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

Giles Jackson injured

Giles Jackson, a thirty-three-year-old man, was struck on the leg by “falling glass” around 3.00 am on March 20. An unnamed physician from nearby Beth Israel Hospital attended Jackson at West 116th Street and 7th Avenue, but the hospital record identified the injury as having occurred “in some unknown place.” Several incidents of broken windows and looting around that intersection and further east down West 116th Street and two blocks north on 7th Avenue would have sent glass flying. Car windows smashed by objects thrown at vehicles driving up 7th Avenue would also have produced flying glass. Injuries from flying glass make up 25% of the injuries not related to assaults that appear in sources, the largest group after head injuries.

Jackson’s injury did not require he be taken to the hospital; after the physician attended him he “left for home.” He gave a home address four blocks south of where the ambulance treated him, at 33 West 112th Street, a Puerto Rican area. The hospital record, the only source in which Jackson appears, did not identify his race. (Census and draft records did identify a Black man born in Virginia named Giles Jackson of the correct age living in Harlem at this time, but he was a roomer who moved frequently, and cannot be placed at this address in 1935).

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"Hospital Admissions, 19-20 March 1935," Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 5 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).