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

Injured by glass (5)

When objects broke windows, glass went flying, hitting individuals on at least five occasions. All those reported injuries came after 1 AM, so during the period when most of the reported looting took place, and in the areas where that looting was concentrated: Alice Mitchell and Hugh Young at Lenox Avenue and 129th Street, William Brown at Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, Herbert Holderman at Lenox Avenue and 130th Street, and Giles Jackson at Seventh Avenue and 116th Street. Evidence about the circumstances of those injuries is fragmentary, brief details in lists and hospital records rather than discussions in stories. One record explicitly linked the injuries to windows being broken in stores. In the 32nd Police Precinct book of aided cases Holderman was listed as “cut by flying glass when some unknown persons broke windows of stores.” Young and Brown were recorded as simply injured by “flying glass,” and Mitchell and Jackson by “falling glass.”

Although those injured could themselves have been involved in attacks on businesses or looting, there were crowds of bystanders on street throughout the disorder, from which those that attacked stores often came. Mitchell and Young lived within a block of where they were injured; Jackson and Holderman lived further away, four and seven blocks, while Brown lived almost ten blocks away.

Acting Captain Conrad Rothengrant testified in an MCCH hearing that he believed that police officers were the intended target of some of the objects that broke windows. That scenario is more likely to have occurred in the early hours of the disorder, when police were trying to clear crowds from 125th Street and protect Kress and the stores on the block around it. Businesses damaged later, when windows were broken to enable looting, rarely had police in front of them. In James Hughes alleged assault of Detective Henry Roge, Rothengrant's scenario appears to have been reversed; the rock that struck Roge was intended to break windows in Kress' store.

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