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• 1 2023-07-05T20:55:35+00:00 Investigations of the events of the disorder 34 plain 2024-01-27T03:28:43+00:00 While most of the MCCH's investigation of the events of the disorder focused on the initial outbreak in the Kress store and on 125th Street, and on finding witnesses to those events to testify at public hearings, Arthur Garfield Hays also directed Eunice Carter to have investigations made into the deaths that occurred during the disorder. James Tartar took on some of that work, with the most extended investigation conducted into Patrolman McInerney's killing of Lloyd Hobbs. He also interviewed the aunt of James Thompson, the other Black man shot and killed by police during the disorder. (Tartar's other extended investigations were of cases of police brutality that did not occur during the disorder.) The MCCH also gathered hospital and autopsy records on Hobbs and Thompson, together with two of the other men who died, August Miller and Andrew Lyons, along with records of the police investigations of the deaths of all four men. Tartar transcribed police blotter and arrest records for Hobbs and Thompson. The other police records and hospital records were obtained by Hyman Glickstein, an attorney at Hays' law firm, by writing to the relevant agencies. (Glickstein also requested information and testimony about police brutality beyond the disorder from ILD lawyers and Communists.)
  
  Additional records gathered by the MCCH shed light on the events of the disorder, although some may have been obtained for the study of crime in Harlem rather than an investigation of the disorder. As such, they would have been gathered after the public hearings had ended, or at least after May 1st when E. Franklin Frazier was appointed to direct the survey of conditions in Harlem, so at his direction rather than that of Arthur Garfield Hays.
  
  A list of those arrested during the disorder was transcribed from the 28th Precinct police blotter. It was not a complete list of those arrested within that precinct; nor was it a complete list of those arrested during the disorder, as arrests were made in the 32nd Precinct as well. This transcript was likely compiled from a set of index cards, each recording that information for an individual arrested in 1935. The cards were filed in the MCCH "Harlem: Survey" files by precinct as "Police Report," indicating that they were gathered as part of the investigation of crime. In addition to the 28th Precinct, there are cards from the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 30th and 32nd Precincts. One other police record obtained by MCCH staff were the entries from Aided Cases book of the 32nd Precinct for the period of the disorder. Procedure required police to record all incidents reported to them in that book. The document was a summary of four cases sent by the precinct commander to Inspector Di Martini.
  
  Copies were made of two sets of hospital records related to the events of the disorder. "Medical Attendances, 19-20 March 1935" listed individuals attended by physicians at specified locations around Harlem, and appeared to be a record of ambulance activity. The second list, "Hospital Admissions, 19-20 March 1935," included individuals attended by physicians without specifying a location, and appeared to be a record of emergency room activity at hospitals, not all of which resulted in individuals being kept in a hospital for treatment.
  
  MCCH staff also collected 2,900 newspaper clippings "in connection with "Disturbance of March 19th" as well as "Commission Releases." Back issues for the days immediately after the disorder were ordered from eighteen newspapers: twelve major white New York City publications, the city's two major Black newspapers, the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News, together with three other Black publications, the Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the Communist publication the Daily Worker. Articles on the disorder from national magazines were also collected: the New Republic, the Nation, Newsweek, Time, Commonweal, the NAACP's Opportunity, and the Communist-aligned New Masses. Those clippings were not all in the MCCH files, but all the publications are among the sources for this study.
  
  Frazier also obtained two eye-witness accounts that included material on events beyond 125th Street. He interviewed Channing Tobias on August 10. On November 11, an account of the disorder by Carlton Moss was mailed to him.
• 1 2022-08-18T17:30:27+00:00 [Carlton Moss], Untitled account of the disturbance on the night of March 19, Harlem Survey: March 19th, Box 131-123, Folder 7, E. Franklin Frazier Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University). 11 Carlton Moss was a twenty-six-year-old Black actor who, after he arrived in Harlem, wrote radio plays, and would later help lead the Federal Theater Project. plain 2024-01-18T20:26:53+00:00 This first person narrative was unsigned. However, a letter filed separately in the Frazier Papers from Carlton Moss dated November 12, 1935, refers to an enclosed account of the disturbance on the night of March 19. Moss may have been encouraged to send the account by his wife, Annie Laurie Savage, who worked for the MCCH as supervisor of the study on "Family Organization and Disorganization" and later as the "Intake Interviewer for the study of social control." The couple married on July 6, 1935, in a wedding reported in a long story in the society pages of the New York Amsterdam News.
  
  Carlton Moss was a twenty-six-year-old Black actor who, after he arrived in Harlem, wrote radio plays, and would later help lead the Federal Theater Project. He also worked for the Federal Writers Project on "Negroes of New York," for which he authored a brief account of the MCCH public hearings, titled "The "Peoples Court," based on his observations of those proceedings.
   

  E. Franklin Frazier Papers