Monroe Brown

Monroe Brown was a Black Detroit worker whom labor attorney Maurice Sugar helped obtain a new trial and acquittal. Page 3’s March 14 report says Brown and Charles Lee had been sentenced to ninety days by Recorder’s Court Judge John V. Brennan for having no home, job or visible means of support. The article presents the vagrancy prosecution as an attack on unemployed Black workers. It establishes neither the individual arrest date, acquittal day, physical discharge nor actual time served; ninety days is the initial imposed sentence. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n064-Nat-mar-15-1935-DW-LOC.pdf

Page 2 reproduces the stenographic account of the January 8, 1935 Detroit hearing before Recorder’s Court Judge John V. Brennan. The officer says he arrested both men at 2:30 p.m. the previous day, January 7; both pleaded not guilty. The judge imposed ninety days each in the House of Correction. Brown gave a home address and Lee said he worked eighteen to twenty hours weekly at the Twelfth Street Terminal. Maurice Sugar was appealing and demanding a new trial. This supplies the early dates in the existing case, separate from the later reported acquittal; ninety days is imposed, not established actual service. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n014-not-15-Nat-jan-16-1935-DW-LOC.pdf