This tag was created by Anonymous.
Injured (74)
The injured include forty-nine victims of assault; four other assaults involved attacks on individuals in vehicles that damaged cars and smashed windows, but did not result in reported injuries, and Thomas Wijstem died three months after the attack on him led to a prosecution for assault. Four of the men charged with assault are also recorded as being injured: Paul Boyett shot by a policeman who alleged he was part of a group assaulting Timothy Murphy; Charles Alston, who fell from a building roof to a ledge several floors below while trying to escape police; Isaac Daniels, arrested for assaulting Herman Young; and James Smitten, arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz. An additional man arrested in the disorder for inciting a riot, Hashi Mohammed, also appears in lists of the injured. Another five individuals are identified as injured by flying glass, and an additional man was accidentally shot by police pursuing James Thompson. The remaining fourteen are listed as injured with no information on the circumstances which produced their injuries.
Few of the injured suffered wounds severe enough to require being admitted to hospital. Information is available for forty-three of the seventy-two injured individuals: physicians sent only twelve (28%) to hospital. Six of those were shot and wounded (two other shooting victims were not admitted to hospital, while the three men shot and killed were admitted, although one does not appear in hospital records). The other six individuals injured severely enough to be sent to hospital received their wounds in a variety of circumstances: head wounds when assaulted by a group, by an individual and in unknown circumstances; and injuries to the leg and nose. The highest proportion came in assaults on individuals, but the numbers are very small (1/4, with no information in three cases). In terms of injury, the highest proportion sent to hospital were of those with leg injuries (2/5). By the day after the riot, March 21, only eight men remained in hospital, according to the New York Herald Tribune.
That combination of a high proportion requiring treatment and a small number admitted is at odds with accounts that emphasize shooting during the disorder, particularly on March 20. The NYJ’s picture of the extent of injuries resulting from the violence seems particularly sensationalized and exaggerated:
Ambulances raced through the streets to care for the wounded as the casualty list grew until it resembled some wartime engagement. The accident wards of Harlem, Sydenham, Knickerbocker and Jewish Memorial hospitals were jammed with victims of the mob's wrath. At first the victims were those injured by rocks or clubs. But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns - were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks. And then the reports carried the words: "Gunshot wounds." (1935_03_20_NYJ_1c)
Not even estimates reported in other newspapers suggest injuries on the level of “some wartime engagement,” let alone as many as would result from violence “at a point never before seen in New York City.” Nor do the handful of gunshot victims support claims of widespread gunshot wounds.
The injured attracted the attention of photographers from the NYDN and Daily Mirror, and appear in almost a quarter (20/85) of the published images of the disorder. Those images span the experience of injury from wound to treatment to recuperation, and feature men and women, blacks and whites, and police and medical staff: a white man knocked to the ground (NYDN Hit by Object page); an injured white police officer being helped; 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). The presence of three black individuals in these images is out of proportion with the number among the injured individuals who appear in the sources