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

Patricia O'Rourke assaulted

When the car carrying Patricia O’Rourke, a thirty-year-old white woman, north on 7th Avenue reached 118th Street, a brick thrown at it smashed one of the windows. Shattered glass cut O'Rourke's eyes, forehead, and cheeks. The car detoured from its journey to her home at 160 West 180th Street in the Bronx to take her to Harlem Hospital for treatemnt. A photograph of O’Rourke leaving the hospital with bandages obscuring most of her face appeared on the front page of the Daily News. However, she did not appear in the lists of those attended at the hospital collected by the MCCH. Police did not arrest anyone for the assault on O’Rourke.



Seventh Avenue was the most heavily trafficked roadway north of 59th Street, a major route in and out of the city. While Black New Yorkers owned and drove cars, automobiles driven by whites made up most of the traffic that passed through Harlem, including the vast majority of the taxis serving the neighborhood, thanks to the refusal of the three largest taxicab companies to employ Black drivers. As police apparently made no effort to stop traffic from traveling through Harlem during the disorder other than briefly closing 125th Street early in the evening, vehicles containing whites continued to provide new targets for Black residents into the early hours of March 20. There were several general references to objects being thrown at vehicles traveling on Harlem’s streets. Only four other attacks were reported in detail, two on a car driven by Fred Campbell, the Black owner of two barbershops, on 7th Avenue at 121st and 123rd Streets just after midnight, and two on buses on 7th Avenue at 125th Street and 127th Street. The attack on O’Rourke occurred near the southern boundary of the disorder, in a cluster of events in the blocks north of 116th Street.

The New York Herald Tribune carried the most detailed of report of the assault, framing the woman as not “a participant in the fight.” It put O’Rourke’s two sisters in the car with her, and identified her father as a “contractor who helped to build Rockefeller Center.” That account closed quoting her as saying "My father will see about this," as she left the hospital. The Daily News also cast O’Rourke in relation to her father, as a daughter, in its account, and the thirty-year-old as a “Girl Victim” in the title of the photograph it published of her leaving the hospital (the story also got both the location of the assault and her address wrong). The tabloid also invoked familiar sensational tropes in the photo caption, drawing attention to her fur coat and labeling her father “wealthy.”

The other reporting on the assault was limited to including O’Rourke in lists of victims of the disorder in the Home News, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post, in some cases with a few words that described the circumstances of her injury. Both the New York American and Daily News portrayed the assault as a direct attack, in which a bottle struck her on the face. The Daily Mirror went as far as claiming “a bottle was hurled into her face with such force that it broke.” (The American shifted from those details on March 20 to a listing on March 21 that mentioned only O'Rourke's injuries, "cuts about head and face, and eyes.") The more detailed account in the New York Herald Tribune story had O’Rourke “showered with glass,” suggesting the bottle smashed a window on the car, as Fred Campbell and the passengers on the Boston-bound and Fifth Avenue buses experienced.

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