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Assaults (53)
The records of these events are highly fragmentary, so more assaults could have taken place. Newspapers published separate lists of those arrested and those injured in the disorder, with few accounts of events that connect an injured individual to an individual charged with assault. Nineteen additional people are reported as being injured without any source describing the circumstances, leaving the possibility that some may have been assaulted. No individuals assaulted by police are identified in the historical record despite evidence that numerous people suffered injuries at the hands of police officers. One white man is included among the assaulted although he died in Bellevue Hospital three months after the disorder without regaining consciousness. However, as the attack on Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault, he is included as assaulted and killed (but not among those injured in assaults).
The nature of the violence that took place during the disorder also made it likely to escape the historical record. Most assaults took the form of objects thrown from a distance or attacks by groups. In both cases it was difficult to identify and apprehend the individuals responsible. Even the nature of some assaults was uncertain. In several instances journalists disagreed over whether an individual had been hit by an object or attacked by a group.
As a result, police arrested only twelve people for assault, all black men alleged to have assaulted white men, one of who was a police officer. Further demonstrating the difficulty of prosecuting crowd violence, only James Hughes, the man charged with assaulting the police officer, was convicted of assault, and two others of the lesser offense of disorderly conduct. Twelve assaults appear only in records of ambulance call outs and hospital admissions, and are not mentioned in any newspaper reports of the riot. Six assaults appear in only one newspaper story, all but one cases involving white victims reported by white publications that emphasized that dimension of the disorder. Such fragmentary sources suggest that it is likely that other cases may not have been captured in the historical record, with those assaulted either not being treated at the hospital or not receiving medical treatment at all, or not attracting the attention or interest of reporters.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the alleged assaults for which there is evidence establish continuities with earlier racial disorders and "riots." The interracial violence that defined those events is still present in Harlem, and it takes place in the same areas as other forms of violence (although three cases are the only incidents in north Harlem), pushing us to understand what happened in 1935 as something more than the emergence of a new form of disorder focused on white property and police. These assaults on whites in disorder were out of the ordinary in 1935; the rest of the year saw very few attacks on whites outside of robberies. At the same time, the assaults in the disorder took different forms than violence at other times, without the knives and razors that featured in two-thirds of the incidents that resulted in felony prosecutions, and instead featuring attacks in which objects were thrown at individuals, a form of assault not evident in the rest of 1935.