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

Violence in Harlem in 1935

Prosecutions in the district attorney's case files and stories in Harlem's two Black newspapers from the rest of 1935 collected for Digital Harlem provide a context for the violence of the disorder. The picture offered by those sources captures only part of what appears in material on the disorder. Most of the assaults in the disorder did not lead to arrests (45 of 54), let alone prosecution for a felony that involved a district attorney. Half of those arrests resulted in lesser charges, cases which do not appear in the list of the district attorney's cases. In fact, as those cases often resulted in charges of disorderly conduct, an offense that encompassed other acts than assault, their prevalence at other times cannot be discerned even in the Magistrate Court docket books. Harlem’s Black newspapers reported a small number of additional cases, some of which, like most of the assaults in the disorder, did not result in arrests or prosecutions. But those stories represent only a small fragment of the incidents of such violence in Harlem.

As incomplete as the context provided by these sources is, it does highlight several features of the violence in the disorder that were out of the ordinary. First, the violence of the disorder was less severe than incidents at other times in Harlem, particularly in regards to the lack of knives, and did not involve attacks in which objects were thrown at individuals, the largest group of assaults in the disorder.

Violence targeted white men and women to a far greater extent in the disorder than was generally the case, when almost all the attacks on white individuals occurred in the context of robbery, with most of the victims collectors and salesmen working in the neighborhood or men seeking prostitutes, as they had been throughout the 1920s. Attacks on police did occur at times other than the disorder, almost all in the context of arrests, as did two of those in the disorder. None involved officers hit by objects, as most of the assaults during the disorder did, but almost half involved knives or razors (5 of 11), which did not feature in the disorder.

Most violence in Harlem at other times in 1935 involved Black and Puerto Rican residents and their family and neighbors, and occurred inside, in hallways, residences, businesses, and on rooftops, not on the streets where the events of the disorder took place. And that violence was widely dispersed around Harlem, including in the areas of the disorder — with the exception of shootings, which were rare above 125th Street.

Events

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