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

Thomas Suares assaulted

Around 1:15 AM, twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Suares, a Black man walking on West 134th Street near Lenox Avenue, was "struck by a milk bottle which some unknown person threw at him," he told police. He lived only a block to the east, at 12 West 134th Street, the heart of Black Harlem, but near the northern boundary of the disorder. Around this time outbreaks of looting occurred on Lenox Avenue as far north as where Suares was hit, so it seems likely he was assaulted in the context of that violence, perhaps caught between a crowd and their target.

Dr Payne of Harlem Hospital attended Suares to treat an injury that the New York Evening Journal reported as lacerations of his right leg. The wound was not serious enough for Suares to be admitted to hospital; instead he left for home after treatment.

The New York Evening Journal was the only newspaper that included Suares appears in its lists of those injured in the disorder. The list identified only his age, address and injury. The circumstances of the alleged assault were recorded only in the book of aided cases from the 32nd Police Precinct. That report that included only four incidents, all occurring in the northern area of the disorder as the precinct’s district began at 130th Street. Neither source identified Suares' race, but he was recorded in the 1930 census schedules, living with a cousin on 5th Avenue, just around the corner from his address in 1935.
 

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