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

Henry Blackwell assaulted

Henry Blackwell, a forty-one-year-old Black man born in Tennessee, was “struck by object thrown by some unknown person” while at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. Dr Payne attended Blackwell at Harlem Hospital at 1.30 AM, finding he suffered a lacerated scalp. He could have been transported the ten blocks from where he was injured to the hospital by ambulance, or made his way there by other means. Given when he was in the hospital, the alleged assault likely took place around 1.00 AM. Beginning around that time, multiple outbreaks of looting occurred on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street. Bricks, rocks and bottles were thrown at stores as part of those events, so Blackwell may not have been the intended target of the object that struck him. As he lived nearby, at 126 West 126th Street, nine buildings and about one third of a block to the west of where he was injured, Blackwell may have been drawn to the avenue by the noise and crowds.

The hospital record is the only evidence of the alleged assault. Blackwell did not appear in newspaper stories or lists of the assaulted or injured, which likely means he did not make a report to police. He was not admitted to the hospital, but left after being treated.

Henry Blackwell still lived at the same address five years later, in June 1940, when the census enumerator called, in an apartment with at least eight other lodgers, working as a WPA laborer for the Parks Department. His situation had been very different when recorded by another enumerator for the 1930 census. Then Blackwell had lived several blocks further north at 201 West 132nd Street, with his wife of eighteen years and a thirteen-year-old daughter, and worked as a driver for a family while his wife worked as a hairdresser. There is no record of what became of his family between 1930 and 1935.

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