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

Victor Fain shot

Victor Fain, a nineteen-year-old Black man born in South Carolina, was shot in “some unknown manner during [the] disorder” at 128th Street and 7th Avenue, according to a hospital admission record. Dr Payne attended Mitchell at Harlem Hospital at 2:30 AM, so he was likely shot sometime after 2:00 AM. The bullet almost certainly came a police gun. The noise of police gunfire had been one of the sounds of the disorder from early on, with many of those shots fired in the air in an attempt to disperse groups who gathered on the street. Around midnight, police had begun shooting more indiscriminantly, aiming at those on the street and shooting sufficient rounds to prodice many stray shots.

Fain was shot some distance from his home fifteen blocks to the south, at 315 West 113th Street, in a section on the southern margins of Harlem mostly occupied by whites and Puerto Ricans. Sometime later in 1935 he relocated to section of Black Harlem, lodging at 208 West 141st Street. Fain was still at that address when a census enumerator called on April 30, 1940.



The hospital record described Fain as having been shot in the left ankle. All the newspaper lists of the injured, in the New York American, Home News, Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times, reported the same injury. That unusual consistency might result from him being admitted to the hospital after being attended.

The hospital record did not identify Fain’s race, but the newspapers did. The lists of the injured in the New York American, Home News and the story in the New York Times identified him as a Black man. The lists of injured in the Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal did not. Four Black men were among the six men shot and wounded in the disorder, with one man unknown race, and one white police officer.

No one was arrested for shooting Fain, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).

 

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