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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, in the hospital record, so he was likely injured sometime around 12.15 AM, given how far the location was from the hospital. At some point during the disorder this area saw windows broken and some looting, in the blocks of Lenox Avenue around 116th Street, but no other injuries were reported. The closest violence occurred to the west, around 7th Avenue and 116th Street. Like many of those injured, Powell was close to home when hurt, only two blocks south of the address where he resided, 69 West 118th Street, suggesting he may have been a bystander attracted by the noise and crowds.

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 American sensationally describing his nose as “severed by [a] razor.” That account cast Powell as a victim of assault, with a weapon that whites associated with Blacks. While the hospital record provided no details of the circumstances of the injury, given that none of the other newspapers suggest an assault, the American listing seems an example of the white 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 stem 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 been treated in that way (11 of 42, 26%).
 

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