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

James White assaulted

Staff at Harlem Hospital recorded that James White was treated for “laceration of the scalp, received during an altercation with an unknown white man at 129th Street and Lenox Ave.” White was a twenty-nine-year-old Black man who lived six blocks south of where he was assaulted, at 104 West 123rd Street. This event is not reported in any sources other than the hospital records gathered by the MCCH. White was one of only twelve Black men reported assaulted during the disorder, the only one explicitly attributed to a white man. This location was at the heart of the area where the most extensive looting took. White was treated at 3.30AM, after the peak of the looting, but he may have been assaulted earlier, during the wave of theft from stores. Two other men of unknown race, Jack Ponder and Thomas Brown, suffered injuries at the same time and place as White.

No other details of the event are provided. The white men in this area at that time were likely to be police officers, including plainclothes detectives, and storeowners; there is no evidence suggesting the presence of white civilians.

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"Hospital Admissions, 19-20 March 1935," Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 5 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).