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

Wilmont Hendricks shot

Wilmont Hendricks, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was shot on Lenox Avenue near 128th Street. Dr Payne attended Hendricks at Harlem Hospital, eight blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 1.30 AM, the hospital staff recorded, so he was likely injured sometime around 1.00 AM, not around 2.00 AM, as a New York Times story reported. No details survive of the circumstances of Hendricks’ injury: the hospital record noted that he had been shot in “in some unknown manner,” while newspapers only reported he had been shot. There was considerable disorder on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street around this time, including other assaults and looting. The outbreak of looting led police to begin shooting more indiscriminately than earlier in the disorder, and it is likely that Hendricks was shot by police.

After being seen by Dr Payne, Hendricks' injury was sufficiently serious for him to be admitted to the hospital, and to still be there a day later, according to the New York Herald Tribune. While the hospital recorded his wound as being in his left shoulder, only the list of injured in the Home News echoed that report. The lists in the New York American, New York Post, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide instead locating the gunshot in his chest, and the lists in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, and story in the New York Times reporting it was in in his back.

The hospital record did not identify Hendricks' race, but the newspaper lists in the New York Post, Home News, New York American and New York Evening Journal did. Four of the six other men shot and wounded in the disorder were black, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. When he was shot Hendricks was some distance from his home at 214 West 146th Street, which was almost twenty blocks to the north on 146th Street.

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

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