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

Thomas Suares assaulted

Around 1:15AM, twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Suares, a Black man walking on West 134th Street near Lenox Avenue, was hit by a milk bottle thrown by an unknown person. He lived only a block to the east, at 12 West 134th Street, the heart of 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.

An ambulance attended Suares, to treat an injury that the NYJ reported as lacerations of his right leg. The wound was not serious enough for Suares to be taken to hospital; instead he left for home after treatment.

The NYJ is the only newspaper in which Suares appears in lists of those injured in the disorder. It identified only his age, address and injury. The circumstances of his assault are recorded only in the Police report of aided cases from the 32nd Precinct, a 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 his race, but he appears 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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