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

Thomas Wijstem assaulted & killed

Around 10.30 PM, Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, was struck on the head by a rock and knocked unconscious in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street. By this time the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups and scattered north and south up the avenues, allowing police to secure the street. Perhaps this lull also drew white spectators, to see the store windows that had been smashed the length of the block. Wijstem only lived a few blocks to the east, at 16 East 127th Street, a racially mixed section close enough to have heard the disorder (most of the other whites assaulted on 125th Street in the early period of the disorder lived west of Kress' store).

Notwithstanding the breakup of the crowds, three of the four brief newspaper accounts of the assault reported that a group of black men attacked Wijstem. While police only made one other arrest in such circumstances, on this occasion they did apprehend a suspect. That outcome is perhaps unsurprisingly given that this block of 125th Street was the headquarters of the police response to the disorder. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that all the police in the vicinity did not prevent the assault.

While many of those injured in the disorder suffered head injuries, Wijstem’s injury was one of the most severe, a fractured skull that rendered him unconscious. As a result, he appears in stories of the disorder and lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, New York Daily News, New York American, Home News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette as a seriously injured ‘unidentified white man.’ The New York Post and New York World-Telegram did finally name him, on March 22, reporting respectively that his neighbors or his brother had identified him. Three months later, a brief story in New York Herald Tribune reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness. However, as the attack on Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault, he is included among both those assaulted and killed (but not among those injured in assaults).

Police charged Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old black man, with hitting Wijstem with a rock. Like the man he targeted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in lists of those arrested for assault in nine papers, but only five of those reports link him to the unidentified man with the fractured skull. But as in the case of Paul Boyett and Charles Alston and his three companions arrested on West 138th St., it appears that police could not prove that Cornelius was actually involved in the assault. After apparently being indicted, the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book recorded the charges against him as having been dismissed.

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