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Injured [not in assaults] (20)
The most common reported cause of injury for those not reported as being assaulted was flying glass (5/19). An individual need not be involved in breaking windows to suffer the cuts and lacerations to the wrists, head and legs recorded by these individuals. Crowds filled the sidewalks and streets during the disorder, and those who did attack businesses often emerged from those crowds, leaving bystanders little opportunity to distance themselves from their targets and the shattered glass produced by those attacks. On the other hand, injured individuals could also have been involved in those attacks, or in subsequent looting, which required moving through broken glass.
Others listed as injured had the same lacerations and head injuries suffered by those assaulted, but no information as to the circumstances of the injury. (The injured in photographs had head injuries, which could be caused by glass or objects). The NYAm and NYEJ did report that eighteen-year-old Nathaniel Powell had his nose cut off, with the NYAm specifying that a razor had been used. However, as the NYP, NYDN, and most importantly the hospital record all simply reported cuts to his nose and face, those stories of an attack are likely another example of the white press falling back on tropes of racial violence rather than a reliable account of what happened to Powell. Similarly, Stanley Dondoro suffered a gunshot wound, but there is clear evidence that police shot him accidentally when pursuing James Thompson. Some of these individuals could have been injured when knocked off their feet in the crowds on Harlem’s streets, a circumstance captured in several photographs of the disorder, including the most widely circulated.
Most of this group of injured received their wounds around the heart of the disorder, in the blocks around 125th Street, but there are a cluster along Lenox Avenue up as far north as 132nd Street. This area saw the most extensive attacks on stores and looting; it was also relatively easily accessible from Harlem Hospital, on Lenox Avenue between 136th and 137th Streets. The one injury outside this area, Giles Jackson hurt by flying glass at West 116th Street and 7th Avenue, also occurred in an area that saw significant amounts of looting and broken windows (and another case in this area not on map – Lenox between 116th and 117th, Nathaniel Powell). The map also reveals that the injured lived relatively close to where they got hurt; only Clara Crowder came from as far away as some of those arrested for looting (although that group also included some from close to the site of their arrest). That proximity could indicate that this group of the injured were bystanders, parts of the crowds drawn to the streets from their homes by the disorder but not participating in it.
Three woman are among the nineteen injured. One, Clara Crowder, is anomalous. A (white?) clerk at Kress’ store, Crowder fainted in the crush of the crowd inside the store who initially reacted to reports Rivera had been beaten or killed. A doctor from the ambulance summoned to treat the two store employees bitten by Rivera also treated Crowder. The other injured (unknown race) women appear to have been part of the crowds on Harlem’s streets. Photographs of the crowds show women scattered among the men. Most of those injured are not identified by race; of the five that are, two white individuals were injured in anomalous situations, Crowder fainting in a store, Dondoro accidentally shot by police (the third white individual, Salvatore Nicolette, suffered a fractured skull in unspecified circumstances).