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

Nathaniel Powell injured

Around 1AM, Nathaniel Powell, a nineteen-year-old Black man suffered lacerations to his nose and left wrist “in some unknown manner” on Lenox Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets. 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 cuts to his nose and left wrist, the New York Daily News described them more broadly as cuts about the face, and the New York Post shifting the location 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. Given that none of the other sources 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 a physician from Harlem Hospital attended Powell, he was admitted to the hospital, one of only eleven among the injured known to have been treated in that way (11/42, 26%). The location of his injury was twenty blocks south of the hospital; there were several closer hospitals. Given that Powell appears in police aided case book, it is possible that police officers took him to Harlem Hospital.
 

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