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"Executive Meeting of the Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem, May 28, 1935," Mayor's Committee on Conditions in Harlem: Meetings, 1935-36, Departmental Correspondence, Box 34, Folder 3 (Roll 171), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945
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The MCCH and the subcommittee report
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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.
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Investigations (May 4-May 17)
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As neither Jackson Smith, the manager of the Kress store, nor Louis Eisenberg, the owner of store allegedly looted by Lloyd Hobbs, had appeared at the May 4 hearing, the subcommittee’s investigation of the events of the disorder had to continue until the next hearing, scheduled for May 18. The appearance of both men was secured in the interim.
MCCH members meeting on May 7 did agree to take further action to have Smith testify. A. Phillip Randolph proposed they write to Mayor La Guardia requesting he write to the company "asking them to cooperate by having the manager of their 125th Street store present at the next meeting." No such letter is in the files. It may have been unnecessary. Hays was not at that meeting, so the outcome of his discussions with the Kress company attorneys was likely not known to the other MCCH members.
Louis Eisenberg took up Hays’ offer to avoid the public hearing. He would later tell an MCCH investigator surveying his business that he opposed the hearings because they “permitted any Tom, Dick, and Harry to cross examine people.” The private hearing that heard his brief testimony on May 18 was recorded by a stenographer, but otherwise did not appear in records of the MCCH’s work. To the contrary, compilations of the Subcommittee’s activities by MCCH staff recorded that it held no private hearings.
Securing the store owner’s testimony was not the only additional investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs undertaken by the MCCH notwithstanding the grand jury’s decision not to charge Patrolman McInerney. James Tartar continued to pursue information on the whereabouts of the items that the police officer claimed the boy had stolen and that he had recovered next to him after he was shot. An interview with ADA Price confirmed that McInerney brought the horn and socket set to the DA's office on April 1st, while a visit to the property clerk's office at police headquarters revealed that those items were not delivered there until April 8, 1935. For Tartar and Hays, the interval of almost two weeks before anyone saw those items supported the testimony of eyewitnesses that Hobbs had nothing in his hands when shot, calling into question a justification for his shooting. Getting answers about those items became part of the program for the May 18 hearing.
Three additional witnesses to McInerney shooting Hobbs were also located. Just how is not clear. Tartar claimed credit, somewhat obliquely, although there are no documents related to those witnesses in the MCCH files. "Your investigator,” he wrote in a narrative report of his investigation, “feeling that the case was of such great importance as an example to show how the citizens of Harlem are murdered by police officers and then charged with having committed a crime in order to justify the officer's act, sought to gather more witnesses if there were any." He found four. However, a man called Clarence Wilson would testify that he had been sent by a member of the MCCH to Lawyer Hobbs, the boy’s father, for the addresses of three witnesses. Wilson found the fourth witness when he went to bring those men to the hearing. Those men likely had either approached the Hobbs family, as the three other eyewitnesses had, or been found by them. The boy’s death clearly continued to loom large in the Harlem community’s view of the disorder.
Gathering that information about the events of the disorder took place alongside continued investigation of police brutality and mistreatment. Robert Patterson appeared at the MCCH offices on May 11 to complain that police forced their way into his home and arrested him on the basis of an anonymous complaint on May 5. Charles Romney, who had played a prominent role questioning witnesses, asked to testify about being a victim of brutality. So did James Middleton. The MCCH appeared to no longer be cooperating with Communists groups in investigating cases. Two men and a woman affiliated with Communist groups, Cyril Briggs, “Mr Campbell” and Ethel Lewis, would testify about police breaking up mixed race groups, but came from the audience to do so rather than being on the program.
Surprisingly given the earlier reports that the MCCH had been overwhelmed by complaints of brutality, Hays told the MCCH meeting on May 14 that the upcoming hearing on police brutality would be the last "for some time as he did not have any more material." While he left the door open for hearings at a later date if he had accumulated sufficient cases, on May 28, he would tell the other MCCH members that "he did not see the necessity" for the subcommittee on crime to hold any further hearings. That the investigations of the events of the disorder and of police brutality had not only become intertwined but also ended at the same time likely contributed to Hays' decision to include them both in a single report, notwithstanding his original vision of them as separate topics.