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1. 1 2020-09-24T17:03:34+00:00 Anonymous In the Daily News Anonymous 51 plain 2023-07-24T01:29:50+00:00 Anonymous

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• 1 2020-02-24T21:19:53+00:00 Injured (74) 66 plain 2023-05-25T17:11:27+00:00 At least seventy-four people suffered injuries from assaults, flying debris and unknown circumstances during the disorder. Some newspapers reported higher numbers of injuries, which is likely the case given inconsistencies in the records. The Mayor’s Commission gathered two sets of hospital records, one which lists individuals attended at locations in Harlem, presumably by ambulances, and a second list of individuals attended by physicians with no information on where the treatment took place, which may be emergency room attendances. In addition to the thirty-nine injured individuals identified in those records, another thirty-three are listed as injured in newspaper reports, some recorded as being taken to Harlem Hospital (that number does not include individuals mentioned as involved in violence in newspaper stories who do not appear in lists of the injured). The UP reported “Many of the injured were treated by ambulance surgeons, thus making an exact check on their number impossible,” implying that those numbers did not even capture everyone who received medical treatment, let alone all those who suffered injuries. Although the report claimed that less than fifty people required hospital treatment, the reporter estimated that up to 100 had been injured – and several of the publications that ran the UP story used that figure as a headline. The Associated Press reported Harlem Hospital officials “estimated they alone treated about 70 victims,” but the hospital records and newspaper reports identify only forty-seven people attended by physicians from that hospital.
  
  The injured include forty-nine victims of assault; four other assaults involved attacks on individuals in vehicles that damaged cars and smashed windows, but did not result in reported injuries, and Thomas Wijstem died three months after the attack on him led to a prosecution for assault. Four of the men charged with assault are also recorded as being injured: Paul Boyett shot by a policeman who alleged he was part of a group assaulting Timothy Murphy; Charles Alston, who fell from a building roof to a ledge several floors below while trying to escape police; Isaac Daniels, arrested for assaulting Herman Young; and James Smitten, arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz. An additional man arrested in the disorder for inciting a riot, Hashi Mohammed, also appears in lists of the injured. Another five individuals are identified as injured by flying glass, and an additional man was accidentally shot by police pursuing James Thompson. The remaining fourteen are listed as injured with no information on the circumstances which produced their injuries.
  
  
  Few of the injured suffered wounds severe enough to require being admitted to hospital. Information is available for forty-three of the seventy-two injured individuals: physicians sent only twelve (28%) to hospital. Six of those were shot and wounded (two other shooting victims were not admitted to hospital, while the three men shot and killed were admitted, although one does not appear in hospital records). The other six individuals injured severely enough to be sent to hospital received their wounds in a variety of circumstances: head wounds when assaulted by a group, by an individual and in unknown circumstances; and injuries to the leg and nose. The highest proportion came in assaults on individuals, but the numbers are very small (1/4, with no information in three cases). In terms of injury, the highest proportion sent to hospital were of those with leg injuries (2/5). By the day after the riot, March 21, only eight men remained in hospital, according to the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  That combination of a high proportion requiring treatment and a small number admitted is at odds with accounts that emphasize shooting during the disorder, particularly on March 20. The New York Evening Journal’s picture of the extent of injuries resulting from the violence seems particularly sensationalized and exaggerated:

  Ambulances raced through the streets to care for the wounded as the casualty list grew until it resembled some wartime engagement. The accident wards of Harlem, Sydenham, Knickerbocker and Jewish Memorial hospitals were jammed with victims of the mob's wrath. At first the victims were those injured by rocks or clubs. But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns - were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks. And then the reports carried the words: "Gunshot wounds."

  
  Not even estimates reported in other newspapers suggest injuries on the level of “some wartime engagement,” let alone as many as would result from violence “at a point never before seen in New York City.” Nor do the handful of gunshot victims support claims of widespread gunshot wounds.
  
  The injured attracted the attention of photographers from the Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and appear in almost a quarter of the published images of the disorder. Those images span the experience of injury from wound to treatment to recuperation, and feature men and women, Blacks and whites, and police and medical staff: an unidentified white man knocked to the ground; an injured white police detective, Henry Roge being helped by another officer (on the street in the New York Evening Journal and Daily Mirror and inside in a second photograph in the New York Evening Journal); an unidentified man waiting for an ambulance (likely in a police precinct); Dr. Sayet of Harlem Hospital treating an unidentified Black man in a police precinct; Police officers carrying an unidentified Black individual on stretcher (likely Charles Alston); Police officers picking up an unidentified injured man outside Harlem Hospital; doctors treating an unidentified Black man and an unidentified Black woman in Harlem Hospital; a room of people recuperating in hospital beds; a bandaged white woman, Patricia O'Rourke, leaving Harlem Hospital (on the front page of the Daily News); and an injured white woman, Elizabeth Nadish, at home. The presence of three Black individuals in these images is out of proportion with the number of Black men and women identified as injured in the sources, suggesting that those lists did not include all those injured during the disorder. Black men with bandaged heads also appeared among the men arrested during the disorder photographed being transported to court the next day, in photographs published in the Daily News, one on the front page, and in the Acme Photo Agency image below.
  
  Embed from Getty Images
• 1 2020-02-24T21:51:52+00:00 Assaults on white men and women (29) 62 plain 2023-09-13T02:39:26+00:00 At least twenty-nine white men and women were assaulted during the disorder, in addition to nine white police officers. This violence has been overlooked in most scholarship on the disorder, which has followed the lead of the final report of the MCCH. Assaults were only obliquely mentioned in that document which instead emphasized attacks on property: “In fact, the distinguishing feature of this outbreak was that it was an attack upon property and not upon persons. In the beginning, to be sure, the resentment was expressed against whites—but whites who owned stores and who, while exploiting Negroes, denied them an opportunity to work."
  
  Newspapers told a different story, particularly the New York Evening Journal, a Hearst afternoon publication that sought out and gave prominence to white men and women assaulted by Black men. The most sensational and racist example of that emphasis was a story by Richard Levitt published under the page-spanning headline, “Kill the Whites Roar Maddened Harlem Mobs.” It was more a litany of racist fears and stereotypes than an account of the events of the disorder, with the phrase "kill the whites" used as a refrain to separate different elements of the story not in descriptions of specific events. In none of instances was the alleged call associated with the events being described. Invoking Black violence, or fears of Black violence, was a longstanding racist trope, employed in white narratives about the race riots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only two specific cases that include such threats were reported in the newspaper. A call to “Kill him” is attributed to a crowd of Black men and women that the New York Evening Journal described threatening B. Z. Kondoul, a thirty-five-year-old white man. Again, only one story mentioned that detail. So too the alleged assault on Betty Willcox, as she waited in a parked car. The story that quoted Willcox appeared alongside Levitt's article. The Black men she described surrounding the car screamed "White- we'll get you' We'll get all of them around here!"
  
  While the New York Evening Journal slanted its coverage to emphasize interracial violence, there was other evidence for all but four of the incidents that it reported. Other white publications reported that violence more sporadically, while the Black press generally did not report it at all. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Daily Worker dismissed the claims of the Hearst press that the disorder had been a race riot and gave credit to Communists on the streets and the leaflets they and the Young Liberators distributed for urging the "unity of black and white workers." However, the radical newspaper obliquely allowed that attacks on whites did take place: "In a few instances where small turbulent groups were suspicious of whites and disposed to attack them, white Communists were pointedly excluded from attack." Several papers reported clashes between bands of blacks and whites, in line with patterns from earlier racial disorders, but none offered details and there are no reports of blacks injured in those circumstances. Those claims appeared to reflect tropes about racial violence not descriptions of events during the disorder. Violence against whites took place throughout the disorder and across a wide area centered on 125th Street. Assaults on whites are thus woven into the disorder not so marginal as to distinguish the disorder from outbreaks earlier in the century.
  
  White men and women on the street, newspaper reporters and photographers, storeowners, and passengers in vehicles traveling through Harlem all allegedly suffered injuries at the hands of black assailants.
  
  Crowds threw stones and rocks at whites. The occupants of vehicles traveling through the neighborhood became targets, with Patricia O'Rourke hit in her car and Joseph Rinaldi in a Boston-bound bus. In other cases, whites standing apart, observing crowds came under attack, including a newspaper photographer Everett Breuer and his assistant Joseph Martin, and security guard James Wrigley. Others appeared at the hospital with similar injuries resulting from flying glass and rocks that they did not report as assaults, that did not result from efforts to injure them but from the attacks on property. One of them was likely the unidentified white man with a bleeding head wound after being hit by an object who appeared in a photograph published in the Daily News.
  
  The remaining assaults involved attacks by individuals or groups who targeted white individuals they encountered on the street. The victims of those assaults were apparently observing the events like those hit by objects or walking Harlem’s streets either around the entertainments of 125th Street or near the areas of white residents north of 116th Street. Almost all those attacks took the form of beatings, with only two men stabbed, Edward Genest and Morris Werner. Attacks on Betty Willcox, B. Z. Kondoul, and Timothy Murphy only ended when police officers intervened, while William Ken was saved by Black co-workers. Such violence was not endemic to the disorder. "All night until dawn on the Tuesday of the outbreak white persons, singly and in groups, walked the streets of Harlem without being molested," Claude McKay reported in an article in The Nation. While McKay insisted that "there was no manifest hostility between colored and white," it was clear that he mistook the lack of attacks on whites at some times and places for a general attitude. A Columbia University student's experience captured the intermittent presence of violence against whites among the variety of behavior during the disorder. Hector Donnelly reported being hit on the shoulder by a milk bottle while walking on West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue having gone to the neighborhood unaware of the disorder. As several members of the crowd on the street then moved toward him, he knew he was "in for it." A policeman came running, however, and dragged Donnelly away. Although the officer told him, "You better stay out of here," the white student met a reporter he knew so decided to stay "to watch the excitement." He remained despite further warnings from police until he "got into more trouble." A group of four or five men bumped him as they passed him on the sidewalk and then stopped and continued to push him. Again, a police officer came and "broke up the trouble." After that encounter, Donnelly decided that he needed to leave the neighborhood.
  
  White storeowners also appear among those assaulted, but in very small numbers not as the focus of violence as the MCCH report claimed. Herman Young's injuries resulted from glass from a smashed window rather than a direct attack. Max Newman was attacked as he closed his store, as was Joseph Sarnelli, with his assailants also attempting to rob him.
  
  Four white women appear among those assaulted in Harlem. Two of the women were attacked in cars, Patricia O'Rourke while driving through Harlem, Betty Willcox while parked. Alice Gordon was assaulted by a group on the street. Elizabeth Nadish was reported simply as having been “beaten."
  
  Attacks on white men and women occurred throughout the disorder (information about timing is missing for thirteen of the twenty-nine assaults), but were more geographically contained than in race riots in the north earlier in the twentieth century. Other than one man attacked north of 145th Street in an assault likely unrelated to the disorder, most attacks occurred around 125th Street, with a small number further south, around the stores on 116th Street. The first reported assaults came early in the disorder as the crowd on 125th Street clashed with police and began smashing windows. William Kitlitz was allegedly assaulted by James Smitten around 8.30 PM and Timothy Murphy and Maurice Spellman by different groups of men around 9 PM, and Morris Werner around 9.30 PM. All these men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street, to shop, seek entertainment or access public transport, on this evening caught up in the disorder. Around 11:00 PM a small cluster of assaults took place on or near 7th Avenue north of 116th St, as crowds moved away from 125th Street into an area with white residents. Further assaults occurred north of 125th Street around 1:00 AM, back near the entertainment district frequented by whites. The final assault whose timing is known was of a storekeeper during the looting that intensified after midnight.
  
  Most assaults on white men and women left few traces in the official record: police made arrests in only seven cases (there was no information on the circumstances that led to the arrest of two of the men charged with assault). Seven victims of alleged assaults appeared only in records of ambulance callouts and hospital admissions. Fifteen assaults are reported only in newspapers. Four cases appeared in only the New York Evening Journal, a publication that reported the disorder with an emphasis on violence against whites distinct from the rest of the press.
  
  Only one of the five Black men arrested for assaulting whites, Rivers Wright, was convicted, but only summarily by a Magistrate for the misdemeanor offense of disorderly conduct, for which he received a sentence of ten days in the Workhouse. That charge likely indicated that Wright had not been involved in the assault, but had been on the street nearby and been mistakenly arrested by police pursuing the assailants. In one case, there was no evidence of the outcome, one case was dismissed by the Grand Jury, and two men acquitted by trial juries.

  As Part of Related Categories:

  • Assaults by groups (17/17)
  • Assaults by individuals (3/7)
  • Hit by objects (7/19)
  • Assaults in unknown circumstances (1/3)
  • Assaults on women (4/5)
  • Assault in the courts (5/9)
• 1 2020-02-24T23:08:33+00:00 Hit by Objects (18) 55 plain 2022-12-16T02:38:30+00:00 The most common assault involved throwing a stone, rock or bottle. Such attacks made up 33% of the assaults in the sources (18 of 54); however, that proportion is somewhat distorted by six instances of assaults on police officers. Throwing objects made up 30% (12 of 45) assaults not targeted at police. Most of those attacked in this way were white men, but five were Black men (and one man of unknown race); by contrast all of those shot and wounded were Black men and all of those assaulted by groups of people were white men. Two of the attacks on Black men involved objects thrown at a car; there are no details of the circumstances of the other three assaults. Only one of those hit by an object was a woman, struck by glass when a rock shattered a window in a moving car.
  
  Almost all (10 of 12) of the civilians hit by objects appear either only in reports of hospital admissions (4 of 12) or only in newspaper reports (6 of 12); only two appear in both sources (one whose assault led to an arrest). That discrepancy did not result from reporters ignoring the hospital, as five photographs appear in the Daily News, taken both inside and outside the facility. But reporters do not appear to have been able to systematically gather the names of those being treated notwithstanding newspapers' practice of publishing lists that had the appearance of being comprehensive. Clearly the hospital records did not include everyone treated for an injury. Patricia O’Rourke appears in a photograph published in the Daily News leaving the hospital bandaged, but is not in the hospital’s admission records. Likewise, lists of the injured in newspapers recorded numerous individuals as having been treated at Harlem Hospital who do not appear in the admission records. Journalists also noted that ambulances called during the disorder treated more people than made it into their records. Of the six police officers, four appear in hospital records and in newspaper lists of the injured, while the remaining two appear only in newspaper reports.
  
  O’Rourke’s injuries are typical of those resulting from these assaults – cuts to the eye, forehead and cheek, which most of papers described as “lacerations” rather than cuts, as hospital records did. Cuts produced by rocks, stones, bottles and shattered glass produced significant bleeding, as photos show. The impact of being hit by an object also knocked at least some off their feet, a detail missing from reports but evident in photographs. The white man being helped up by a police patrolman in this image published in the Daily News had been hit in the head with a bottle (a piece of which is identified is visible in the published photograph, highlighted with an arrow). Several cars traveling along the street are visible in this uncropped version of the image previously available in the Daily News archive. Another Daily News photograph taken sometime earlier from in the street showed the man down on the ground with a bloodied face. Two police officers suffered injuries to their legs rather than heads, and one to his hands. However, three attacks on individuals in cars did not result in reported injuries, two on Fred Campbell as he drove up 7th Avenue, and one on Detective Frank Lenahan.
  
  It was not always clear that those hit were actually the intended targets of the objects. Rocks, stone and bottles were also being thrown at store windows. The Home News account of Isaac Daniel’s alleged assault on Herman Young explicitly identified a store window as Daniel’s target; Young, the storeowner, was not injured by the stone Daniel’s threw but by the glass sent flying when it hit and shattered a window. Young was likely behind the window, inside his store. Others hit by objects were standing in front of windows, potentially between those throwing and their targets. That was the case with Detective Henry Roge, who was in front of Kress store when hit by a rock allegedly thrown by James Hughes. Police witnesses were certain that Roge was the target, although two newspaper reports said the rock hit the store window after striking Roge. Hughes denied throwing the rock, and although convicted, received a sentence of only 3 months in the workhouse, which the Assistant District Attorney explained reflected the judge’s belief that the store window, not Roge, was his target.
  
  In other cases, there is evidence that those throwing objects hit their targets. The Daily News photographer Ebbs Breuer and his assistant made their identity obvious by setting up to take images, prompting some members of the crowd to bombard them with rocks. Breuer suffered cuts to the head, Martin a broken nose, injuries that required a trip to Harlem Hospital. None of the black journalists on 125th Street reported being attacked.
  
  Similarly, cars and buses traveling along Harlem’s streets were clearly the targets of the objects that hit them. Lenox and 7th Avenues were major traffic routes, with almost all of the vehicles, private and commercial, driven by whites. One Black driver, Fred Campbell, was caught up in the disorder. A brick smashed the rear window of Campbell’s car as he drove up 7th avenue at the same time as windows smashed on both sides of the street – but the width of Harlem’s avenues made it unlikely he had been hit by someone trying to throw from one side of the street at a window on the other side. In the streets rather than on the sidewalks, vehicles represented targets similarly distant from the crowd as bystanders in front of stores, police and reporters. Campbell reported being hit by more bricks before he reached his destination, and seeing cars driven by whites with broken windows, but on finishing his errand to pick up the day’s receipts from his two barber’s shops, he returned home. Likely so too did the drivers of the other cars Campbell saw. Two buses likewise were bombarded with stones as they drove through the disorder on 7th Avenue, one part of the local service, one on its way out of the city to Boston, but continued on to their destinations. Only the injured were drawn into the historical record. Joseph Rinaldi, a passenger traveling to Boston, was hit by flying glass; the bus stopped at a drug store outside Harlem so he could treat his injuries. Patricia O’Rourke was also in a car hit by bricks while traveling on 7th Avenue, toward her home in the West Bronx, but in her case the front window smashed, leaving her with cuts to her eyes, forehead and cheeks. The Daily News put a photograph of O’Rourke leaving Harlem Hospital with bandages obscuring much of her face on its front page (the caption highlighting the fur coat and wealthy father made her entirely unrepresentative of those caught up in the disorder).
  
  Police riding on riot trucks were more exposed than passengers inside cars; at least one officer, Henry Whittington, was hit. According to the Daily Mirror, he “was “sniped” off of the emergency truck he was riding at 8th Ave and 123rd St.” No such details appear in other newspapers, which simply include Whittington in their lists of the injured, with a head wound. Police in cars do not seem to have been subject to the same attacks as other whites driving through Harlem. The only reported instance of such an attack appears only in the New York Herald Tribune, a brief note that “The automobile of Detective Lieutenant Frank Lenahan was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered when Lenahan drove through a riotous section of Eighth Avenue” in the early hours of the disorder.

  Assaults (54)