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• 1 2023-06-14T14:54:24+00:00 The MCCH investigation of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs 96 plain 2024-02-13T00:04:50+00:00 The MCCH learned of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs from the New York Urban League. His father, Lawyer Hobbs, went several times to the 28th Precinct police station on West 123rd Street trying to get the name and shield number of the patrolman who had shot Lloyd, which the family had been too upset to get when they encountered him at Harlem Hospital. He also wanted to file a complaint against the officer. Although Hobbs "was told by the inspector that he could not file a complaint because he did not witness the affair, and knew nothing about it," no one at the precinct mentioned that Detective O'Brien was investigating the shooting. As police kept him "running up and down with no satisfaction," Lawyer Hobbs also went to the offices of the New York Urban League on West 136th Street. The Urban League was a social work and civil rights organization focused on the social and economic conditions of Black residents. James Hubert, the executive director, told Hobbs that they would look into it and to come back later. Although Hobbs did not mention it, someone at the Urban League also recorded his statement. Hobbs recounted what his son Russell had told him, that the boys had stopped to see what a crowd was looking at when a patrolman appeared telling them to "break it up." The boys joined everyone else in running; the patrolman then shot Lloyd. Hobbs also added the exchange he and his wife had with the patrolman at Harlem Hospital, when he told them he had shot the boy because he had not stopped when told to. Lawyer Hobbs returned on Monday, March 25, to find that Hubert had no results for him. However, three days later, on March 28, the Urban League sent a letter sent to the MCCH, which enclosed the statement by Hobbs and asked for ”cooperation” and “assistance.” The MCCH had appealed for information in the statement it gave the press after its first meeting on March 25.
  
  The MCCH responded to the information from the Urban League by including “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family" on the list of eyewitnesses asked to give testimony to the first public hearing on March 30. Near the end of the day-long hearing, as Captain Rothengast was being questioned about who had been shot during the disorder, the chairman, Arthur Garfield Hays, asked did he "know anything specifically about a boy by the name of Hobbs?" Hays then had Mrs. Carrie Hobbs stand up, to ask her if her son Russell was present, and called the boy up to testify. Rothengast knew nothing beyond what was in the arrest report, so Hays excused him so Russell could be questioned. His testimony, or at least as recorded by the stenographer, was a somewhat garbled version of what he had told his parents. He talked of stopping on 125th Street, not 7th Avenue, and the patrolmen running up on the pavement on a horse, not in a patrol car. Few newspapers stories about the hearing mentioned Russell's testimony, even as they reported Lloyd's death later that night. Hays, however, did pay attention to the testimony, not only because Lloyd had died. Hays made investigating deaths during the disorder and victims of police brutality the next focus of his subcommittee's hearings.
  
  On April 1, Hays wrote to the MCCH's secretary, Eunice Carter, telling her to have the Hobbs family attend the next hearing, on April 6, and to "have our investigators find out all they can about [the Hobbs case]." He also had an attorney at his law firm assisting him, Hyman Glickstein, write to Police Inspector Di Martini and the superintendent of Harlem Hospital to obtain their records relating to Lloyd Hobbs. Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, one of the staff who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. He did what Detective O'Brien had not; he interviewed the Hobbs family "as the first source," having the advantage of knowing that Russell had been with Lloyd when Mcinerney shot him. Tartar complied a "social and economic history of the family" and took statements from Russell and his mother. He also learned from Lawyer Hobbs that he had been contacted by two eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore.
  
  Tartar met with the men at 213 West 128th Street, the apartment building in which they both lived, and recorded "their story." Malloy said he had walked past the automobile store almost two hours before McInerney alleged he had heard the window breaking and Hobbs taking items and the windows had been entirely broken with no merchandise remaining inside them. Not long before the Hobbs brothers arrived, he and Moore had come out to get ice cream for their wives, who were in the Moores apartment. As they arrived at the northwest corner of 128th and 7th Avenue, they saw a "commotion" on the block of 7th Avenue to the south. As they watched, people began to move toward them, breaking into a run. When Lloyd Hobbs turned west on 128th Street, they saw the patrolman shoot the boy without calling on him to halt. Nothing fell to the ground when the shot hit the boy. They also contradicted the officers' claim that objects had been thrown at them, saying that seeing both men had guns caused people in the area to stay away.
  
  On April 2, Tartar also spoke with ADA Saul Price, who told him "that the officer had not been exonerated, due to the fact that he was waiting to hear the story from the Hobbs family, particularly Russell Hobbs." An interview with the police department's ballistic expert produced no information as he had not received the bullet that hit Lloyd. Tartar's visit to Harlem Hospital was more successful, as Dr. Steinholz shared the boy's chart, which the investigator copied. An additional interview with Inspector Di Martini not mentioned in Tartar's report allowed him to make a copy of a report to Commissioner Valentine from commander of the 28th Precinct, Captain George Mulholland, on the subject of "The shooting of prisoner by Patrolman." It described McInerney observing Hobbs leaving the store window "with several objects in his hands," giving that evidence a far more prominent and specific place than they had in O'Brien's reports. Threats to the patrolman also received more attention, with allegations that "the colored people in the immediate vicinity threw bottles and other objects from the windows with the intent to strike the officer” and that the officers "dispersed a large crowd of colored men and women who had threatened them" before they could leave the scene.
  
  Tartar was among those who testified at the MCCH's April 6 public hearing, with Russell Hobbs and both his parents, Malloy and Moore, and a third man who had been with them when Lloyd Hobbs was shot, Samuel Pitts. Pitts' name was added in pencil to the MCCH's typewritten witness list, indicating they had not known he would be present. He likely came with Malloy and Moore, although he lived some distance from them, at 112 West 127th Street. Pitts witnessed the shooting from the same corner as those men, where he had been since about 10:00 PM, "looking after people and cops shooting[, and] talking about the riot." Russell's testimony was more in line with his statement than the previous week. Having continued to run up 7th Avenue fearing a beating by police, he had not, however, seen his brother shot. His parents testified that when they found Lloyd in the hospital, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” McInerney, guarding the boy, said "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" Malloy, Moore, and Pitts, who all had seen the shooting, described the same details. Arthur Garfield Hays had also expected Patrolman McInerney to testify, but although he was at the hearing, District Attorney Dodge had refused to allow officers involved in cases in the legal system to give evidence. The police officer who did testify, also not on the MCCH list of witnesses, was Detective Thomas McCormick, the stenographer who recorded Lloyd's statement at Harlem Hospital. He read that statement, which echoed what the boy had told his parents when they found him in the hospital: he had done nothing but run when the patrol car pulled up but McInerney had shot him. The hearing also heard from medical staff from Harlem Hospital. The case of Lloyd Hobbs was the first about which Hays asked them. All Dr. Arthur Logan could tell him was the nature of the boy's injuries; he had not said anything in the doctor's presence and no items had been found in his clothing. While the Black press (except for the New York Amsterdam News) highlighted the testimony on the case, among white publications only the radical Daily Worker and New Masses gave it similar prominence in reporting the hearing, and only the New York Times and Home News among the mainstream white press even mentioned Lloyd Hobbs.
  
  Hays announced plans to continue hearing evidence about the killing of Lloyd Hobbs at his subcommittee's next public hearing, in two weeks, the New York Times, New York Age, and Afro-American reported. However, Detective O'Brien delivered subpoenas to the three eyewitnesses after they appeared before the MCCH. Two days later, ADA Saul Price drew the men into the police investigation.
  
   
• 1 2022-11-10T16:14:30+00:00 Reactions to appointments to the MCCH 73 plain 2024-02-14T20:37:52+00:00 The Home News, which had an anti-Communist editorial position, prefigured one strand of criticisms of La Guardia’s appointments when it described the Commission members as “all of distinct liberal leanings” in reporting their names. The New York Sun and New York American, also anti-Communist newspapers, expanded those criticisms. Both reported complaints by unnamed “anti-Red organizations.” The New York American story described them as “openly dissatisfied with the make-up of the Mayor’s committee,” while the New York Sun reported more specifically that they considered “that the Mayor's investigating committee is composed largely of men whose names have been associated with radical movements in this country.” The targets of the complaints were Randolph, Hays, Ernst, Villard, and Cullen. In Randolph’s case, these critics pointed to him being named in the Lusk Committee report, an investigation of radicalism conducted by the state legislature fifteen years earlier. Hays’ recent work defending John Strachey, “avowed English Communist,” which is why he was in Chicago at the time of the disorder, was singled out. Despite their more well-known affiliations, Ernst and Villard were criticized for their membership in the United Action Campaign Committee of the League for Independent Political Action, an obscure group trying to create a political organization that united workers, farmers, and intellectuals that was largely defunct by 1935, with the New York American quoting two selections from a pamphlet that committee published two years earlier. Notwithstanding the uncompelling nature of the specific charges made against those four men, they were well-known for their involvement in a range of liberal causes and organizations. Not so Cullen. In his case, the charge reported in the New York American was that the poet’s writings were “quoted regularly and enthusiastically by communist publications.”
  
  While those criticisms were reported only in avowedly anti-Communist newspapers, and did not appear in later stories, criticisms of the Black members of the commission appointed by La Guardia were more widely and extensively reported. While stories in Black newspapers described the criticisms in the most detail, they also appeared in the white press, particularly in stories about the mayor’s attendance at a meeting of Black clergymen on March 25. As Black newspapers were published weekly, those stories did not appear until March 30, after those in the white press, and after the mayor had added an additional Black member to the commission, Rev. John Robinson.
  
  The first reported criticism of the Black members came from Charles Hanson of the Harlem Committee on Public Policy, which organized a meeting at the YMCA on March 22. The New York Age described that organization as “made up of business and professional men and women and welfare workers,” and “James H. Hubert, executive secretary of the New York Urban League, several prominent local clergymen and others” as giving addresses. Walter White of the NAACP was in the audience. The New York Times reported that Hanson said Randolph “was the only Negro on the committee who had practical knowledge of conditions in Harlem.” No other white newspapers mentioned that meeting or Hanson’s criticism. They were reported in New York Amsterdam News, which added that “special censure” was directed at the appointment of Cullen and Delany, dismissed as a “poet” and a “Fusion Republican,” and hence affiliated with La Guardia, or as the paper's columnist J. A. Rogers put it, “[held] a position under the mayor." Neither criticism was mentioned in the New York Age and Norfolk Journal and Guide reports of that meeting. Bennie Butler of the NAACP also wrote to specifically complain about Cullen and Delany, as having little in common with the rank and file, were not equipped to analyze conditions in and did not come into daily conduct with the masses. The Daily Worker echoed that criticism of the appointment of Delany in an editorial on March 23 that described him as “only too eager to foster the Hearst-La Guardia plot against the Communist Party.”
  
  Even as he announced the committee, La Guardia had Charles Roberts reach out to Dr William Lloyd Imes about meeting with Harlem’s clergy, apparently anticipating criticism that none had been appointed. He proved to be correct. “The absence of the name of even one minister on the whole body” was the first criticism mentioned in the New York Age, which it reported “was considered by many as a slight to the colored clergy and an oversight on the part of the authorities.” The mayor’s subsequent meeting with the Interdominational Preachers Meeting of Greater New York and Vicinity, had been planned to take place in secret, according to the New York Sun, but someone provided the press with the location. Only the New York Times reported that Charles Roberts was appointed the MCCH chairman only hours earlier, and Hubert Delany accompanied him. About fifty clergymen attended the meeting according to the New York Herald Tribune or seventy-five according to the Home News and New York Times. Several of them criticized La Guardia for not appointing a clergyman to the committee, stories in the New York World-Telegram and Daily News and the New York Amsterdam News, New York Age, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, reported. The New York Herald Tribune reported that La Guardia had tried to preempt those criticisms when he spoke, explaining that he had not appointed a minister because “If I had appointed one I would have had to appoint many others.” The story then quoted three complaints about that decision:

  "There ought to be a minister on that committee!" shouted a parson in the front row, as soon as the Mayor ended. "There is not a minister in this community who is not in touch with more persons than any member of your committee. Since we are recognized as leaders we should have representation."
  
  "The people here believe the ministers have been slighted by the Mayor," another pastor commented gloomily. "A minister is necessary for psychological reasons."
  
  An emotional touch was contributed by the last protest, when another minister demanded:
  
  "Why should we get up here and beg for a place - we, who have been suffering for many long years?"

  
  The opening of the story framed those reactions in terms that suggested that the reporter had not taken them entirely seriously, that the clergymen “told him he had outraged their feelings and prestige by failing to appoint one of their profession to the committee named to investigate the riot.” The Home News reported only one minister questioning La Guardia about “why he had not appointed one of their members to the investigating committee, pointing out that they were in close touch with the residents of the district and that one clergyman should be on it for psychological reasons.” That clergyman was “Rev. D. Ward Nichols, pastor of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church,” according to the Afro-American story, which described him as saying that “not one of [the members of the committee] has the psychological influence which comes within the power of any one of the ministers present.” Rather than reporting any criticisms from the group, the New York Times story reported only the mayor’s speech, referring to comments he made about criticisms in general terms, “that he had been criticized for his selection of the committee, some saying it was too small, others demanding a larger body. He also admitted that he might have been at fault in not appointing one clergyman to the committee.” The New York American reported the meeting without any mention of the criticism of the mayor.
  
  The mayor did not respond to his critics according to all but one white newspaper. The New York Herald Tribune and Daily News emphasized that La Guardia had no reaction to the complaints. The Home News reported that La Guardia asked the clergy to form a committee to advise the investigation, which was part of his speech, and that the group instead elected Robinson to represent them. The New York Times also mentioned Robinson’s selection after La Guardia left. Only the New York World-Telegram story reported that the group’s selection was a response to a statement by the mayor, who, “Obviously nettled toward the end,” “announced he would consider the names of Negro clergymen submitted to him for membership.”
  
  La Guardia’s commitment to add a Black clergyman was also reported in Harlem’s two Black newspapers. In the New York Amsterdam News story, “the mayor promised to consider the appointment of one minister to his body,” while the New York Age added that he “promised to appoint one of their body to the committee if a name would be sent to him immediately” and “offered the body the opportunity to name one of their number who they felt most capable. If this name were sent to him immediately, he said, he would appoint the man to the committee. A second additional appointment, chosen from a denomination not included in the Alliance, would also be named, he added.” Rev. Robinson was appointed to the committee several days later, on March 29, attending their meeting that day. At La Guardia’s request, he was added to the subcommittee investigating “the disturbances of March 19.” Only the New York Amsterdam News reported Robinson’s appointment. There is no evidence of how the Harlem community reacted to the choice of Robinson. A second clergyman was not appointed until April 4, when La Guardia wrote to notify Roberts he had selected Father McCann of St. Charles Borromeo on West 141st Street. It is not clear if McCann attended the committee meeting on April 5 as no attendance was recorded in minutes, but he was present at the subcommittee hearing on April 6. An outspoken anti-Communist who had blamed Communists for the disorder and called for a movement to drive them out of Harlem, McCann’s appointment was likely intended to address those critics. Again, only the New York Amsterdam News reported this appointment, under the headline, “Mayor Places Radicals' Foe On Riot Body.” Predictably, the Communist Party criticized McCann’s appointment, writing to both the MCCH and La Guardia about the priest’s call to drive white Communists out of Harlem (but not until April 25, to say “we understand that Reverend McCann has been appointed a member of your commission,” which seems to confirm that the appointment was not widely announced). They claimed his appointment represented an effort “at stirring up further animosity between white and Negro people in Harlem and still further trying to place the blame for the March 19 events on the Communist Party.”
  
  La Guardia made no moves to address the other criticisms of the Black members reported extensively in a story in the New York Amsterdam News, and in less detail in the New York Age and Norfolk Journal and Guide, on March 30. The Consolidated Tenants League, like the HCPP, judged only A. Philip Randolph fit for the task of investigating the disorder and “sufficiently free from political and other affiliations and views to render them capable of obtaining the proper economic-social view of the problem,” a story in the New York Amsterdam News reported. New York Amsterdam News columnist, J. A. Rogers, wrote that “in naming the routine inquiry he, or his advisers, chose among them two or three routine names and left out some who would be more effective on it. The three most outspoken critics against conditions in Harlem are James W. Ford, Frank Crosswaith and the Rev. A. C. Powell, Jr., yet none of them is on the commission.”
  
  For others, the issue was that those on the commission did not represent all of the Harlem community. The New York chapter of the National Association of College Women proposed adding social worker Mrs C. C Saunders, Amsterdam News editor Obie McCullum and Rev Johnson, who had led the boycott movement. The Consolidated Tenants League suggested “Frank Crosswaith, labor organizer; Dr. Cyril Dolly, physician; the Rev. A. Clayton Powell, Jr., of Abyssinian Baptist Church, and Mrs. Minnie Green of the Tenants' League.” Individuals interviewed for a “Man on the Street” story in the New York Amsterdam News were asked, "Do you feel that the committee appointed by Mayor LaGuardia is sufficiently representative of the people to report on their needs?" Only two of the thirteen men and women were satisfied with the mayor’s appointments. In the opinion of the others the members were too removed from the realities of life in Harlem. New York Amsterdam News columnist J. A. Rogers had also heard the complaint “that they, themselves, are not in the breadline.” While three of the men interviewed offered no suggestions for who should have been appointed, six men and women suggested an unemployed person or someone “up against it,” and one suggested “William H. Davis (general manager of the Amsterdam News) and the Rev. James W. Brown (pastor of the Mother A. M. E. Zion Church).”
  
  James Hubert of the Urban League suggested the need for a social worker in letter to La Guardia: “if anybody is supposed to know anything about these problems, surely it is the social worker. I understand that there is a person on the committee who is supposed to represent social workers, but I have not been able to discover who it might be since there is no one named up to now who is thought of as a social worker.” It seems unlikely that he did not know that the social worker was Eunice Carter, who had a degree in social work from Smith College. However, he would also have known that it was ten years since Carter had worked in the field, during which time she had shifted into the practice of law. Hubert clearly wanted someone more centrally defined by social work expertise on the commission. The Norfolk Journal and Guide included the absence of "an outstanding colored social worker" among the complaints it reported.
  
  While this criticism was “considerable” in the assessment of the New York Age, and less “mild” than that offered by the ministers “in every section of Harlem,” according to James Hubert, it was not the universal reaction of the Black community. Allyn Grenville, a correspondent for the Norfolk Journal and Guide, certainly thought the criticism was largely the work of “a score of leaders trying to use the rioting as a peg upon which to lift themselves to prominence.” In his opinion, “as commissions go, it is a representative one with more than the usual number of men of integrity. Another story in the same issue of the newspaper reversed the terms in which the New York Amsterdam News and New York Age had assessed the situation, stating “On the whole, the city has received the commission as being representative of both the city and of Harlem, and above the average, perhaps, in having a full membership of trained and capable people.” Channing Tobias offered a slightly more restrained endorsement in the New York World-Telegram: “While the committee might have been more representative in spots, still it is a committee of reputable citizens that can be depended upon to run down the facts and make a dispassionate presentation of them to the mayor.” More narrowly, New York Amsterdam News columnist J. A. Rogers defended Hubert Delany against the charge that as a member of the city government he was not willing to stand up to whites. He recounted hearing Delany “speak on the race question to a group in downtown New York, which was composed largely of white people, and it would be difficult to find any more outspoken than he was.”
  
  Among the white newspapers, La Guardia’s appointments received editorial endorsements from the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and New York Herald Tribune. All noted the Black members, whose presence the New York World-Telegram said showed “good sense,” while the New York Post referred to the Black majority as something that was “proper.” The New York Herald Tribune merely noted that the commission was made up of “distinguished men, both white and Negro.” The New York Post also described the commission members as “distinguished.” Referring to the white men La Guardia appointed, the New York World-Telegram described them as “highly intelligent humanitarians.” A story in the New York Post offered an alternative description of the white members as “men who have the confidence of Negro leaders.”
  
  As they debated who should be represented in the investigation of the disorder, neither the Mayor nor both white and Black newspapers made any mention of the group in Harlem’s population from which the boy grabbed in Kress’ store came. Lino Rivera was Puerto Rican, part of a community centered on 116th Street. In the plan of work for the MCCH Randolph proposed Puerto Ricans appeared only in a list of groups to have testify in public hearings late in the investigation. Suggestions from Walter White of the NAACP considered at the same time likewise included only one mention, the need for a “study of the origin of and interrelation of the various groups making up the Negro community of Harlem – West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Virgin Islanders etc, etc.” However, Puerto Rican leaders did not see themselves in that way, Insisting that their community had not participated in the events that followed Rivera’s release from the store, the city’s Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa attributed the disorder to the “colored elements” of the neighborhoods around 125th Street; “entirely separate from this is the Spanish-speaking group of the neighborhood, with distinct problems, absolutely different interests, and ethnic characteristics that disassociate Hispanics from their colored American neighbors.” The newspaper portrayed this Puerto Rican Harlem as a target of violence rather than a participant, publishing lists of damaged Hispanic-owned businesses that are not identified in any other source.
  
  Despite those stories, there were some nationalist groups in the Puerto Rican community that did seek representation on the MCCH. Jesús Flores, head of Unidad Obrera (Workers’ Unity) wrote to La Guardia on March 25, and Antonio Rivera, secretary of the Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana and Isabel O’Neill, secretary of the Junta Liberal Puertorriqueña de Nueva York in June, complaining that Puerto Ricans had been ignored. Rivera labeled that omission “unfair” and O’Neill an act of political and civic indifference and unmindfulness.” In addition, Ralph Bosch, a lawyer and former Republican state assembly candidate, wrote to La Guardia on March 21 advocating adding a Puerto Rican member to the MCCH: “Although the Portorican [sic] part of the population may have such needs as may call for slightly different remedies, yet when analized [sic] it all is the same social problem of racial relations.” While there are no replies to the Puerto Rican groups in the records of the mayor, Bosch did receive a response from his secretary saying that “it is not deemed advisable to enlarge the membership or scope of program of the present committee.”
   
• 1 2022-10-27T21:16:01+00:00 MCCH Meeting (March 25, 1935) 37 plain 2024-01-24T18:36:59+00:00 All eleven members of the MCCH met for the first time at 4:30 PM on March 25, at the Seventh District Municipal Court, 447 West 151st Street. Minutes of that meeting are in the records of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. The meeting was also widely reported in the press, having been announced the previous week, after some members of the MCCH met with the mayor. Aware of the presence of reporters, the MCCH members made preparing a statement for them their first business after electing their officers, the task deferred the previous week. That statement contributed to focusing attention not on the events of the disorder but on broader conditions in Harlem.
  
  Oscar Villard wrote and delivered the statement released after the meeting, having been appointed chair of a Publicity Committee that included Toney, Roberts and Carter. Although the minutes refer to a copy of the statement being attached as part of the record, one is not included in the file. Based on the newspaper stories, it appears to have had three sections. Only the Home News quoted all three sections, although it omitted a parenthetical statement in the first section that is quoted in the Daily Worker and New York Times.
  
  The 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:

  "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."

  All the stories in white newspapers quoted or paraphrased this statement, and in the case of the New York Times, New York World-Telegram, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker, made it the basis of the headline of their story. (The New York Times published an additional story at the end of the week, on the day after the first hearing, endorsing that approach and arguing that the MCCH needed to pursue “a thorough economic and social investigation” with the “assistance of technical advice.") The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and Home News folded the meeting into stories about the work of Dodge’s grand jury, which they made the subject of their headlines. The Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily Mirror, took that approach further, writing only about the progress of Dodge’s investigation without similar attention to the MCCH (keeping the Communists in the foreground). Only the New York Amsterdam News among the Black newspapers quoted this section; the other papers did not refer to the statement at all.
  
  The second section put events on par with broader causes as one of two parts of the investigation:

  “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.”

  Only the Home News and Daily News included this section in their stories, quoted in the Home News and paraphrased in the Daily News. It was not mentioned in New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker. Without this section, the stories pushed the events of the disorder to the background, giving the impression that the MCCH was not concerned with them — particularly the Daily News, which characterized the statement as a “preliminary report.”
  
  The third section was an appeal for information, and a notice that hearings would be held, without any dates.

  “To that end it asks public cooperation and will welcome any suggestions and information which should be sent directly to the secretary, Mrs Eunice Hunter Carter, in care of Seventh Municipal Court, 447 W. 151st St.
  
  Public hearings will be started at an early date.”

  This section was quoted in New York Times and Home News and paraphrased in three other newspapers: as “The public was invited to send any remedial suggestions” in the Daily News; as “beseeching the city to offer suggestions to clear up the Harlem sore spots” in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle; and as “it asks for public cooperation and will welcome any suggestions and information,” in the New York Amsterdam News. The New York Age mentioned only that the meeting took place, emphasizing that as the meeting was not open to the public the MCCH was “enveloping their activities in an obscuring cloud of secrecy that evoked considerable comment.”
  
  Three subcommittees were established at the meeting. The minutes recorded Judge Toney as chair of one appointed “to investigate the police records and all facts pertinent to the happenings in Harlem on Tuesday, March 19th,” with Hays, Schiefflin, and Carter. A meeting of the subcommittee, and two others, on discrimination and employment and on housing, was scheduled for March 27. (By the time the MCCH met again on March 29, Hays rather than Toney was acting as chairman of the subcommittee. There is no evidence in the sources about that change.) These subcommittees did not appear to have been announced to journalists after the meeting. Only the New York Amsterdam News provided any information on them: that story identified their members as those appointed in the meeting and reported that one subcommittee would “investigate the "outburst" (the committee rejected the term "riot"). There is no mention in the minutes of a decision that that subcommittee would hold a public hearing on March 30; Villard’s press statement referred only to hearings “at an early date.” However, Hays told journalists the day after the meeting that such a hearing would be held. Given that Hays announced the March 30 hearing before his subcommittee was scheduled to meet, it is not clear who else was involved in making that decision.
  
  The other work done in the meeting reported in the press was the selection of officeholders: Roberts as chairman, Villard as vice chairman and Carter as secretary. The previous week, a story in the New York Herald Tribune had suggested that Delany would be the chairman, as his name “led the list of appointments to the committee as made public by the Mayor.” Delany had rejected that possibility, telling the reporter that “he would rather have someone else, preferably a white, in that position.” When the MCCH met on March 25, the minutes mentioned “a general discussion as to whether [illegible] expedient to have a white or Negro Chairman.” Or at least that statement initially appeared in the minutes; someone later crossed it out. Before that discussion, Ernst had said “he thought that the Chairman should be a Negro,” and suggested Eunice Carter. She declined. After the discussion, Toney was nominated by an unnamed commission member, with Grimley seconding. Hays then nominated Villard, with Carter seconding, setting up a choice between a Black candidate and a white candidate. However, Villard withdrew due to “his uncertain health,” offering instead to be the vice chairman. Schiefflin then nominated Roberts, with Hays seconding. That nomination ensured that the MCCH would have a Black candidate, with Roberts winning the role on an 8-3 vote. (Villard would later write to Walter White of the NAACP lamenting his decision not to serve as chairman, “which was the wish of the majority,” complaining that “Roberts has been a very poor chairman and there has been no meeting for weeks and weeks and weeks, and there is to be no effort on the part of the Commission to carry out any of its recommendations.")
  
  The further business discussed in the meeting that was not made public was how the committee would do its work. The minutes record a “consensus” that “one trained person was necessary to correlate the reports.” The commission members voted to pursue Ira B. Reid for that role, but left the final selection to Roberts, Delany, and Carter. (After lobbying by Walter White of the NAACP, E. Franklin Frazier rather than Reid would be employed by the MCCH.) At Carter’s urging, the MCCH also decided to move forward with its investigation without waiting to fill that position, and charged Randolph, Ernst, Delany, and Carter “to formulate general plans of work for the committee” by the next meeting.