This tag was created by Anonymous.
Assaults (54)
The records of these events were 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 connected an injured individual to an individual charged with assault. Nineteen additional people were reported as being injured without any source that described the circumstances, leaving the possibility that some may have been assaulted. No individuals assaulted by police were identified in the historical record despite evidence that numerous people suffered injuries at the hands of police officers. One white man was included here among the assaulted even though he died in Bellevue Hospital three months after the disorder without regaining consciousness. As the attack on Thomas Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault he was 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 thirteen people for assault, all Black men. Further demonstrating the difficulty of prosecuting crowd violence, only James Hughes, a man charged with assaulting a police officer, was convicted of assault. Three others were convicted of the lesser offense of disorderly conduct which indicated that had not participated in the alleged assaults for which police arrested them but had only been in teh area at that time. Twelve assaults appeared only in records of ambulance call outs and hospital admissions and are not mentioned in any newspaper reports of the riot. Six assaults appeared in only one newspaper story, all but one cases that involved white victims reported by white publications that emphasized that dimension of the disorder. Such fragmentary sources suggest that it was likely that other cases may not have been captured in the historical record as those assaulted were either not treated at the hospital, did not receive medical treatment at all or did not attract the attention or interest of reporters.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the alleged assaults for which there was evidence established continuities with earlier racial disorders and "riots." The interracial violence that defined those events was still present in Harlem and it took place in the same areas as other forms of violence (with two incidents further north in 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.
Those 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. Participants did not use the knives and razors that featured in two-thirds of the incidents that resulted in felony prosecutions at other times that year but instead threw objects at individuals, a form of assault not evident in the rest of 1935.