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

Detective Frank Lenahan assaulted

As Detective Frank Lenahan drove “through a riotous section of Eighth Avenue,” his car was bombarded by rocks, shattering most of its windows. Accounts of the disorder suggest that crowds occupied 8th Avenue only in the early hours of the disorder, pushed there by police seeking to clear 125th Street, but the report of the attack on Lenahan does not include a time. Lenahan was the one of two officers attacked in a vehicle rather than on the street. Several hours later, Patrolman Harry Whittington would be hit by a rock while riding on the back of an emergency truck.

After 10 PM, when the crowd moved away from 125th Street, police used radio cars and emergency trucks to respond to violence and to try to control crowds. As a plainclothes officer, Lenahan may not have been driving a marked police vehicle. Cars and buses driven by whites were also targets of rocks thrown by black crowds throughout the disorder, but those attacks took place on 7th Avenue, the major route to the Bronx and northern neighborhoods, not the less traveled 8th Avenue. In at least two cases, flying glass from smashed windows injured occupants of those vehicles.

Only the New York Herald Tribune reported this event, in a single sentence at the very end of its story from March 20: “The automobile of Detective Lieutenant Frank Lenahan was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered when Lenahan drive through a riotous section of Eighth Avenue.” There is no mention of an injury to Lenahan, so it is not surprising that he does not appear in hospital records or the lists of the injured published by other newspapers.

 

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