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

James White assaulted

James White, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, was injured in "an altercation with an unknown white man at 129th Street and Lenox Ave,” Harlem Hospital staff recorded in the admission records. Dr Payne attended White at Harlem Hospital, seven blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 3.30 AM, so he was likely assaulted sometime around 3.00 AM. Two other men of unknown race, Jack Ponder and Thomas Brown, suffered injuries at the same place and were treated by Dr Payne at the same time. This location was at the heart of an area of Lenox Avenue that saw extensive looting after midnight. White lived six blocks south of where he was assaulted, at 104 West 123rd Street.

The hospital record described White's injury as a "laceration of scalp." He left for home after treatment, rather than being admitted to the hospital, indicating that it was not a serious injury. White's absence from police and court records, and from newspaper lists and stories, indicates that he did not make a report to police.

While the hospital admission record did not include information regarding White's race, that it specified that the man who assaulted him was a white man" suggests that White himself was a Black man. He was one of only twelve Black men reported assaulted during the disorder, and the only assault explicitly attributed to a white man. The white men in the area at that time were likely to be police officers, including plainclothes detectives, and storeowners; firefighters had been on Lenox Avenue several hours earlier, with at least some photographers given the published images of those men fighting fires, but there is no evidence either group remained there at the time was assaulted or that other white men and women were in the area this late in the disorder.
 

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