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

"Complete Riot Report Bared," New York Amsterdam News, July 18, 1936, 1.

This story was included in the edition of the report published by Arno Press in 1969. The text of the report was transcribed from the New York Amsterdam News.

In the New York Amsterdam News

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Releasing the MCCH report MCCH members present when Mayor La Guardia spoke to journalists after their meeting on July 1st apparently said nothing. Nonetheless the New York Post reported that they “appeared to be satisfied with progress reported by the Mayor." Later, one of the MCCH members told a journalist from the New York Herald Tribune “that the committee is generally pleased with the results of the conference and is willing to let the Mayor make the final report public when the addenda from various department heads are sent to him.” On a similar note, Charles Roberts told the New York Amsterdam News that he was “convinced that the mayor is sincerely working to carry out the recommendations of the commission.”

However they felt about the city’s response to their recommendations, a willingness to let the mayor release their report at some unspecified time in the future seemed unlikely to be shared by all the MCCH members given how strongly they felt about its importance. To the contrary, at least some appear to have responded differently soon after the meeting. “The Commission’s report to the Mayor is OUR report and not the Mayor’s. And it is our report whether he likes it or not,” Rev. Robinson told the Daily Worker. Then the Daily Worker obtained a copy of the report and started publishing chapters on July 2. On July 18, the New York Amsterdam News obtained and published the entire report other than the foreword and letter to the mayor that accompanied it. While the New York Age claimed the mayor had given its competitor the document, that seems unlikely given that the text published by both newspapers was not the version submitted to him, but Frazier’s unedited text. The New York Amsterdam News certainly did not credit the mayor as the source. “The Amsterdam News is happy it could avail itself of the opportunity to present to the public for the first time the complete report of the MCCH,” the paper editorialized. “Our duty appeared more patent because Mayor La Guardia has kept it hidden for months.” It also played up that the recommendations it published were “considered too hot, too caustic, too critical, too unfavorable by the Mayor,” and had been changed in the final version. Given that it was Frazier’s text that was supplied to the newspaper, it would not have come from an MCCH member who had pushed for the changes in the submitted version. Eunice Carter might have been the source. She had spoken up for submitting Frazier’s report unedited and in favor of its immediate release during the MCCH meeting on February 14 and would have had a copy.

Introducing the report, the New York Amsterdam News published a story that summarized the discussion of the beginnings of the disorder while only identifying the topics of the other chapters, an attention to the events lacking in the white press. At the same time, it presented the report as nothing new, as “tell[ing] again of the combination of circumstances which made people to believe the young Negro boy had been beaten to death, and of how the police, first inefficiently, and next, ruthlessly, tried to meet the excitement of the people.” Both Frazier's assessments of the Communists' lack of responsibility for the disorder and their role in preventing it becoming a race riot were quoted in the story. Although the latter claim was new, and highlighted by a sub-heading “Communist Angle Touched,” the story offered no comment about it.

Publication in the New York Amsterdam News was not the official release that MCCH members sought. Not only was the report not the version they had submitted to the mayor, other newspapers did not publish stories about the content of the report and no copies were available to those who did not get editions of the New York Amsterdam News. “No newspapers will give the same publicity to something reprinted from another paper as they would to a story given the papers generally and at the same time,” the New York Age complained, effectively describing its own response. The effect, the New York Age editorial went on, was “to bury the report.” By La Guardia's account, the press response played out in exactly that way over the next three months. Journalists from several publications read the report but “none have seen fit to print anything about it” because all the news in it had been covered by the newspapers that had published it.

Alain Locke’s article, “Dark Weather-Vane,” published in the Survey Graphic in August 1936, did examine the report. Locked endorsed its account of the causes of the disorder, writing, “The careful report of the Commission on this occurrence correctly places the blame far beyond the immediate precipitating incidents.” More pointedly than in his memo to La Guardia, Locke criticized Valentine for continuing to assert that Communists caused the disorder. "There are those even in official circles who insist upon a more direct connection between Harlem’s restless temper and racial propaganda. To do so seriously misconstrues the situation by inverting the real cause and effect. Discrimination and injustice are the causes, not radicalism." Suggestions from Arthur Garfield Hays, who had been sent a draft of the article, had tightened the alignment of the article and the report. Where Locke had described the "immediate causes" of the disorder simply as "trivial," Hays suggested he add the "coincidental and unfortunate" events that the narratives in both the subcommittee report and Frazier's report presented as giving greater significance to the "trivial" apprehension of Lino Rivera: the appearances of the ambulance and the hearse. Locke revised the article to include that "by tragic coincidence an ambulance called to treat one of the Kress employees, whose hand the boy had bitten, seemed to confirm the rumor and a hearse left temporarily outside its garage in an alley at the rear of the store to corroborate this." Hays also suggested the addition of a "striking phrase" that the MCCH had used in regard to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. Locke duly added the phrase: "As the report aptly says, 'A policeman who kills is prosecutor, judge and executioner.'" If Locke had been given a copy of the MCCH report, he would have realized that it did not actually contain that statement; it had appeared only in the report of the Subcommittee on Crime. Locke made no changes in response to Hays questioning how the article presented participation in the disorder. A reference to how as the result of Rivera's apprehension "a community of 200,000 was suddenly in the throes of serious riots through the night" wrongly gave the impression that "the whole community was engaged in rioting," Hays contended, when in fact the MCCH "concluded that 3 to 5 thousand was a liberal estimate." That more limited participation led the MCCH to often refer to "the incidents of that night as a disturbance rather than a riot," according to Hays. If Locke did not want to go as far as Hays in diminishing the violence of the disorder, which he described as "actual loss of life, many injures to police and citizens, destruction of property, and a serious aftermath of public grievance and anger," he did include other features of the MCCH's characterization of the events. In doing so, he drew on the Subcommittee Report as well as the MCCH report. After presenting the catalog of conclusions that opened the preliminary report, including that the events "were not a race riot in the sense of physical conflict between white and colored groups," he quoted Frazier's summation from the final report: "Its distinguishing feature was an attack upon property rather than persons." Rather than clearly endorsing that picture, in the opening of the article Locke offered a catalog of possible interpretations, noting that the events had been "variously diagnosed as a depression spasm, a Ghetto mutiny, a radical plot and dress rehearsal of proletarian revolution," before moving on to what concerned him, what the "revealing flash of lightning" showed: "the actual predicament of the mass life in Harlem." In glossing over the events in that way, he prefigured how historians would approach the disorder.

By September, two months after the meeting with the mayor, Oscar Villard's patience had run out. He and Hays called for a meeting of the MCCH “to decide once and for all whether it will issue its report now, or wait for the Mayor to release it when it is no longer of any value.” The meeting, of which there was no record, evidently decided to give La Guardia an ultimatum by telegram. If he did not release it within ten days, Villard wrote, they would release it themselves. Villard was out of touch with what had happened, the mayor responded; the report had been available to the press for ten weeks. After expressing his astonishment at that news to La Guardia, Villard promptly notified the New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, New York Sun, and New York World-Telegram that the report had been “released.” Notwithstanding La Guardia’s claim, New York Herald Tribune journalists appeared unaware until then that the report was available. However, when one called at the mayor's office to get a copy, there were none. La Guardia, clearly concerned to avoid again being accused of suppressing the report, scrambled to send a copy, together with the city commissioners’ responses, to the paper. The New York Herald Tribune published only the responses. Other newspapers must have also been sent that material at the same time, as similar stories appeared in the New York Post, New York American, Home News, and New York Amsterdam News. The New York Post was again alone in publishing a less credulous view of the city’s response, which it headlined "City Clears Itself." Charles Roberts sent an angry complaint to the mayor that the responses had been released without the report. Walter White of the NAACP initially shared that anger until Hubert Delany told him that New York Herald Tribune and New York Times had a copy of the report as well and had chosen not to include it (the New York Times also did not publish a story about the commissioner's responses). Valentine’s report received the least attention in the coverage of the commissioners' responses. The New York Herald Tribune and Home News quoted only the statements that the report was in error and that only the lawless resented police, and the New York American only mentioned his denial of any resentment (while the New York Amsterdam News story did not mention Valentine). None of the stories took up Valentine’s assertion that that Communists had caused the disorder.

As late as December, Eunice Carter was telling Morris Ernst that Mayor La Guardia was planning a meeting with the MCCH to discuss the report and to formally disband the group. The meeting never happened. Nor did the NAACP publish the report, as Carter suggested to Ernst they were planning to do. She might have misunderstood the organization's efforts to obtain copies of the report as an intention to publish it. In fact, the NAACP sought copies to give to individuals and organizations approaching it having struggled to find one. Arthur Garfield Hays also fielded similar requests, several times lending the copy in which he had marked sections for exclusion, the only one he had (given that this copy was not in his papers, one of those correspondents may have failed to return it). Frazier did submit proposals to publish the report to several presses. Although he pitched it as akin to the influential report on Chicago riot of 1919, he found no interest. It would not be until 1969 that the full report was published. That text was a transcription of the version that appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, establishing Frazier’s report, not the MCCH report as the version of record for most historians. Over time, writers and scholars relying on the report would follow Frazier and the MCCH members in marginalizing and obscuring the events of the disorder and diminishing its violence.
The MCCH and Frazier's report Just one of Frazier’s changes and additions to the narrative of the events of the disorder offered in the report of the Subcommittee on Crime provoked a reaction from MCCH members. On January 6, Oscar Villard wrote to Eunice Carter that, “I must record my astonishment at the treatment given to the Communists therein.” Arthur Garfield Hays shared a similar reaction with Eunice Carter, who agreed that “Mr. Frazier’s opening chapters contain misstatements as to the findings of the Commission and create a totally incorrect impression of the results of the Communist activities in the events of March 19.” Walter White of the NAACP, with whom Judge Toney had shared the chapters, also took exception to Frazier’s “singling out of the Communists for credit” as “too sweeping” and indicating a “less than judicial appraisal of the New York scene” and “lack of knowledge of or inability to interpret properly the historical background.” White was hardly an objective observer in regard to the Communist Party. The NAACP was already resentful of the praise the Communist Party’s response to the case of the Scottsboro boys had received in Black communities.

Carter thought the Commission should take “definite action” on Frazier’s comments about Communists and told Hays she had suggested to Charles Roberts that he call a “full commission meeting” to discuss them. However, Roberts found it “very difficult to get the Commission members together.” (Villard blamed Roberts for the lack of meetings, telling Walter White he had "been a very poor chairman.") A meeting on February 4 was attended by just Roberts, Hays, Villard, Toney, and Delany and discussed only what would happen after the MCCH completed its work. In the following days, the specific concerns about Frazier’s account of the events of the disorder were pulled into efforts to complete the MCCH’s work by the anniversary of the disorder, March 19. Roberts told the New York Amsterdam News that the "Mayor will have report in his hands before the anniversary." He notified MCCH members that the meeting called for February 14 was “probably the last meeting of the Commission,” as Frazier was “coming up from Washington for the last time and the complete report will be ready for approval of the Commission, together with a letter to the Mayor and the Foreword.” A week before that meeting, Frazier wrote to Roberts that he still had three chapters to complete, so it was unlikely MCCH members had read the complete report at the time of the meeting.

When the MCCH members met on February 14, there was some discussion of eliminating the statement that Communists were not responsible for what happened as they did not distribute their leaflets until after the disorder started, a position which echoed the Subcommittee’s conclusion. Rev. Robinson raised making that change; Hays rejected it (there may have been further discussion before that exchange; the first page of the meeting minutes was missing). Hays, however, was in favor of cutting the section giving credit to Communists for preventing a race riot, as well as praise for the role that Communists played in the MCCH’s public hearings in the report’s second chapter. So too was Judge Toney, perhaps following the position taken by Walter White. Robinson also insisted that Communists in the hearing had done nothing more than spread propaganda. Those two passages, on the events and the hearings, are likely what Villard had in mind when he moved that “all information on the CP be struck from the report,” a motion seconded by William Schiefflin. (A. Philip Randolph, too ill to attend the meeting, may not have reacted to these passages in the same way as his colleagues. On February 6, he wrote to Carter that he had read the first two chapters and found them "quite discerning and well done." Father McCann, who was also absent, would certainly have supported Villard's motion.)

The MCCH members also debated how to review Frazier’s report more generally. Morris Ernst proposed letting each subcommittee examine the section covering their responsibility and “revise it.” Carter countered that she did not think that they should make any other report than this and not “chop up” Frazier’s text. Toney proposed an alternative, that a committee of two go over the whole report. The meeting adopted that approach and chose Hays and Villard for the task. With the report still to be approved, the MCCH adjourned until March 6.

On March 3, Hays sent Villard a version of the complete report with suggested changes and cuts, including the two passages discussed on February 14. He reported to Villard that he had been "particularly careful in cutting out the parts - not many of them - that referred to the capitalist system, communism, socialism, etc or that used words like 'mass action', and others of the kind." That marked up copy of the report did not survive, but the sections Hays cut were identified by a correspondent in 1938. Hays later wrote that “there was a rather heated discussion during which I insisted that the eliminations be made which were marked on my copy.” All the assessment of the Communists' role in the hearings was cut in the complete version of the report sent to MCCH members, as was the sentence that attributed the economic status of Black workers to "the operation of our competitive capitalistic system," the statement that the ills of Harlem were too deeply rooted in the economic and social system to "be cured by an administration under our present political and civic institutions," and a mention of "mass action" against police as the result of the unifying effect of police brutality. Two other phrases were changed. "Mass action" became "organized action" and "black proletariat" became "angry crowd." Strikingly, the passage giving credit to Communists for preventing a race riot remained. It was not a position for which any member of the MCCH expressed support in their discussions, but it did serve to emphasize that the disorder was not a race riot. Judge Toney had expressed a desire to have the report "say some of the acts proved it was not a race riot" at the meeting on February 14, the view promoted by many of Harlem’s Black leaders. Concern to have explicit support for that position may have outweighed hostility toward the Communists.

It is likely the MCCH discussed those changes when it met on March 6, although there are no surviving records of that meeting. Hays was absent from the subsequent meeting on March 11 meeting, for which there are also no records. According to Carter, the March 11 meeting, and another on March 20, worked on the recommendations. Although the record of the March 20 meeting referred to "certain changes [being] made that were found necessary by the members," it was only revised recommendations that Carter sent to members after the meeting, on March 23. She wrote that they had had the complete report for some time.

Morris Ernst responded to the recommendations Carter sent on March 23 with changes, which were not included in the report submitted to La Guardia. Carter later evasively explained that “evidently it did not seem expedient at that time to incorporate them in the report. That was a matter not within my jurisdiction, but within the jurisdiction of the Committee as a whole and of Mr. Frazier.” As his changes had not been adopted, Ernst did not sign the report submitted to the mayor.

John Grimley and Father McCann joined Ernst in not signing the report. Neither appeared to have attended any of the meetings that discussed the drafts. In fact, all three had rarely attended meetings, with Grimley and McCann at the fewest, five of the twenty meetings, and Ernst at only six meetings. Grimley gave no reason for his refusal when contacted by MCCH staff. McCann never responded at all. While the report’s foreword nonetheless acknowledged Grimley as having contributed “intimate knowledge of the manhood of Harlem” and “technical advice relative to the problem of health,” it credited McCann only as having “represented the Catholic opinion of the community.” Hubert Delany came close to joining Ernst, Grimley and McCann, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he was part of the city government the report criticized and close to La Guardia. He stalled for several days before signing at the last possible moment on March 31. With his signature, all seven Black members of the MCCH endorsed the report, joined by only three of the six white members.

While the changes the MCCH made to the report were not extensive, and left intact Frazier's picture of the role of Communists in events, they did represent an assertion of the members' control of the report. So too did the front matter the MCCH added to the document when they submitted it to the mayor. In the letter to the mayor that accompanied the report, Roberts described Frazier as having directed the research. The report’s foreword referred to him only as the MCCH’s technical expert, while detailing the expertise and contribution of the MCCH members at greater length. The report itself contained no indication of Frazier's authorship.

Ironically, the report edited by the MCCH members was not the version of the report that would be read by the public and studied by historians. The published document would be Frazier’s unedited text. Moreover, the front matter, which celebrated the MCCH members, would not be published. The story that accompanied the published report would describe Frazier as “director of the studies and surveys on which the commission based its reports.” However, the caption to a photo of Frazier accompanying the report would add, “He is reported to have had a large hand in the wording of the completed report.”
Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, The Complete Report of Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935. New York: Arno Press, 1969. This version of the MCCH report is the unedited text written by E. Franklin Frazier, which was published in the New York Amsterdam News on July, 18, 1936. It does not include the front matter in the version edited by MCCH members that was submitted to Mayor La Guardia, a covering letter and a foreword describing the MCCH members, and their contributions to the investigation and report. Instead, it reprinted the story that the New York Amsterdam News published to accompany the text of the report.
Published Primary Sources: Books

This page references:

Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, The Complete Report of Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1-6.