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

Henry Blackwell assaulted

At around 1:30 AM, 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. Beginning around 1AM, 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.

Blackwell’s injury was serious enough that someone called an ambulance, but not so bad that the physician who attended him took him back to Harlem Hospital. After treatment Blackwell instead returned home. Although he consequently appeared in the hospital records, newspaper reports did not include him in any lists of the assaulted or injured. As with all the Black men assaulted during the disorder, no one was arrested or charged for assaulting Blackwell.

Henry Blackwell still lived at the same address five years later, 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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