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

Julius Narditch assaulted

At 11:30pm, as Julius Narditch, a thirty-four-year-old white man, walked on 8th Avenue near 147th Street, three Black men allegedly "jumped" him. His struggle with the men left him with head injuries and lacerations to his face and hands. A doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital attended Narditch, who was then taken to Harlem Hospital (although he did not appear in the hospital records obtained by the MCCH). Narditch lived at 400 West 128th Street, west of Harlem. No explanation was provided for why he was in a Black neighborhood, although many of the businesses on the avenue were white-owned. He may have come from the elevated train station on 8th Avenue and 145th Street.

The alleged assault on Narditch was the only event in the disorder north of 145th Street. Given that there were only four other events north of 135th Street (including a shooting), it was not certain that the assault was actually related to the events at the Kress store and to the south, in the sense that the assailants had been on 125th Street or been brought out on to the street by the disorder. Narditch was included in the one of the lists of the injured distributed to journalists, likely by police, published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American, and New York Herald Tribune. He likely was on that list because as he had reported the assault to police it was recorded in the Aided Cases book of the 32nd Precinct. Procedures required police to record all incidents reported to them in that book. Those records were among the material gathered by MCCH investigators. The other three other cases that appeared in the book for the period of the disorder all occurred closer to the other events of the disorder: the shooting of De Soto Windgate on West 144th Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues; the assault on Thomas Suarez on 134th Street; and the injury of Herbert Holderman on 132nd Street.

Only the New York Herald Tribune mentioned that multiple assailants attacked Narditch. The New York American attributed the cuts on his face to stabbing, but there was no mention of weapons in the police record. Only two other assaults in the disorder involved knives, a striking contrast with the extensive use of knives in violence at other times in 1935. The mention in the New York American likely reflected assumptions from those larger patterns.

No one was arrested for the assault on Narditch.

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