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• 1 2020-02-24T21:19:53+00:00 Injured (74) 79 plain 2024-03-01T17:58:37+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). A United Press International (UPI) story reported that “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 story claimed that fewer than fifty people required hospital treatment, the reporter estimated that up to 100 had been injured — and several of the publications that ran the UPI 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 Stanley Dondoro was accidentally shot by police pursuing James Thompson. The remaining fourteen are listed as injured with no information on the circumstances that produced their injuries.
  
  
  Few of the injured suffered wounds severe enough to require being admitted to the hospital. Information is available for forty-three of the seventy-two injured individuals: physicians sent only twelve (28%) to the hospital. Six of those were shot and wounded (two other shooting victims were not admitted to the 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 the 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 the 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.
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  Events

• 1 2020-02-24T23:08:33+00:00 Hit by objects (18) 65 plain 2024-03-01T17:55:51+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) of 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 were 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 appeared either only in reports of hospital admissions (4 of 12) or only in newspaper reports (6 of 12); only two appeared in both sources (one whose assault led to an arrest). That discrepancy did not result from reporters ignoring the hospital, as five photographs taken there appeared in the Daily News, showing both the inside and the outside of the facility. But reporters did 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 was 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.
  
  Patricia O’Rourke’s injuries are typical of those resulting from these assaults — cuts to the eye, forehead, and cheek, which most of the 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 individuals 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 visible in the published photograph, highlighted with an arrow). Several cars traveling along the street are visible in the uncropped version of the image 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 by objects were actually intended targets. Rocks, stones, and bottles were also being thrown at store windows. The Home News account of Isaac Daniels' alleged assault on Herman Young explicitly identified a store window as Daniels' target; Young, the storeowner, was not injured by the stone Daniels threw but by the glass sent flying when it hit and shattered a window. Others hit by objects were standing in front of windows, potentially between those throwing them 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 three 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 and 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 without reporting being attacked. 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. Both continued on to their destinations. Only the injured were drawn into the historical record. Joseph Rinaldi, a passenger on the bus 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 which highlighted 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 by an object. 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 appeared in other newspapers, which simply included Whittington in lists of the injured, with a head wound. Police in cars did 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)

• 1 2020-04-09T19:45:50+00:00 Assaults on women (5) 47 plain 2024-03-01T17:54:06+00:00 The fifty-three alleged victims of assault included five women. Two of the women were allegedly attacked by groups, one “beaten” by an individual or group, one hit by an object, and one assaulted in unknown circumstances. Details exist of only two of those assaults. This small proportion of women does not appear to have reflected their presence in the disorder.
  
  Patricia O’Rourke was hit by glass after a bottle was thrown at the car in which she was traveling on 7th Avenue toward her home in the Bronx, leaving her with cuts to her eyes, forehead, and cheeks. Betty Willcox was also traveling on 7th Avenue, in a car that stopped at 7th Avenue and 125th Street so her companion could buy cigarettes. A crowd of Black men attacked the car as she sat in it, until a group of police appeared and drove them away. Willcox was uninjured. Alice Gordon was also allegedly assaulted by a group of Black men, also on 7th Avenue, eight blocks to the south at 117th Street, only a block south of where O’Rourke was assaulted. She was treated for lacerations to her face. The alleged assault on Emma Brockson occurred at 125th St and 7th Avenue, the same location as that described by Willcox, but there was no evidence indicating the form of the assault. She suffered an injured hand. Finally, Elizabeth Nadish was described as being “beaten,” a term that encompasses assaults by an individual and by groups while excluding being hit by objects or shot. Her injury was to her eye.
  
  
  
  Four of the women were white and one of unknown race. Two of the women were traveling through neighborhood rather than present there. However, white women could be found among the staff of businesses in Harlem and among those who patronized the theaters on 125th Street and 116th Street. That the four assaults with locations all occurred on 7th Avenue, at 125th Street or further south, means those women may have come from Harlem's businesses or entertainment venues. Nonetheless, white women did not appear in any images of the crowds in Harlem’s streets.
  
  Although no Black women were identified as victims of assault in any of the sources, they did appear in images of crowds and of the injured. One photograph printed in several newspapers showed a Black woman being helped up from the pavement, reportedly after being knocked down by “rioters.” (Several photographs, almost entirely illegible in the microfilm copies, that appeared to show an injured woman being loaded into a vehicle may have been taken subsequent to that photograph). Two men have hold of her arms, a Black man looking directly at the camera and a partly visible white police officer. Offering additional evidence of the presence of Black women on the streets, three of the four figures in the background are Black women. While the woman in that photograph did not appear to be seriously injured, a Daily News photographer took an image of a Black woman being treated in Harlem Hospital – although no Black women appeared in the list of those treated sent to the Mayor's Commission. The woman was lying on a trolley facing away form the camera, with only the back of her head visible. One of the men "treating" her was holding her head, which could indicate that was the location of her injury.
  
  There are also three photographs of women who were allegedly assaulted. O’Rourke appeared with bandage around her head as she left Harlem Hospital wearing a fur coat that attracted particular attention in the Daily News caption. (The only other bandaged individual was among those arrested being transported to court; otherwise the injured in photographs were bleeding or being treated). Only Nadish’s head with a “puffed up eye” appeared in the published photograph of her. Willcox was photographed striking a pose and smiling while seated on a desk — an image that on its own contained nothing to associate it with assault or the disorder.
  
  The reporting of assaults on women varied little from that on men. Several newspaper stories did frame women victims of assault as a sign of the indiscriminate nature of the violence of the disorder. The Daily News titled the photograph it published of a woman in Harlem Hospital “Sex was disregarded in riot” and in the body of its coverage wrote, “Men and women alike were attacked by hoodlums."
   
• 1 2024-03-01T17:49:36+00:00 Patricia O'Rourke assaulted 2 plain 2024-03-01T19:13:16+00:00 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 treatment. 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. It likely happened after midnight, as Campbell did not report seeing any damaged vehicles that far south on 7th Avenue when he drove by just before midnight.
  
  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.