Mamie Belcher, a caseworker, began countersigning Saunders' reports. The Society reported "no further complaints" about his behavior, which the Probation Department took to unambiguously mean Saunders had changed his behavior. In June 1936, Saunders relocated to live again with his sister Vable. It took six more months before he found work, at a box manufacturing company. Nothing else changed in his answers on the report form until after a lapse in reporting in May 1937, when he wrote that he had moved to live with his sister Lois, who had returned from New York City. Only in Saunders' Discharge from Probation did the probation officer mention that this change in circumstances came after his sister Vable was killed in a car accident. By the end of 1937 Saunders had moved back in with his brother and begun working irregularly as a stevedore.
  
  Throughout his time in Savannah, Saunders appears to have remained in contact with Anna Gregory. She came to the Probation Department at the end of 1935 concerned that he had been warned that his sentence could be reviewed if he failed to report regularly and seeking to have him return to the city. When Gregory applied for Home Relief, she described Saunders as her husband, prompting the Emergency Relief Bureau to contact the Probation Department in May 1937, who in turn sought information from Saunders about whether the couple had formally married. In the Discharge from Probation, the probation officer described Saunders as "discontented as he missed New York, and Mrs Gregory, his mistress," information apparently passed on by the Savannah Welfare Society. Their caseworker also reported in January 1938 that Saunders' sister Lois "was anxious to have Charles return with her to New York." The Probation Department wrote to the Society, to Saunders, and to his brother immediately before the end of his probation in April 1938 urging that "his best interests will be served" by remaining in Savannah. They also asked Saunders to advise the department of his plans. He did not reply. There is no evidence of what Saunders chose to do.
• 1 2020-10-21T01:41:36+00:00 Hezekiah Wright arrested 50 plain 2024-01-25T22:49:35+00:00 Around 12:30 AM, Acting Captain Conrad Rothengast of the 6th Detective Division arrested Hezekiah Wright, a thirty-six-year-old Black janitor in front of a delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue. Rothengast claimed that shots being fired on 7th Avenue near 123rd Street drew his attention to a group of men standing in front of the delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue, owned by Sarah Refkin and managed by Nathan Pavlowitz, according to a Probation Department investigation report. As he approached the group, he allegedly saw Wright kick and smash the store's plate glass window, reach in and take four lamps and two jars of food. Wright then saw him coming towards him, dropped those items and held his hands above his head. The detective somehow interpreted that stance as indicating that Wright was about to attack him, so struck him with his baton before arresting him.
  
  
  
  Wright denied any involvement in the looting of the store when interviewed by a probation officer. Instead he said he was returning to his home at 155 West 123rd Street, around the corner from the delicatessen, having gone out to buy cigarettes, when he saw the crowd in front of the store. Those men ran when they saw Rothengast approaching; Wright said he stayed where he was as he was not involved in attacking the store. Others arrested in the disorder similarly claimed to have been out on errands and mistaken for participants in acts of violence. In Wright's case, it was not unusual to be on the streets late at night. He told the probation officer that he occasionally went on walks in the late evening, as the long hours of his job kept him occupied until then. The probation officer reported nothing that indicated he would have chosen to participate in looting, characterizing him instead as "a quiet, inoffensive type of individual." Dr. Walter Bromberg used a similar phrase in the report of his examination of Wright in the Court's Psychiatric Clinic, describing him as "a quiet, cooperative individual," who showed "no evidence of any emotional upset" or "of any aggressive, antisocial personality characteristics." The probation officer did report that Wright's "moral standards are lax," apparently because his "greatest outlet [was] playing the policy numbers in the hope he will 'become lucky' and 'hit the numbers.'" That very widespread activity in Harlem reflected the limited economic opportunities available to the neighborhood's residents at least as much as their morality. Missing from the Probation Department investigation report is the explanation that the probation officer wrote at the end of the Preliminary Investigation: that Wright was "A victim of mob hysteria who [?] advantages during a tense situation to enrich himself at others expense and by a criminal act." Other psychiatrists had invoked the influence of the mob in reporting their examinations of men arrested in the disorder, and it may be that this probation officer had been anticipating that it would also appear in Wright's report. When it did not, he may have chosen to omit his comment. 
  
  The Magistrate Court affidavit included few of those details. In that account, Rothengast simply saw Wright kick in the window and take a quantity of groceries. A Home News report of Wright's arraignment in that court put the value of the goods he allegedly stole at $100. The Probation Department investigation report specified that the items Rothegast alleged Wright tried to steal had a combined value of $11.10, the lamps 90 cents each and the jars of food $3.75 each. Stories in the New York Age and New York Times reporting later stages of his prosecution included the details that he had allegedly stolen "four lamps and a quantity of food," with the latter story misstating the value of those items as "about $8 in all." As Pavlowitz, the store manager, told a probation officer, others had taken the other missing merchandise, which he valued at between $50 and $75, rather than $100.
  
  The lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal included Wright among those charged with burglary. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, with the docket book and the Home News recording that Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on $1,000 bail. The grand jury indicted Wright on March 22, according to his district attorney's case file; three days later, Judge Morris Koenig of the Court of General Sessions continued his bail, a step in the legal process documented only by the New York Sun. It took only two more days for Wright to agree to a plea bargain offered by a district attorney; his appearance in court to plead guilty to unlawful entry was reported in the New York Post on March 27, and New York Herald Tribune, New York Daily News and New York Times on March 28, and the New York Amsterdam News on March 30. Wright told a probation officer he pled guilty on the advice of his lawyer, denying he attacked the store. His sentencing on April 8 was recorded in 28th Precinct police blotter and again widely reported, in the Times Union on April 8, in the New York Evening News, New York Times and Daily News on April 9, and in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Age and Afro-American on April 13. Judge Donnellan sent Wright to the Workhouse for three months.
  
  Wright told a probation officer he had been in New York City for eight years. Born in Kingston, North Carolina, his family moved at some point to Suffolk, Virginia, and from there to Boston in 1906. Around 1909, his mother became ill with tuberculosis and sought treatment at the Rutland Sanitarium. When she was released after two years, Wright and his five younger siblings returned with her to Suffolk, where her sister helped Wright look after the younger children. His father rejoined the family a year later, Wright worked with him making baskets. When Wright was fourteen years old, his mother died. The probation investigation included no information about Wright's subsequent life in Virginia other than his statement that he had spent thirty days in jail in 1917 after a fight with a railway detective when a circus arrived in town, and his marriage to Odel Burns in 1923. His World War One Draft registration lists his employment in 1918 as a soda foundation clerk in the Colored YMCA in Hopewell, Virginia.
  
  Around 1927, Wright moved to New York City, likely with his family, as his father and three of his surviving siblings lived in Harlem in 1935, and the other sibling nearby in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Charles, who in 1935 lived with his second wife and one of his daughters at 510 Manhattan Avenue, was a Baptist minister at Jerusalem Church. Wright worked for his first five years in the city as a chauffeur for Dr. Bernard Zaglin. That work was "irregular," which might explain why the Preliminary Investigation in Wright's Probation Department file also records him working in Haverstraw, sixty miles north of the city on the Hudson River, as a driver hauling bricks for the Excelsior Brick Company in the busy season, the summer of 1931, and sometime prior to that as a painter and in a poolroom, and as a laborer in nearby Iona Island. The Probation Department Investigation Report presents all Wright's work in Haverstraw as prior to his employment by Zaglin even thought the Preliminary Investigation records the length of his work hauling bricks as May-October 1931. It may be that he lived and worked in Haverstraw prior to moving to Harlem, and returned there periodically.
  
  It was to Haverstraw that his wife Odel went when she left him in 1932, with a man named Charlie Phillips, information in the Preliminary Investigation that the probation officer omitted from the Investigation Report. Instead, the report explained the couple's "separation" as a result of Wright's "infidelity with Marion Harris," with whom he was living at the time of his arrest. As was the case with others whose relationships followed the more fluid marriage patterns of working-class communities, the Probation Department Investigation Report described the twenty-two-year-old Harris as Wright's "mistress," ignoring the information in the Preliminary Investigation that they had married in April 1933, again in Haverstraw. At that time they were living with one of Wright's cousins at 860 Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx, rent free as Wright was unemployed after Zaglin decided in October 1932 that he no longer needed a chauffeur.
  
  Wright remained unemployed until July 1933, when he and Harris were employed as janitors at 155 West 123rd Street, a job that came with an apartment in the basement. They still held that position at the time of his arrest, and his employer told a probation officer he would reemploy Wright when he was released. However, if that happened, Wright did not live in the building. A census enumerator found him at 143 West 113th Street in 1940, where he told her he had been in 1935 (a question in that census), and was employed as the superintendent of an apartment building. He also told the enumerator he was married, but Harris is not recorded in the census schedule. Two years later, when Wright registered for the draft, he was living and working in another building, at 216 West 114th Street. He left blank the line for "Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your address," where men typically included their wife or a parent. His home address is struck out and updated several months later to 143 West 113th Street, his home in 1940.