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

Nathaniel Powell injured

Nathaniel Powell, a nineteen-year-old Black man, suffered cuts to his nose and left wrist on Lenox Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets “in some unknown manner,” his hospital admission recorded. Dr. Payne attended Powell at Harlem Hospital, twenty blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 1:00 AM, so Powell was injured sometime after 12:30 AM. Just after midnight, windows were broken in the San Antonio Market on West 116th Street just east of Lenox Avenue, and groceries valued at around $10 were taken. A restaurant on Lenox Avenue near West 117th Street and three businesses around West 118th Street also had windows broken some time during the disorder. Like many of those injured, Powell was close to home when hurt. He lived only two blocks to the north at 69 West 118th Street so may have been a spectator attracted by the noise and crowds rather than a participant in that violence.


If the phrasing of the hospital record indicated that Powell did not provide the medical staff with any details of the circumstances in which he had been injured, the context makes it likely he had been injured by glass flying from smashed windows. While he could have been watching as others broke windows, the severity of his wounds would suggest he was closer than that and involved in smashing the glass. While others treated by hospital staff did tell them they had been hit by glass, Powell would have had little incentive to reveal if that was the cause of his injuries. Police officers were stationed at Harlem Hospital during the disorder, where they arrested at least one Black man, Isaac Daniels, while he was being treated after a white storeowner identified him as the man who had assaulted him. Another possibility was that Powell had been beaten by police officers as they sought to disperse crowds on the street. While police violence intensified after midnight, Powell's injuries included more extensive lacerations than were seen in those hit with batons and gun butts. There was also no evidence of police in the area of Lenox Avenue where he was injured until more than an hour later when James Williams was arrested.

While the hospital record recorded Powell’s injuries as "laceration of nose and left wrist," the Daily News described them more broadly as cuts about the face, and the New York Post shifted the injury to his foot. The New York Evening Journal and New York American reported a more dramatic wound, that Powell’s nose had been cut off, with the New York American sensationally describing his nose as “severed by [a] razor.” That account cast Powell as having been assaulted with a weapon that whites associated with Black New Yorkers. While the hospital record provided no details of the circumstances of the injury, given that none of the other newspapers mentioned a weapon, the information in the New York American was likely an example of the Hearst press falling back on tropes of racial violence rather than a reliable account of what happened to Powell. Descriptions of his nose being cut off likely stemmed from the seriousness of the cuts. After Payne attended Powell, he was admitted to the hospital, one of only eleven among the injured known to have needed that additional care (11 of 42, 26%).
 

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