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• 1 2023-07-09T00:33:29+00:00 The MCCH and the subcommittee report 20 plain 2024-02-02T22:06:57+00:00 Villard sent his draft report to Hays on May 27, the day before the MCCH was scheduled to meet. He proposed that they “read the report to the whole committee and discuss any suggestions or criticisms.” Only six other MCCH members joined them at that meeting, only Ernst of the four other white members and five of the seven Black members, Roberts, Carter, Toney, Robinson, and Cullen. All five members of the subcommittee on crime were among those in attendance. Villard read the report, “a few necessary corrections” were made, and then Ernst moved that the MCCH adopt the report and arrange to submit it to the mayor. Hays’ copy of Villard’s report is marked up with several corrections and additions. They are likely a combination of changes made by Hays and those made at the MCCH meeting.
  
  The MCCH made several changes to reduce the violence in the report’s portrayal of the events of the disorder. “Riot” was replaced with “disturbance” in the opening sentence and the account of police fetching Rivera from his bed to show he was unharmed. Hays later explained that due to the small proportion of the community involved in the disorder, the MCCH “often referred to the incidents of that night as a 'disturbance' rather than a 'riot.'” The violence described in the report was further reduced by corrections to claims not supported by the information gathered by the MCCH. The reference to five deaths in the preface to the findings that opened the report was corrected to several deaths. Opting to refer less precisely to several deaths reflected the uncertainty surrounding two of the four deaths the MCCH had investigated, with no clear evidence of the circumstances in which August Miller and Andrew Lyons had died. There is no mention of a fifth death. A later reference to “five men who lost their lives were killed by police” was removed. The possibility that police were responsible for all the shootings during the disorder had been examined during the first public hearing, but they had been established as responsible only for killing Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. Also removed from the middle of a long quotation of Louise Thompson’s testimony to the first public hearing was a mention of a woman breaking an umbrella on the head of a police officer in the Kress store. None of the other testimony about events in the store had mentioned such an attack.
  
  At the same time as they downplayed the violence of the disorder as a whole, MCCH members heightened their criticism of the actions of the police and district attorney in the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. As well as additions highlighting how unlikely it was that Hobbs had time to enter the automobile store, loot it, and leave carrying items in his hands as the police described, a further denunciation was added: “A policeman who kills becomes at once prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.” Criticism of the district attorney was made more pointed, with the reluctance to seek an indictment of Patrolman McInerney becoming a result of the “killer” being a police officer.
  
  One other set of cuts to the report changed its portrayal of participants in the disorder. The MCCH removed two descriptions of the Black population that employed racist stereotypes that implied a degree of responsibility for the disorder. Villard had allowed, in introducing the section on police conduct, that “the excitable nature of the people with whom the police were called upon to deal” would have contributed to the actions of police during the disorder. In the final sentence he had also attributed the danger radical propaganda posed to “public order” in Harlem not only to the economic and social conditions but also to “a people peculiarly subject to emotional appeals.” The description of participants as coming from the criminal class, which Villard had used in place of Hays description of them as hoodlums, was changed to hoodlums. Presenting participants as troublemakers rather than criminals reduced the threat posed by the disorder, in a parallel with the change from riot to disturbance.
  
  Hays sent Villard a “clean copy” of the report on May 29, which included an additional section he wrote addressed to the mayor and police commissioner urging them to take the opportunity to change the system and psychology of police. After Villard returned it with “a few typographical and stylistic changes on June 1, Hays responded suggesting adding a final sentence highlighting the recommendations to create community oversight of the police and change police behavior could be adopted even in the midst of a depression as they required no extra spending, a version of which appeared in the final report. Both those additions were made without reference to the other MCCH members.
  
  At the next meeting of the MCCH, on June 4, Hays reported that the edited report was ready to be signed by MCCH members, after which he would deliver it to the Mayor’s office. Ten MCCH members signed the report. The signatures of A. Philip Randolph and William Schieffelin were missing because they were out of town, Hays wrote in the letter accompanying the submitted report. Father McCann had “refused to sign the Report, apparently not approving thereof.” Although the priest had not been at the meeting on May 28 that had read the report, he was present the next week when it was ready for signatures but apparently had not voiced his objections at that time. However, when the subcommittee report was released, McCann would publicly challenge the MCCH account of the events of the disorder and the role of police in the violence.