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• 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 2022-03-09T20:45:58+00:00 Crowds incited by Black women (3) 26 plain 2024-02-12T18:02:22+00:00 Women made up a large proportion of those inside Kress’ store when Charles Hurley and Steve Urban grabbed Lino Rivera, and in the crowd inside and outside the store in the hours immediately after. During that time, three woman allegedly incited crowds, but not by calling for action. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather, different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men.
  
  The prominent place of women in the events that began the disorder was unusual; men typically initiated outbreaks of violence, joined later by women. In this instance, however, the site was a store in a retail district, realms of shopping and consumption associated with women. However, the women were not presented calling for action, so not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Some newspapers amplified that distinction by casting these women in stereotypical terms as not entirely in control of their actions, as “emotional” in the New York Sun, as “frantic” and “excitable” in the New York Herald Tribune, as “hysterical” in the New Republic, as screaming rather than shouting in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, New York Post, and New York Sun, and the New Republic and Newsweek, as having “shrieked” in Time and “shrilled” in the New York Times, their cries as “gossip-mongering” in the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  The women who alerted those around them to Rivera being beaten and the hearse arriving were effectively acting as protectors. Historian Marilynn Johnson has pointed that women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century included that role, as well as being victims of violence, and from mid-century, participants in looting. Where Johnson's examples are women acting who tried to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. Those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, as Johnson noted, but by extending beyond family, they echoed the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year.
  
  Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds are mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police, with one exception, Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News. He described women as inciting men to looting: “Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” Ottley also cast women as inciting violence without joining the crowds on the streets in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.” No other source reported such scenes. Writing a column rather than a news story, Ottley’s account was impressionistic rather than specific, making it difficult to link to other evidence. He also presented women in secondary roles, with men acting on their behalf, which may echo attitudes toward women as much as their behavior. Certainly, the women in and around Kress’ store took action themselves. There were also a small number of women among those arrested for activities other than inciting crowds, three for looting and three for breaking windows. There are also three women among those reported as injured/treated for injuries during the disorder
  
  The presence of Black women in the crowds beyond 125th Street indicated by those arrests was recorded in some accounts and photographs of the disorder. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.
  
  Other papers, however, such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender, included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Photographs also captured only the women’s presence on 125th Street, in a crowd facing a patrolman swinging his baton, among a group being scattered by police, and knocked to the ground. Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.