This page is referenced by:

• 1 2023-07-02T17:39:13+00:00 Frazier's report 40 plain 2024-02-13T14:34:39+00:00 Frazier’s account of the events of the disorder was one of the first chapters circulated to MCCH members on January 2, 1936. It had a different form and tone than the report of the Subcommittee on Crime, as Frazier had told his Howard University colleague Alain Locke that the preliminary reports were “inadequate to represent his final conclusions." While it began with the same narrative of events in the Kress store offered by Hays and Villard had in the subcommittee report, Frazier’s chapter extended to events beyond 125th Street not covered in that document and recast the character of those involved in them. While finding that police had generated antagonism throughout the events of the disorder, Frazier tempered the tone of the criticism of police in the subcommittee report except in regard to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. He was also less critical of the role of the Young Liberators and Communists, going as far as praising them for helping limit interracial violence.
  
  The disorder after Rivera was grabbed resulted from a “fortuitous combination of subsequent events,” in Frazier’s narrative, rather than the being driven by the attitude of police towards Harlem residents that the earlier report had highlighted. The actions of officers in the Kress store “tended to infuriate the crowd,” while their quick and violent arrests of Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon when they tried to speak “only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd.” Those reactions were examples of “a lack of confidence in the police and even hostility toward these representatives of the law...evident at every stage of the riot.” Frazier's assessment fell short of the “intense hostility” toward officers seen as “lawless oppressors who stop at no brutality or at the taking of human life" described by Hays and Villard. Only in his discussion of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs by Patrolman McInerney did Frazier match the judgment of the earlier report, not only echoing it in labeling the shooting “inexcusable” but describing it as “brutal.”
  
  The actions of groups affiliated with the Communist Party received even less criticism from Frazier than had been directed at them in the subcommittee report. That document had described their distribution of leaflets suggesting that Rivera had been beaten as “highly censurable,” while simply noting that those leaflets did not appear until after the disorder had begun. Frazier couched his judgment of those actions in lesser, if more ponderous terms, as “exhibiting a lack of due regard for the possible serious consequences of acting on more rumors.” In addition to directly stating that Communists were “not responsible for the disorder,” he also redirected some of the blame toward one of their greatest adversaries, the Hearst press: “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that race riot was going on in Harlem.”
  
  More strikingly, Frazier endorsed a Communist claim not mentioned in the earlier report that tied directly to the party’s focus on interracial organizing in pursuit of worker's rights: “that they prevented the outbreak from becoming a race riot.” While not granting them “full credit,” he asserted that Communists “deserve more credit than any other element for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks.” The only evidence Frazier offered was that police arresting and beating two white men, Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon, for trying to “take the parts of the indignant Negro crowds” in front of the Kress store had “changed the complexion of the outbreak.” Louise Thompson had presented those events in similar terms in her testimony to the MCCH, but her ties with the Communist Party predisposed her to that view. The change to which Frazier alluded was to “an attack upon property and not upon persons.” Even if those events had the impact claimed on those on 125th Street at that time, the people there made up only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder. Moreover, as the MCCH had not taken up either violence that did not involve the police or attacks on property in its investigation, it was not clear on what Frazier based his claim. In fact, there was evidence of multiple attacks on white men and women that complicated if not contradicted Frazier’s characterization. Nonetheless, historians writing about the disorder have adopted his occlusion of interpersonal violence alongside his emphasis on violence against property.
  
  In a departure from the focus of the Subcommittee on Crime, Frazier’s narrative extended beyond the outbreak of the disorder on 125th Street to events throughout the evening and across Harlem. While he followed the MCCH members in limiting the crowd to “a few thousand” including the “many unemployed” on the streets, he was not as content as they had been to report that “those who looted stores obviously belonged to the hoodlum class who made use of the opportunity." That “criminal element” formed only part of the crowds in Frazier's account, alongside “many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals [who] joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure.” Their presence among the participants had been mentioned in the testimony of Captain Rothengast and Inspector Di Martini but omitted by Hays and Villard. Frazier also included “some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but had suffered years of privation, [who] seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property.” He also introduced a fluidity to the behavior of those crowds; they formed “here and there as the rumors spread,” “constantly changed their make-up,” dissolved and reformed, “showed various needs and changed their mood from time to time.” Jarringly, straying close to racist stereotypes, Frazier claimed, “Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key.” Only Captain Rothengast had briefly mentioned such behavior in the public hearings, noting, "I don’t believe they were indignant about the rumors. I saw a number of them yelling and laughing about things that were being done." If the crowds were not all criminals in Frazier’s account, neither was their behavior a significant threat to “the safety and welfare of the community,” and certainly not a sufficient threat to justify the beatings and arrests Black residents experienced during the disorder.
  
  Frazier vaguely attributed these details of the events of the disorder to “available sources of information” and the “testimony of observers.” The MCCH hearings were not one of those sources as they had not taken up events beyond 125th Street, which had been only briefly mentioned by a handful of witnesses. Although it was not a topic in his proposal for the survey, Frazier and his staff had taken statements from several individuals and collected information from the police about some of those arrested and hospital records for some of the injured. However, none of those sources characterized the crowds and events of the disorder in the terms Frazier did. That picture had more in common with the accounts published in the press. Back issues of eighteen white and Black newspapers from the days of the disorder and its immediate aftermath were also among the material gathered by MCCH staff, in September, 1935, when Frazier directed their work. For all Frazier dismissed the value of the press accounts of the public hearings — "a sociologist is supposed to be a better reporter than a newspaper reporter" — it did appear that he took a different approach to reporting on the events of the riot.
  
  Whatever their basis, some of Frazier's departures from the subcommittee report would prompt objections from MCCH members and changes to his draft of the chapter. Lindsay Lupo, the only historian who has written about the details of the MCCH report, argued that this text was not Frazier's draft but a version rewritten by MCCH members. However, correspondence between Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard not examined by Lupo detailed changes that MCCH members agreed to make that are revisions of this text, establishing it as Frazier's draft.