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

Appointments to the MCCH

Most newspapers reported in the same edition both the statement that Mayor La Guardia released on the morning of March 20 and had distributed in Harlem and his afternoon announcement of who had appointed to the Commission. Only the appointment of the eleven Committee members was reported in the Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle, while their names were included in the Home News, New York World-Telegram, Atlanta World. The New York Age published the names of only the six Black members. The names and the occupations provided by the Mayor’s press statement were published in the Daily Mirror, New York American, New York Times, Daily Worker (3/22) and the New York Amsterdam News (3/30). The New York Post, and the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, combined that occupational information with information on the political affiliations of each member. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun published more extended biographies of all eleven members.

Black members:
White members:La Guardia announced the members had been selected “because of their distinct contributions in their several fields,” according to a story in the New York Sun. He would later say that the appointments had been made "by advice,” according to the New York Age. There is no direct evidence of who offered La Guardia that advice. That it had not come from the leaders of Harlem’s social organizations is clear from the pointed request that James Hubert, the Executive Director of the Urban League, made to La Guardia in a letter on March 26, “that in the future you will avail yourself of such assistance as is very easily obtained in Harlem and other Negro sections of the City to the end that whatever is undertaken may be accomplished as I know you desire the work to be done.” <2 Urban League to LaG, 26 March 1935> Instead, La Guardia appeared to have relied on those with who he had political ties. Hubert Delany was likely one source of advice. La Guardia, who had appointed him Tax Commissioner, treated him “as an unofficial ombudsman for the black community” according to historian Thomas Kessner. <371> (Delany was a member of NAACP, holding a position responsible for “Legal Redress and Legislation” – letterhead of Butler letter). The NAACP did send La Guardia a list of names on March 20 that included three of those appointed – Hays, Ernst, and Carter – but there is no evidence to confirm that the Mayor received that list before announcing the Commission members. <NAACP 0267-4> Historian Stephen Carter argued that Eunice Hunton Carter may have been appointed in recognition of her willingness to run for a state assembly seat for La Guardia’s Republican-Fusion party the previous year. He noted that the party machine “had a tradition of finding places for candidates willing to run in tough cases against incumbents.” An Associated Negro Press story published in the Norfolk Journal and Guide attributed Carter’s subsequent appointment to Thomas Dewey’s team of special prosecutors going after the Mob to that obligation.

La Guardia subsequently added two additional members, a Black clergyman and a white clergyman. Only the New York Amsterdam News reported those appointments, suggesting that the Mayor's office did not announce them in press statements. The appointment of Rev. John W. Robinson, the retired pastor of St. Mark's, the city's largest AME church, was foreshadowed in newspaper stories about the mayor's visit to the Interdenominational Preachers Meeting of Greater New York and Vicinity on March 25. Robinson led that group. After their complainants about La Guardia's failure to appoint a minister, the mayor indicated he would consider appointing a nominee of the meeting. Stories in the Home News, New York Times and New York World-Telegram, and in the New York Amsterdam News and New York Age reported that the meeting chose Robinson. Evidence of an indirect political connection that may have made La Guardia receptive to that suggestion appeared in a New York Amsterdam News story on the couple's wedding: Robinson’s second wife, pharmacist Dr. Julia Coleman, was active in the Republican Party in Harlem.

That La Guardia told the Interdenominational Preachers Meeting that he would also appoint a second clergyman “chosen from a denomination not included in the Alliance” was reported only in the New York Age. It took until April 4, almost a week after Robinson's appointment, for the mayor to finalize that choice: Father McCann of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church on West 141st Street. The New York Amsterdam News made McCann's appointment the headline of the story it published on April 6 about the MCCH hearing. McCann had appeared in earlier stories in the HN, New York American and NYJ, and in the NYP  and the AN (3/30) as a result of a pastoral letter he made public on March 30 blaming Communists for the disorder and calling for a movement to keep them out of Harlem. The priest's anti-communism offered La Guardia a way to address those who had criticized those he had appointed as all liberals. However, La Guardia had clearly also decided the second clergyman on the committee should be Catholic as he had sought the advice of Edmund B. Butler, a prominent Catholic lawyer who was secretary of the city’s Emergency Relief Bureau about who to appoint immediately after he met with the Black ministers. Butler wrote to him the next day, to give him McCann’s name, which he had been unable to think of at that time: “He has always been very much interested in Negroes and volunteered for the work….I think that the appointment of him would be excellent.” A note on the letter recorded, “Father McCann is white,” likely another criteria for his selection given that the committee had two more Black members than white members after Robinson’s appointment. Several days later, on April 1, Butler spoke to La Guardia about McCann, after which he told the clergyman that La Guardia was going to appoint him. On April 4, La Guardia wrote to notify Roberts that he had appointed Father McCann. Even after the CP wrote to both the MCCH and the Mayor to complain about McCann's appointment on April 25, the Daily Worker did not report it.

In the historical literature, only Lindsey Lupo identified all thirteen the members of the MCCH,in a chart that described their occupatiosn n two or three words. (61-62) Cheryl Greenberg named Delaney, Randolph, and, inexplicably, Cullen as examples of the "impressive range of experts" that La Guardia, also mistakenly including Frazier as a member of the commission. (4)  Naison only identified the number of "representative citizens" appointed, which he stated was eleven, neglecting the later appointments of Robinson and McCann. (142) Johnson also mistakenly identified the MCCH as an eleven-member commission, without identifying any of the members. (187) Kessner mentioned only Roberts, the chair, (374) as did Watson. (167)

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