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

The MCCH investigates

The group that Mayor La Guardia appointed moved ahead with its work even before he finished adding members. Investigating the events of March 19 was one of the first tasks on which they embarked. Over the next two and a half months, a subcommittee assigned that task sent staff drawn from city government agencies to find eyewitnesses to the events in and around the Kress store and to conduct investigations into the deaths that occurred during the disorder. They later extended the investigations to cases of police brutality. MCCH investigators gathered pages of official records and undertook nearly one hundred interviews in the commission’s offices and in homes and another fifteen interviews with police and hospital staff. Individuals and organizations from the Harlem community wrote to the MCCH or visited its offices to provide information. Fifty-seven witnesses identified by those means testified at five public hearings held by the subcommittee members and attended by audiences of 300 to 400 people.

While the MCCH members had a program for those hearings, the audiences interjected their own issues and perspectives. "The commission as well as the witness found themselves face to face with an aroused public which demanded that its grievances be heard," E. Franklin Frazier, the Black sociologist hired to lead the committee's investigation of Harlem, wrote in the Final Report of the MCCH, "and that no technicalities of court procedure or rules of order were to thwart its right to be heard." He singled out the hearings of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder as one of those in which the audience expressed itself "most forcibly" with "vociferous condemnations." Many white observers dismissed those contributions as coming from Communists and other radicals. So too did some mainstream Black leaders such as James Hubert of the Urban League. The hearings were "a sort of Roman holiday for the soapbox orators who regard it as their outstanding opportunity to heckle and vilify publicly anyone and every organization that is attempting to deal with the problems at hand," he complained to Eunice Carter, the MCCH secretary. "It was a most disgusting scene that these agitators were injecting all sorts of silly and unrelated questions at a time when the Commission is dealing with one of the most serious problems that has challenged our community." Frazier insisted to the contrary that the Black men and women who made up most of the audience "were truly a cross-section of the Harlem population" whose "various reactions at the hearings expressed the general feelings of the community."

At the end of May, the subcommittee chair Arthur Garfield Hays would draw on the testimony at the hearings and the audience reactions to it to draft a preliminary report on the "Events of March 19" for submission to the mayor.

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