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

Injured (73)

At least 73 people suffered injuries from assaults, gun shots and flying debris from attacks on businesses during the disorder. Some newspapers reported higher numbers of injuries, which is likely the case given inconsistencies in the records. Physicians both responded to ambulance callouts to treat the injured in the neighborhood, including in the police precincts, and treated those brought to the hospital. The Mayor’s Commission gathered records of both forms of treatment, but the 43 people identified in those records do not include another 33 listed as injured in newspaper reports, many recorded as being taken to Harlem Hospital. The ambulance records are callouts; once on the scene, physicians may have treated additional injured – at least that is what the UP implied when it reported “Many of the injured were treated by ambulance surgeons, thus making an exact check on their number impossible.” Although the report claimed that less than 50 people required hospital treatment, the reporter estimated that up to 100 had been injured – and several of the publications that ran the UP story used that figure as a headline. The AP reported Harlem Hospital officials “estimated they alone treated about 70 victims.” (The NY Post reported on 22 March that only ten injured in the disorder remained in hospital.)

Photographers from the NYDN and Daily Mirror also chose to focus on the injured. Published images span the period from injury to treatment – a white man knocked to the ground (NYDN Hit by Object page); an white man waiting for an ambulance (Daily Mirror); a doctor treating a black man in a police precinct (NYDN);  officers carrying a stretcher (NYDN); doctors treating a black man and a black woman in Harlem Hospital (NYDN), a room of people recuperating in hospital beds (NYDN & DM); a bandaged white woman leaving the hospital (NYDN Hit by Object page); and a white woman at home (DM- Nadish)

Aside from the 54 assaulted, an additional 19 appear in sources as injured. The most common cause was flying glass (5/19). Others listed as injured had the same lacerations suffered by those assaulted, but no information as to the circumstances of the injury. 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. The map also reveals that the injured lived relatively close to where they got hurt;, which could indicate they were bystanders drawn to the streets from their homes by the disorder but not participating in it.

Three woman are among the 19 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. The other injured (unknown race) women appear to have been part of the crowds on Harlem’s streets. Most of those injured are not identified by race; of the 4 that are, the two white individuals were injured in anomalous situations, Crowder fainting in a store, Dondoro accidentally shot by police.

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