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

Lyman Quarterman shot

At around 10.30 PM, Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was part of a crowd at 121st Street and 7th Avenue that police were struggling to disperse when he was shot in the abdomen. Around the same time, Anthony Cados, a thirty-four-year-old white man reported being assaulted nearby by "some unknown colored person or persons." While Cados lived approximately ten blocks to the south, Quarterman lived at the other end of Black Harlem, at 306 West 146th Street (in the same area as two of the other Black men shot, Clarence London and Wilmont Hendricks)

It is clear from the newspaper reports that police fired their guns as part of their efforts to disperse the crowd, raising the possibility that an officer shot Quarterman. White newspaper reports discounted that possibility in various ways. Hospital records of the ambulance called to attend Quarterman simply recorded he had a "gunshot wound of the abdomen received when shot by some unknown person at the scene of riot." The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, Brooklyn Citizen and Daily Mirror,  and the Associated Press reported on March 20, and the Chicago Defender on March 23, that Quarterman had died, a mistake the Home News attributed to "many conflicting reports during the night," and the New York Evening News attributed more specifically to a "report having been sent out on the police teletype." By late on March 20 the New York Evening Journal, New York Post and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle listed Quarterman among the injured, as did the Atlanta World on March 27 and the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette on March 30. He was one of eight men still in hospital on March 21,  the New York Herald Tribune reported, and still there as late as April 8 according to the New York Age, but there are no reports that he died.

The New York Herald Tribune, reported that no policeman in the vicinity could remember discharging his revolver, whereas the Times Union said many had, but “only into the air to frighten the mob.” The New York Evening Journal made an oblique reference to shots being fired into the crowd, as the culmination of a narrative justifying police actions as a response to escalating violence, in which officers from the 123rd Street station surrounded by a crowd, first drew their nightsticks “to save their own lives,” and when the crowd armed themselves with baseball bats and clubs, drew their guns and exchanged shots with the crowd. No other newspapers reproduced this narrative.

The New York American simply said Quarterman had been shot by an unknown assailant, the Daily Mirror by a “stray bullet,” and the New York Daily News reported his assailant had escaped, stories which all implicitly assumed the police were not responsible for his death. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly expressed such an assumption in reporting Quarterman had been shot “presumably by rioters.” The New York Times offered the more open-ended report that “police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot.” There are no records of such an investigation. Only the Brooklyn Citizen stated directly that “Whether he had been shot by police or other rioters could not be determined.”

Four of the six others shot and wounded during the disorder were Black men like Quarterman, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. As in his case, no one was arrested for any of those shootings (the man with who the police officer struggled, James Thompson, was shot and killed by police).
 

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