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

Krim Shamhal assaulted

Michael Krim-Shamhal, a fifty-four-year-old white man, reported being assaulted as he walked west on West 122nd Street at 11pm. He described his assailants as “some unknown persons.” An ambulance brought Dr. Harris from Harlem Hospital to treat the cuts on Krim-Shamhal’s forehead. When the doctor was finished, the injured man left for home, an apartment where he and his wife lodged at 140 West 119th Street, in the opposite direction to where he had been heading when assaulted.

Krim-Shamhal was assaulted on the edge of a cluster of assaults and attacks on stores on 7th Avenue from 121st to 125th Streets, suggesting the presence of crowds on the street. He was not the only white resident of the blocks south of 125th Street assaulted, suggesting the presence of whites among those drawn to the streets by the disorder – where they became targets. The timing of that violence is mostly unknown, but the assault appears to have come before much of the other violence, and not long after crowds began to spread from 125th Street.

The record of the ambulance call-out is the only evidence of the assault. Krim-Shamhal’s race is not made clear in that record, but he appears in the 1930 census residing at the same address on 119th Street. Born in Russia, he had arrived in the US in 1923.
 

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