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Investigations (March 22-March 29)
When all eleven committee members met on March 25, they again encountered reporters. As a result, the MCCH members made preparing a press statement their first business after electing their officers, the task deferred the previous week. The statement's first section, the most widely reported, indicated that the focus of the Commission would be the broader conditions in Harlem rather than the events of the disorder:
However, the statement went on to put the events of the disorder on par with broader causes as one of two parts of the investigation:"The committee is already agreed that the disturbance (of last Tuesday, which took a toll of three lives and extensive property damage) were merely symbols and symptoms: that the public health, safety and welfare in colored Harlem have long been jeopardized by economic and social conditions which the depression has intensified."
The approach the group had decided on at the meeting was not as balanced as the statement suggested. They established three subcommittees, two on broader issues, on discrimination and employment and on housing, and one “to investigate the police records and all facts pertinent to the happenings in Harlem on Tuesday, March 19th,” with Judge Toney as chair and made up of Arthur Garfield Hays, William Schiefflin, and Eunice Carter. After what the minutes recorded "as a general discussion as to whether [illegible] expedient to have a white or Negro Chairman,” the committee was initially poised to have to make that choice, between Oscar Villard and Judge Toney, before Villard withdrew citing health concerns and Charles Roberts was nominated in his place. Given the choice between those two Black candidates, the committee members elected Roberts as chairman, with Villard as vice chairman and Carter as secretary.“It has, therefore, determined to divide its work into two parts, an investigation of the immediate situation and a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem, including housing, wages, rents, employment discrimination and other questions.”
On March 26, the day after the committee met for the first time, Hubert Delany secured a staff for them from the city’s Home Relief Bureau. Those four investigators and two stenographers set up offices in two rooms on the fifth floor of the Court House. Carter reported that two of the investigators, Weisberger and James Tartar, were assigned to working on “investigating the immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19 and interviewing prospective witnesses for the inquiry on Saturday, March 30.” Tartar was a thirty-year-old Black former shipping clerk who lived in Harlem for almost ten years. Sometime early in the week, Hays had taken over as chair of the subcommittee responsible for that investigation and scheduled the public hearing. The purpose of the interviews, Hays instructed the men, was to “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.” Hays himself met with Communist Party leaders to identify witnesses, returning with a list of names. Carter also reached out to Black women she knew in Harlem, seeking to find women who had been among the shoppers in the Kress store. Committee members also contacted Inspector Di Martini and Lieutenant Samuel Battle to ensure that police officers who were at the Kress store at the beginning of the disorder would be present to testify at the hearing, together with Lino Rivera and staff from the Kress store. Other witnesses identified themselves by responding to the request for information made at the end of the press statement released after the committee's meeting.
When the committee next gathered, for its regular weekly meeting on Friday, March 29, Carter had a list of eyewitnesses expected to attend the public hearing the next day to give Hays. The first four names, and another further down, were women who had been in the Kress store, “Miss Louise Thompson, Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative).” Louise Thompson was a Communist Party activist formerly married to author Wallace Thurman and involved in the social circles of the Harlem Renaissance. The Communist Party had provided her name to Hays. Forty-five-year-old Effie Diton was currently president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians, an organization her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini, had helped found. The other three women could not be identified. Missing from the list was another woman the committee knew had been in the store, eighteen-year-old Margaret Mitchell, who police had arrested. She steadfastly refused requests to testify. Three other witnesses on the list had approached the committee to give evidence. L. F. Cole, a sometime freelance journalist, had written to the committee to say he had been in the Kress store when Rivera was grabbed by staff. Fred Campbell, sent to the committee offices by Hubert Delany, owned two barbers in Harlem and had driven along 7th Avenue during the disorder. The family of Lloyd Hobbs, shot by police during the disorder, had been brought to the committee's attention by the Urban League; his younger brother Russell had been with Lloyd when he was shot, and together with his parents, had encountered the officer who shot him at Harlem Hospital. Irving Kershaw, the last name on the list, had likely been found by the committee investigators. He owned the garage opposite the rear of the Kress store where a hearse drew up early in the disorder. Hays had also marked another four names on the list the Communist Party provided him as witnesses to the disorder: James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators; James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem; Abner Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights; and Frank Wells, who police had arrested on 125th Street.
While the committee's immediate focus on March 29 was on the events of the disorder, the plans they made at that meeting gave that topic a far smaller place in the investigation of the events of the disorder going forward than indicated in the press statement after their first meeting earlier in the week. The extensive program for the investigation, prepared by A. Philip Randolph, that the members voted to adopt did not mention those events. In reorganizing to accomplish that work, the committee created six new subcommittees focused on topics in the outline: education, health and sanitation, labor problems, law and legislation, relief agencies, and crime, with the later encompassing the events of the disorder. Two additional members were added to that subcommittee, Oscar Villard and, at the request of Mayor La Guardia, the newly appointed Rev. John Robinson.
It was also at this meeting, in a discussion of securing letterheads, that the group chose a “formal name." They had been referring to themselves as the “Bi-Racial Commission.” The new name reflected the broad agenda they adopted that day: the Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem.