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Investigations by the staff of the MCCH
A quantitative summary of the MCCH's work recorded the details of the activities undertaken for the Subcommittee on Crime. Nineteen investigations and two special investigations, and ten interviews with police and six with hospital staff, would include Tartar's investigations of the deaths during the disorder, including the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. The one appearance before the grand jury and the one appearance before a police department trial are both related to efforts to prosecute the police officer who killed Hobbs. Interviews made up the remainder of the work tabulated: seventy-five "office interviews," likely done in the MCCH offices, and fourteen "home interviews," likely done at the subject's residence. In at least some of those interviews, MCCH staff recorded statements and collected or transcribed a variety of police and hospital records.
Additional information was sent to the MCCH. A count of correspondence compiled by Edna Hayes, who worked as Eunice Carter's secretary, provide some additional indication of the scale of that information. The documents appear to date from the end of 1935, when Hayes' time at the MCCH ended. Eighty-nine letters on the "Events of March 19th" were received and seventy-two letters sent related to that subcommittee. The only larger category was complaints about employment discrimination at the W. P. A., which amounted to 138 letters, and ninety letters received related to "social control." It is not clear if those totals included letters sent on behalf of the MCCH by Hyman Glickstein, an attorney who worked with Arthur Garfield Hays to secure information and witnesses from city government agencies.
In addition, included under the topic of "social control" in the quantitative summary, was a collection of 2,900 newspaper clippings "in connection with Disturbance of March 19th" as well as "Commission Releases." Those clippings were not all in the MCCH files, but a file labelled "Newspaper Clippings" included some information on what was gathered. Back issues for the days immediately after the disorder were ordered from eighteen newspapers: twelve major white New York City publications, the city's two major Black newspapers, the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News, together with three other Black publications, the Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the Communist publication the Daily Worker (all of which are among the sources for this study, together with three others, the Times Union, and the Black newspapers the Atlanta World and Chicago Defender). Articles on the disorder from national magazines were also collected: the New Republic, the Nation, Newsweek, Times, Commonweal, the NAACP's Opportunity and the Communist-aligned New Masses.
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This page references:
- US Census, 1930, Enumeration District 31-1118, Sheet 13B, Manhattan, New York, New York (Ancestry.com).
- "March 19th Events," Mayor's Committee on Conditions in Harlem: Newspaper Clippings, Departmental Correspondence, Box 34, Folder 7 (Roll 171), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945.
- "Back Copies Ordered," Mayor's Committee on Conditions in Harlem: Newspaper Clippings, Departmental Correspondence, Box 34, Folder 7 (Roll 171), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945.
- Edna Hayes to Mrs. E.H. Carter, Correspondence, no date, Mayor's Committee on Conditions in Harlem: Agendas, Box 32, Folder 6 (Roll 170), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- "Hearings conducted by the Commission and a quantitative summary of their work," Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 14 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- "Personnel, October 25, 1935, " Memos to and from staff, Box 131-118, Folder 2, E. Franklin Frazier Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
- "Office set-up as of December 1st," January 17, 1936, Mayor's Committee on Conditions in Harlem: Agendas, Box 32, Folder 6 (Roll 170), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).