This page was created by Anonymous.
"Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem," "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 25, Folder 19, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University).
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Assaults by police (?)
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There are no reported victims of assaults by police officers during the disorder aside from Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, the two men police officers shot and killed. Four additional Black men arrested by police appeared in lists of the injured, one shot, three with injuries that may have resulted from being beaten. Harry Gordon, a white man arrested trying to speak at the beginning of the disorder, claimed he was beaten while in custody. Generalized reports of violence by police suggested that some unattributed incidents of violence and injuries may have been the work of police officers.
The uniformed patrolmen who responded to the disorder carried both nightsticks and pistols. Detectives did not typically carry nightsticks but were issued them to deal with the crowds, according to the New York Evening Journal. Emergency trucks carried rifles that were used by the patrolmen who crewed those vehicles. All those weapons were evident in photographs of police taken during the disorder. Officers first resorted to nightsticks and pistols used as clubs. A Daily News photograph of the arrest of Charles Alston showed one of the officers holding his pistol by the barrel so the butt could function as a club, a detail to which the newspaper’s caption drew attention. The Times Union story on the riot noted that “Police night sticks accounted for almost as many minor injuries as the shower of stones thrown from rooftops, windows and hallways by rioters.” Officers used nightsticks when they sought to move or contain crowds. One can be seen in the hand of the officer pushing into the crowd in a Daily News photograph; that one of the Black men to his right appears to be reaching for the officer’s arm confirms he is swinging into the people in front of him.
One Afro-American journalist reported that while mounted police had been "somewhat rough" early in the disorder, violence by other officers only came later in the disorder, "early Wednesday morning, as the news that fellow-officers had been wounded with bricks increased, [when] other officers 'got even' by 'mussing up' whoever came into their hands." Further evidence of that more indiscriminate use of nightsticks appeared in a New York Herald Tribune story about the “best joke” doing the rounds at the West 135th Street station after the disorder. It involved Detectives McCane and Teed chasing a group of Black residents into a hallway near 130th Street and Lenox Avenue. Although that area saw the most concentrated looting of the disorder, the officers were not seeking to make an arrest. Instead, after Teed went into the hallway, McCabe waited outside. As Teed caused each of the black individuals to flee back to the street, McCabe “hit them over the head with a nightstick” as they went by. It became a joke when his “zealousness” led him to hit his partner when he too exited the hallway. Similarly, police responded to a crowd attacking the car in which Betty Wilcox sat, she related, "with big clubs swinging,... and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air."
A Black man named James White suffered a “laceration of the scalp…during an altercation with an unknown white man” just a block away from that incident, at 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. He reported that assault only to the hospital staff from whom he sought treatment. White did not identify his assailant as a police officer, perhaps indicating the man was not in uniform. Detectives who wore plainclothes like McCabe and Teed would have made up a significant proportion of the white men present at the heart of the disorder. Andrew Lyons, a Black man who suffered a fatal injury to his skull during the disorder, may also have been hit with a nightstick. Two newspapers reported he had been injured on 125th Street, at different locations on the police perimeter. However, medical records indicated he did not receive medical attention until the evening after the disorder, by which time he was described as "stuporous" and unable to tell doctors what had happened to him.
The only photograph of an arrest being made, published in the Daily News, did not show, but suggested, violence by police. Two officers were visible, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, with one standing over a Black man seated on the ground (none of the arrests with locations identified in the sources occurred at the corner). The patrolman was “dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison,” according to the caption, although the image did not offer a view of the patrolman's hands. That kind of treatment could produce some of the injuries reported in the press. More serious injuries would have come from being hit with a nightstick. One officer in the photograph had his nightstick under his arm, while the other, in the foreground, had a revolver in one hand and a nightstick in the other. As they had those weapons at hand, they likely employed them in apprehending the man. He may have fallen, but it seems more likely that the officers knocked him down during the arrest. His face was obscured by his hat so there were no visible signs that he was beaten. (In the background several Black women are visible walking past the scene along 127th Street, one looking back over her shoulder at the police.)
Black men arrested during the disorder displayed further evidence of police violence. The New York Post reported that many of the prisoners who filled the West 123d and West 135th Street police stations before midnight were “slightly injured,” while the New York Sun described "groups of prisoners battered and bruised." Descriptions and published photographs of the appearance of prisoners the next day in line-ups and being transported to court confirmed those reports. Many had bandaged heads and visible bruises. The New York Sun unambiguously attributed those injuries to the men’s “furious battles with the police.”
Four Black men and a white man arrested by police were also among those reported injured. Patrolman Conn hit Paul Boyett in the shoulder when he shot at the crowd around a group of men assaulting Timothy Murphy. A doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. When James Smitten was arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz, the “lacerations to the scalp he received in some unknown manner” were severe enough that doctors were also called to the 28th Precinct to treat him. Isaac Daniels had contusions on his arm and Hashi Mohammed internal injuries, with no description of the circumstances in which they were wounded. In addition, Louise Thompson reported to the MCCH the “severe beating” that she saw Patrolman Irwin Young and his colleagues administer to Harry Gordon, a white Communist, when they arrested him on 125th Street. ILD lawyer Isidore Englander did not see police beat Frank Wells, but saw the results when he found him at the Harlem Magistrates Court. "His head was bandaged, his shirt was red with blood, he could not stand on his feet," Englander testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH by the Communist Party, Wells was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street, again at the police station, and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20.
While few reports of the disorder showed any concern about the indiscriminate use of nightsticks by police, officers' use of their guns was another matter. No one disputed that guns were fired, beginning almost as soon as police faced crowds. The officer in the foreground of the Daily News photograph of an arrest above has drawn his revolver, ready to fire it, not use it as a club. However, newspaper stories emphasized that prior to midnight, officers fired those shots into the air, not at any individuals. The Daily News reported very precisely that the detachment of police trying to clear crowds from 125th Street after someone broke the first window in Kress’ store fired five shots into the air. The shooting of Lyman Quarterman around 10:30 PM was to be at odds with that claim: he was part of a crowd police were attempting to disperse on 7th Avenue at 121st Street, firing their weapons, supposedly only in the air. However, there were no reports of anyone else other than police firing guns during that incident.
After midnight, when looting and damage to property increased, whatever restraint police had shown in using their guns disappeared, notwithstanding one Afro-American journalist who claimed that police "did not fire into crowds." It was during this period that officers shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, and that Patrolman William Clement shot at a crowd pursuing B. Z. Kondoul, a white man, allegedly in order to protect him from assault. Four other Black men suffered gunshot wounds from unidentified shooters in the same period, all but one in the area in which looting was concentrated. It was likely that at least some were shot by police. Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” There was little evidence of Black individuals firing guns; there were two arrests for possessing a gun. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots around 130th Street sometime during the disorder that "apparently came from some roof or window on the side streets," but he did not actually see that himself. Despite the evidence of police firing at crowds, the New York Post reporter compared the fatalities and injured favorably to "the long lists of deaths that might easily have resulted," indicating that "the police handled the crisis so carefully." A journalist for the Afro-American agreed that "the police, on the whole were restrained," but saw a different consequence, that the "crowd would not have been downed if colored bodies were scattered here and there felled by police bullets."
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Preparation for the public hearing on March 30
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The MCCH’s investigations in preparation for the public hearing on the events of the disorder are described in the “Report of the Secretary, March 26-March 29, 1935, inclusive," in correspondence in the MCCH files in the records of Mayor La Guardia and in documents in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays.
According to the report, two of the four investigators initially assigned to the MCCH started their work investigating the events of the disorder, focusing on the “immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19” and interviewing possible witnesses for the first hearing. That division of resources fit how the MCCH presented its plans in the statement to the press after its first meeting; the investigation of the immediate situation as one part and “a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem” as the other. Hays, who took over leadership of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder from Toney soon after the first meeting, asked that the investigators “examine such persons as claim to be eyewitnesses to the events of March 19 in order that time at the hearing might not be taken up by people, in actuality, who knew nothing of the events of that night.”
The result of that work was a “list of eyewitnesses” “expected to be at the hearings on March 30” that Carter gave to Hays on March 29. That list is likely the nine typewritten names on a section torn from a page in the Hays Papers. One of those on the list had been among the forty-nine individuals and organizations that Carter reported wrote to the MCCH in its first four days of existence (The New York Times made an unattributed claim that by March 29 more than 80 wanted to testify). Other witnesses were on a list likely provided to Hays by the Communist Party when he met with James Ford. It is not clear how the investigators identified the remaining people.
The first name in the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses was Louise Thompson, the sixth person to testify on March 30. Her name was also first on another list of twelve names in the Hays Papers headed “For Mr. Hays,” most of whom were identified as members of the Communist Party or groups affiliated with it. Thompson, however, was not identified as a member of an organization but by the information she had: “testimony to the issuing of the leaflet.” As establishing that the leaflet issued by the Young Liberators had not triggered the disorder was a major concern of the Communist Party, the list highlighting that part of Thompson’s evidence offers further confirmation that it likely came from Ford. Four other women appeared on the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses, three listed after Thompson, “Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative)” at the bottom of the page. None of those women testified on March 30. Those women were likely present in the Kress store at some point on March 19 after Rivera was grabbed by staff, part of a crowd widely reported to be almost entirely made up of women. Only one of those women could be identified. A photograph of Effie Diton, a forty-five-year-old Black woman, appeared in the New York Age in 1935, identifying her as the president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. Her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini Diton, had helped found that organization and served as its president in the 1920s. The New York Age had reported their marriage twenty years earlier, when they both worked at Paine College in Georgia. In 1930 they lived at 188 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 120th Street, close enough to 125th Street for Effie Diton to have shopped at the Kress store. “Mrs Jackson, Mrs Ida Hengain, Mrs. Effie Diton” are also on a handwritten list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. (The hearing on March 30 took the whole day, so Hays likely ran out of time to call those witnesses, although there is no evidence that they were present.) Hays called for those three women by name in the subcommittee’s second public hearing on April 6. None of them were present at that time, and they never testified in a public hearing.
The sixth name on the likely list of eyewitnesses was “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family.” Sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs had been shot by a police officer during the disorder. The New York Urban League provided the details of the shooting in a letter sent to the MCCH on March 26, which enclosed a statement by Hobbs’ father and asked for "cooperation” and “assistance.” (The statement appears to have been put in a different file in the MCCH records.) The letter is one of several sources that misidentified the boy’s father as also being named Lloyd; his first name was Lawyer. In listing Lloyd Hobbs as a witness, Carter may have meant Lawyer Hobbs or could have assumed that Lloyd would recover from his injury and be able to testify himself. As it happened, neither Lloyd nor Lawyer Hobbs testified on March 30. Instead, it was Lloyd’s younger brother Russell, who had been with him during the disorder and was thus an eyewitness unlike his father, who testified on March 30. Lloyd Hobbs died that evening. Hays would make the investigation of the boy’s shooting a focus of the subcommittee’s next hearing on April 6 and return to it in later hearings on April 20 and May 14.
“Mr Campbell,” the next name on the likely list of eyewitnesses, very likely Fred Campbell, whose statement is in the MCCH files. Although undated, it referred to him coming to the “Office of the Bi-Racial Commission,” a name used only until March 29, when the members voted to adopt the name MCCH. Campbell’s statement recorded he had been sent to the MCCH offices by Delany “as he had some information that he thought might be of value to us regarding the riot on Tuesday night March 19th.” “Mr Campbell" also appeared in the list of five "Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. Hays, however, did not call for him in the second public hearing and he never testified. As his evidence related to events away from the Kress store on which the hearings focused, Hays may have decided his testimony was not relevant.
The final name on the list is “Mr Irving Kirshaw.” That name is also the final name on the list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. On that list the name is followed by “garage owner” in parenthesis. The garage referred to is likely the one behind the Kress store at which a hearse parked, prompting a crowd to attack the rear of the store. Hays did not call for Kirshaw at the second hearing, and he never testified. Instead, Benjamin Todman, the driver of the hearse, testified at the public hearing on May 4.
In addition to the nine typewritten names, a tenth name was handwritten at the top of the likely list of eyewitnesses, “Cole,” with a check mark, both crossed out. In the Hays Papers is a letter L. F. Cole had written directly to Villard on March 23 saying “I was in Kress’ store when the boy was maltreated by three white clerks” and asking that Villard “invite me to one of your meetings of the Bi-Racial Commission.” Cole testified on March 30, the first eyewitness to give evidence, and again on May 14..
The names of two other men who testified on March 30 appeared with “X” marks next to them on the list "For Mr Hays" likely supplied by the Communist Party, James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators and James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem. Hays told the MCCH at their March 29 meeting that “he had held a conference with Mr. Ford of the Communist Party, and that he and several representatives of his organization would be present at the hearing on Saturday.” A story published in the Daily Worker on March 30 that named several “militant leaders who will demand to be heard” at the public hearing that day fitted the names on the list: Ford, A. W. Berry, Williana Burroughts and “representatives from the Harlem Unemployed Councils, the Harlem International Labor Defense, and the New York District I. L. D.. Of the others named on that list, only one, Frank Wells, likely had information on the events of the disorder. His name was second after Thompson on the list and was likewise annotated with a check mark, with “police brutality” after it. Wells was arrested for allegedly breaking windows on West 125th Street during the disorder. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH, he was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street," again at the police station and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20. The officer who arrested Wells, Patrolman Eppler, would testify at the second public hearing although not about that arrest, but Wells himself never did. ILD lawyer Edward Kuntz tried to ask Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the District Attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case. Handwritten notes related to one other name on the list, William Burroughs, suggest that Hays or an investigator interviewed him as a possible eyewitness. The notes indicated that they found he was not: “has only hearsay evidence of police brutality – was not in Harlem on Mar. 19.” (Three of the remaining names on the list have “Ernst” handwritten next to them, likely indicating that their evidence was relevant to housing, the subject of the subcommittee that Ernst led. Two others are identified as part of the International Labor Defense, which had written to the MCCH saying they had information on conditions in Harlem, rather than the events of the disorder. The final name, A. Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, has an “X” written next to it, as Taylor and Ford did, but he was not among those who testified in hearings chaired by Hays.
Carter’s Report indicated that the MCCH had been assured that police witnesses would be present at the hearing, likely either by Inspector Di Martini or by Lt. Samuel Battle, the city’s senior Black police officer. The assurance was reported directly after the information that an assignment of police to the hearing had been arranged through Di Martino and an “interview was also held with Police Lieutenant Jesse [sic] Battle.” The police witnesses mentioned are “Inspector of the Sixth Division [Di Martini] and officers in charge of the forces handling the crowds on Tuesday March 19 together with the crime Prevention officer who was called to the Kress store at the time of the youth’s apprehension.” On March 30, Di Martini, Donahue (the Crime Prevention Officer), Captain Rothengast (who took charge of police in front of the Kress store at 8:30 PM) and Battle testified. Additional police officers testified in the second hearing. Hays secured an additional law enforcement witness. He told the MCCH on March 29 that he had contacted the District Attorney’s office and they had agreed to send a representative to the March 30 hearing. ADA Alexander Kaminsky was the third witness to testify.
The final witness who testified was Lino Rivera. There is no mention of arrangements for him to appear at the public hearing in either the MCCH records or the Hays Papers. He was photographed at the hearing with Donahue, who likely brought him and ensured his attendance.
There is evidence that the MCCH had sought additional witnesses. A telegram sent to Carter on March 29 by Dorothy McConnell reported that she “Could not get names of eyewitnesses.” That the telegram went on to suggest Carter “Call on Mrs Imes and Louise Thompson at Hearing” suggests that McConnell had been searching for women who had been in the Kress store on March 19 in addition to those on the eyewitness list. Louise Thompson would later say she tried to get some of the women she had met in the store to testify "but they were scared." The name and address of one woman who had been in the store was known, but she would not testify at a public hearing. According to an undated note from Inspector Di Martini to Hays, Margaret Mitchell, described as “the woman who was arrested in the store at the time the boy was in the store,” “refused” the request of a detective to appear. Hays asked about Mitchell at the first hearing; Lt. Battle testfied that when he called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing, “she refused to come.” When Hays again asked Battle about her testimony three weeks later, he reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing." As the MCCH did not have subpoena power, they could not compel her attendance. Perhaps because they lacked that power, the MCCH appeared to have relied on police to bring at least some of the witnesses to its public hearings. The list of eyewitnesses in the Hays Papers is headed “Police Department.”
Police had also sought to bring at least one staff member from the Kress store to the hearing on March 30. A handwritten memo from Di Martini dated that day informed the MCCH of Steve Urban, “the man supposed to be treated by an ambulance has worked all night and left the store, present whereabout unknown.” A police officer had evidently called at the store for Urban as memo attributed that information to “W. F. Woodman ass’t manager Kress Dept Store 256 W 125th St.” Urban never did testify before the MCCH. The other man involved in grabbing Rivera, Charles Hurley, did, on April 6. The MCCH also sought to have the store manager, Jackson Smith, testify; in the hearing on March 30, Di Martini told the MCCH, “I have spoken to Mr Smith, manager, who said that he was busy and he could not get away.”
Finally, Hays requested at the March 29 meeting of the MCCH that “an investigator be sent to Harlem Hospital to secure information relative to victims of the disturbance on March 19th.” It was unlikely that he expected those investigation to produce witnesses for the hearing on March 30. In the second public hearing, on April 6, staff from the hospital gave evidence about the injuries suffered by Lloyd Hobbs and Andrew Lyons, and by two other victims of alleged police brutality. -
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Frank Wells arrested
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Around 8:50 PM, Officer Henry Eppler of the 48th Precinct arrested Frank Wells, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for allegedly "hurling an automobile hub through a cafeteria window on 125th Street," according to a story in the New York Herald Tribune. Eppler was stationed in front of 207 West 125th Street, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH; that was the address of the Willow Cafeteria, which appeared in several newspaper lists of damaged businesses. Eppler had arrived on Emergency Truck #5 about 7:15 PM and initially was stationed on 124th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, at the rear of Kress' store. By that time, the crowds that broke the store's rear windows were gone and he testified that the street was quiet, so the truck drove on to West 125th Street. At that time, police were establishing a cordon around Kress' store; around the time Eppler arrested Wells, a crowd reportedly broke through that cordon on to this block of 125th Street. Wells lived near 125th Street at 155 West 123rd Street, near the corner of 7th Avenue, so could have been drawn to the noise and crowds around Kress' store early in the disorder, when store windows on 125th Street were broken.
A New York Herald Tribune story reported Wells was "locked up at West 123rd Street station," the charge against him "to depend on value of the window." That determination was necessary as malicious mischief, the offense involving damage to property that was the charge most often made against those alleged to have broken windows, was a felony if the damage was more than $25. Only the Daily News list of those arrested reported that charge against Wells. The charge was inciting a riot in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, assault in the list published in the New York Evening Journal, and disorderly conduct in the list published in the New York American. Wells did not appear in the 28th Precinct police blotter, perhaps because of how early in the disorder he was arrested. On March 20, when Wells appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, one of the last arraigned after being one of the first arrested, the charge recorded in the docket book was disorderly conduct. He appears to have been one of a small number of those arrested to be represented by a lawyer: "Ed Kuntz, 100 5th Ave." was the attorney recorded in the docket book. Edward Kuntz, a lawyer with the International Labor Defense, also represented Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels, and Claudio Viabolo, the men arrested for picketing in front of Kress' store immediately before the disorder began, in the Court of Special Sessions, and questioned witnesses in hearings of the MCCH commission. That representation indicated that Wells was associated with the Communist Party. So too did the involvement of another ILD lawyer, Isidore Englander, who once he heard he had been arrested, sought him out at the Magistrates court.
The ILD lawyers representing Wells alleged that he had been beaten by police during his arrest. He appeared in a list of possible witnesses that the Communist Party gave to Arthur Garfield Hays of the MCCH, with the annotation "police brutality." According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH by lawyers affiliated with the Communist Party, he was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street, again at the police station, and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20. When Englander found Wells at the Harlem Magistrates Court, "his head was bandaged, his shirt was red with blood, he could not stand on his feet," he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. At an earlier hearing, Kuntz had tried to ask Patrolman Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the district attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case.
Investigating the case against Wells took an unusually long time. He returned to court on March 26, at which time his bail was set at $500. A note on the docket book appears to indicate that someone put up that bail, likely a Communist Party organization. Wells returned to court a further five times, according to the docket book, on April 9, 12, 17, 18, and finally on April 20, when he was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the Workhouse. -
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Investigations (March 30-April 5)
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While Arthur Garfield Hays likely left the hearing on March 30 wanting to know more about the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs as an example of police actions during the disorder, the boy’s death later that evening would have made gathering information about what had happened more of a priority. On April 1st, he wrote to Eunice Carter, the MCCH secretary, asking to "have our investigators find out all they can about [the Hobbs case]" and to have the Hobbs family attend the next hearing on April 6. Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, the thirty-year-old Black resident of Harlem and former shipping clerk who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. He interviewed the Hobbs family, who gave him the names of two Black men who had contacted them to say they had witnessed the shooting. Tartar then interviewed those men, Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore. He also visited the 28th Precinct and made copies of the police blotter and a report from the precinct commander to the police commissioner.
At the same time, Hays embarked on an investigation of police brutality both in the disorder and more broadly. While the MCCH had extended the subcommittee’s remit from the events of March 19 to crime, police brutality was not one of the topics under that umbrella in Randolph’s plan. It identified numbers gambling, ubiquitous in Harlem at this time, and juvenile delinquency, perceived to be increasing in the context of the Depression, as the topics to be investigated. While the NAACP was receiving complaints of police brutality about Black New Yorkers at this time, Hays’ concern with the topic more likely grew from the involvement of the ACLU in fighting the third degree and police violence against Communists and labor organizations. His intention was that the investigation of police brutality be a “separate project” of the subcommittee on crime, begun after the hearings on the events of March 19 had been completed and a report submitted to the mayor, he told members of the MCCH when they met on April 5. At that time, he reported that the subcommittee had decided another hearing on the events would be needed in addition to the one scheduled the next day. However, the two topics would prove to be intertwined. As a result, the subcommittee’s preliminary report would include both and argue that police brutality was a cause of the disorder as well as a feature of it.
Hays had Hyman Glickstein, an attorney from his law firm, write to senior police officers, the district attorney, the medical examiner, and Harlem Hospital seeking records about six cases. Four involved men who died during the disorder, Hobbs and James Thompson, Andrew Lyons and August Miller. Questions about those deaths had been raised during the testimony of Captain Rothengast at the hearing on March 30. The other two incidents had not occurred during the disorder. Edward Laurie had died at the hands of police soon after the disorder, a case that had been widely reported in the press. Thomas Aiken, blind in one eye after a beating by police just over a week before the disorder, had been brought to the MCCH's attention by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to whom Aiken's mother had written. Glickstein asked that the police officers and physicians who had been involved in the cases be present at the next hearing. Laurie's family and witnesses to Aiken's beating were also asked to be at the hearing.
To expand the investigation into police brutality, Hays again sought the assistance of the Communist Party. He had Glickstein write to the ILD lawyers James Tauber and Edward Kuntz, and James Ford, Robert Minor, and Carl Brodsky of the Communist Party, seeking “all complaints of alleged police misconduct, not only on March 19th, but also on other occasions.” He told them to send him that information as soon as possible so he could have the police officers and physicians involved appear at the next hearing. At some point, the Communist Party sent the MCCH a list of seventeen "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem.” While it included the incidents involving Laurie, Aiken, and Frank Wells, an attack on an unidentified man, the arrest of a boy for lighting a fire in a school, and the eviction of an interracial couple, the list mostly consisted of clashes with police at Communist Party meetings and protests.
Glickstein wrote to Hays on April 4 that “evidence on behalf of the various persons arrested, shot or beaten seems to be considerably more difficult to obtain. I am, however, keeping at it, and I think that at least three or four of the cases, and, perhaps more, will be presented in complete detail before the Committee on Saturday.” His requests for evidence from the police department were initially more successful. “You have my assurance that both the men and records will be made available to the Committee at its next hearing as well as subsequent meetings,” Valentine wrote to Glickstein. However, the day before hearing, District Attorney Dodge intervened to disrupt the MCCH’s plans to have police officers testify. He directed police commanders to “instruct all police officers who may have cases pending not to reveal any of their testimony at any public hearing.” Those instructions restricted what police officers could say, not their ability to testify, so the officers requested to be present nonetheless attended the hearing.
Those officers joined a crowd of other witnesses called to appear at the April 6 hearing. As well as the new witnesses that Tartar and Glickstein worked to secure, the subcommittee still had unfinished business from the first hearing. Five witnesses on the list prepared for March 30 had not testified, Mrs. Jackson, Ida Hengain, Effie Diton and Fred Campbell, and from Steve Urban of the Kress store. There were also additional police officers on the scene and staff from the Kress store whose appearances had not been secured. Although twenty witnesses would appear at the hearing, more than at any of the subcommittee’s other hearings, testimony would be heard about only one of the cases that Hays had investigated, the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. At that time the evidence that the MCCH heard on the other fives cases would be limited to the medical records recounted by doctors on the staff of Harlem Hospital.
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Preparation for the public hearing on April 6
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The report of the secretary for March 30th to April 5th contained less detail of the staff’s investigative work than Carter’s first report. The one activity that was included was that “Investigations were made of the facts in the Hobbs case and witnesses interviewed in order that this case might be heard at the hearing of the Commission on the events of March 19th, on Saturday.” Hays had written to Eunice Carter on April 1 asking to "have our investigators find out all they can about [the Hobbs case]" and to have the Hobbs family attend the next hearing, on April 6. Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, a Black staff member who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. Copies of his reports are in both the Hays Papers and the records of Mayor La Guardia, and a narrative summary is in the Frazier papers. He interviewed the Hobbs family "as the first source," complied a "social and economic history of the family" and took statements from Russell and his mother. He also learned from Lawyer Hobbs that he had been contacted by two eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore. Tartar met with the men at 213 West 128th Street, the apartment building in which they both lived, and recorded "their story." On April 2, Tartar also spoke with ADA Saul Price, who told him he "that the officer had not been exonerated, due to the fact that he was waiting to hear the story from the Hobbs family, particularly Russell Hobbs." An interview with the police department's ballistic expert produced no information as he had not received the bullet that hit Lloyd. Tartar's visit to Harlem Hospital was more successful, as Dr. Steinholz shared the boy's chart, which the investigator copied. An additional interview with Inspector Di Martini not in Tartar's report but mentioned in his testimony in the MCCH hearing allowed him to make a copy of a report to Commissioner Valentine from commander of the 28th Precinct, Captain George Mulholland, on the subject of "The shooting of prisoner by Patrolman."
Hyman Glickstein, an attorney at Hays' law firm, undertook the work of gathering other evidence for the hearing. Copies of his correspondence are in both the Hays Papers and the records of Mayor La Guardia. It indicated that the investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs was part of a shift in the subcommittee’s focus from the events of March 19 to police misconduct and brutality, which Hays described in the MCCH meeting on April 5. Letters dated April 2 to Inspector Di Martini and Commissioner Valentine, the district attorney, and the medical examiner and Harlem Hospital asked for the records of six cases. Four cases involved men who died during the disorder, Hobbs and James Thompson, Andrew Lyons, and August Miller. Questions about those cases had been raised during the testimony of Captain Rothengast at the hearing on March 30. The other two cases had not occurred during the disorder. Edward Laurie had died at the hands of police soon after the disorder, a case that had been widely reported in the press. Thomas Aiken, blind in one eye after a beating by police just over a week before the disorder, had been brought to the MCCH's attention by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to whom Aiken's mother had written. Glickstein asked that the police officers and physicians who had been involved in the cases be present at the next hearing. Witnesses to Aiken's beating and Laurie's family were also asked to be at the hearing.
Glickstein also wrote to the ILD lawyers James Tauber and Edward Kuntz and James Ford, Robert Minor, and Carl Brodsky of the Communist Party seeking more cases, “all complaints of alleged police misconduct, not only on March 19th, but also on other occasions.” He told them to send him that information as soon as possible so he could have the police officers and physicians involved at the hearing. The requests continued the collaboration with the Communists that Hays had initiated the previous week. The Communist Party at some point sent the MCCH the "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" in the Hays Papers. While that list of seventeen cases included Laurie, Aiken, and Frank Wells, an attack on an unidentified man, the arrest of a boy for lighting a fire in a school, and the eviction of an interracial couple, it mostly consisted of clashes with police at Communist Party meetings and protests. Moreover, Glickstein wrote to Hays on April 4 that “evidence on behalf of the various persons arrested, shot or beaten seems to be considerably more difficult to obtain. I am, however, keeping at it, and I think that at least three or four of the cases, and, perhaps, more will be presented in complete detail before the Committee on Saturday.”
The requests for evidence from the police department were initially more successful. “You have my assurance that both the men and records will be made available to the Committee at its next hearing as well as subsequent meetings,” Valentine wrote to Glickstein. The day before hearing, District Attorney Dodge intervened to disrupt the MCCH’s plans to have police officers testify. He directed police commanders to “instruct all police officers who may have cases pending not to reveal any of their testimony at any public hearing.” Those instructions restricted what police officers could say, not their ability to testify, so the officers requested to be present nonetheless attended the hearing. At the beginning of the hearing, Hays read Dodge's letter to Commissioner Valentine, and his brief letter to Glickstein, the MCCH attorney, summarizing what he had instructed the Commissioner, so those in attendance would know why police did not testify.
Although there was no record of efforts to secure their attendance, during the hearing Hays sought testimony from three women and one man listed as witnesses for the previous hearing who had not testified, Mrs. Jackson, Ida Hengain, Effie Diton and Mr. [Fred] Campbell, and from Steve Urban of the Kress store. Battle had said early in the day that he would get Effie Diton to the hearing, but clearly was unable to do so. Hays also tried on the day of the hearing to secure the testimony of two more witnesses to events in the Kress store. During the hearing, James Tauber of the ILD requested a letter be sent Mrs. Williams of 2010 7th Ave, with the text of the letter read in the hearing. At some point on that day, a similar letter was sent to Mrs. DePass of 460 West 147th Street.