John Henry Hill Sentenced to 40 Days in Jail, Aug. 28, 1921

Negro Has Too Much “Armory” for Judge

John Henry Hill, “the living armory,” will go to jail for 40 days, City Judge Wade Williams has decreed. John Henry was brought into police headquarters Friday night loaded down with two blackjacks, a sand bag and a cap pistol. He was posing as a dangerous black man when Detectives Moser and Riley arrived at a place near the Southern Railway yards north of the city. Saturday morning a woman came to the station and reported that John Henry had held her up, threatening to “pound her into a pulp” if she squealed while he engaged in the collection of a small amount of money in her purse.

John Henry admitted that he was a dangerous character to everybody except the police. To them, he contended that he “jist had them thing” for no particular reason. The police discovered that John Henry’s scheme was to “hold ‘em up with the cap pistol and talk business with the blackjacks.”

“You can knock a man crazy and not make a bruise with the sand-bag,” they said at police headquarters. The sand bag was a tobacco sack filled with sand, tied to a piece of iron. The black-jacks were a good example of amateur industry. The cap pistol looked dangerous in the dark.

John Henry will spend 30 days of his time for maintaining the “armory;” the remaining 10 days is to remind him of the laws against robbing people.

From The Charlotte News, Sunday, Aug. 28, 1921