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

Andrew Lyons killed

Andrew Lyons, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man, died as a result of internal injuries "sustained during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh Avenue." There is no information on when he was injured.

Although that intersection is in the heart of Harlem and the disorder, only stories in the Amsterdam News and Times Union reported the location of Lyons' injury, and he did not appear in any hospital records. (The two sources disagree on the location, with the Times Union put the killing at 125th and Lenox not 125th and 7th Avenue, but as that story also gave a different home address and injury than other newspapers, the killing has been mapped at the address given in the Amsterdam News). Lyons also is not included in any lists of the injured published in newspapers on March 20 and March 21. The first reports of Lyons are those of his death in the New York Post and New York Daily News on March 23, New York Times and an AP story on March 24, and the Atlanta World on March 27. Lyons also appears in lists of those killed in the weekly Black newspapers, the New York Age, Pittsburgh Courier, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette on March 30. The only source that provides any details of the circumstances of Lyons' fatal injury is the Times Union, which described him as having been beaten over the head with a blunt instrument, but is the only source to describe his injury as a fractured skull, casting doubt on that account.

Lyons lived at 147 West 117th Street, a mixed Black and Puerto Rican area south of where he was injured, on a block between Lenox and 7th Avenues. The noise and crowds on 7th Avenue could have drawn him to the disorder.
 

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