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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. Given when he was in the hospital, the alleged assault likely took place around 1:00 AM. At that time, there were assaults, injuries, and attacks on stores on all the blocks of Lenox Avenue from 125th Street up to 134th Street. Bricks, rocks, and bottles were thrown at stores as part of that violence, so Blackwell may not have been the intended target of whatever hit 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 a spectator drawn to the avenue by the noise and crowds.



The hospital record was the only evidence of the alleged assault. Blackwell did not appear in newspaper stories or lists of the assaulted or injured, so he probably 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. He was working as a WPA laborer for the Parks Department. His situation had been very different when recorded by an 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. He had been employed as a driver for a family while his wife worked as a hairdresser. There was no record of what became of his family between 1930 and 1935.

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