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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 2020-03-09T19:58:28+00:00 Betty Willcox assaulted 31 plain 2024-02-27T17:52:15+00:00 Betty Willcox, a white woman, was allegedly assaulted by a group of Black men at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. The only evidence of this event was a story published in the New York Evening Journal, the only newspaper story of an assault to take the form of a first-person account. No time was given for these events. The intersection was a locus of violence throughout the disorder, with six other assaults reported there, including attacks on reporters and on another woman, Emma Brockson, at 12:35 AM, and the shooting of Clarence London at 1:00 AM. It was also at this location that Andrew Lyons may have been injured. All those events occurred despite police emergency squads being deployed at the intersection from 9:00 PM. Despite all that activity, Willcox reported seeing no one when she first arrived.
  
  
  
  Willcox reported driving down 7th Avenue with a "young man," who stopped the car at 125th street so he could get cigarettes. Only after they had stopped did she noticed stores in the area had been damaged, and their stock strewn across the street. She then heard gunshots and saw a white man pursed by a crowd of Black men, some of whom caught and beat him. When they saw Willcox, they came toward her, surrounding the car, pounding on it and screaming threats at her. She frantically honked the horn, attracting the attention of a group of uniformed and plainclothes police who "with big clubs swinging, dashed up and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air." The police then formed a cordon around the car while the crowd milled around before slowly dispersing. When her escort returned, they drove off away from the disorder.
  
  The sensational language of the story is characteristic of how the New York Evening Journal, reported the riot, particularly violence against whites: a “mob” commits the attack, threatens to kill whites, is “howling” and “roar for blood,” and all have “murderous rage” in their faces, and after being dispersed by police "kept up a steady yelling with an undertone of ominous muttering and shuffling." For all the shooting that Willcox hears, it is telling that she notes that the crowd that surrounds the car "didn’t seem to be armed." The photograph that accompanied the story was jarringly at odds with that sensational account. It showed a smiling Willcox jauntily sitting on the corner of a desk, with her legs crossed and her hands on her hips.