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

Victor Fain shot

At 2.30 AM Victor Fain, a nineteen-year-old Black man born in South Carolina, was shot in “some unknown manner during [the] disorder” at 128th Street & 7th Avenue. The shooting was the last assault on 7th Avenue, and one of last of the disorder. After midnight violence had moved up 7th Avenue from 125th Street, including the shooting of Clarence London at 125th Street, but switched to Lenox Ave after 1 AM.

As this shooting is not part of a cluster, and there is no information on the circumstances, it is likely Fain was shot by police patrolling the streets in radio cars and emergency trucks seeking to control looting – as was Lloyd Hobbs at the same corner an hour and a half earlier, and James Thompson on 8th Avenue three hours later. Fain was shot some distance from his home: he lived fifteen blocks to the south, in a section on the southern margins of Harlem mostly occupied by whites and Puerto Ricans (although some time later in 1935 he relocated to the heart of the neighborhood, lodging at 208 West 141st Street, where he still resided at the time of the 1940 Census).

An ambulance attended Fain, according to hospital records, who had been shot in the left ankle, taking him to Harlem Hospital. All the sources agree on his injury, an unusual consistency that likely reflects that he stayed in the hospital after being treated.

The hospital record does not identify Fain’s race, but newspapers do. The lists of the injured in the New York American, Home News and and the story in the New York Times include his race; the lists of injured in the New York Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal do not. Four of the six other men shot and wounded in the disorder were black, one of 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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