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1. 1 2023-07-05T20:55:35+00:00 Anonymous Investigations of the events of the disorder Anonymous 34 plain 2024-01-27T03:28:43+00:00 Anonymous

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• 1 2023-06-14T14:50:23+00:00 The MCCH investigation of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs continues 105 plain 2023-12-17T00:43:44+00:00 James Tartar, the MCCH's investigator, described two charges as the focus of the MCCH's effort to "get the facts" about the shooting:

  1. Patrolman John F. McInerney deliberately shot Lloyd Hobbs without provocation
  2. That Lloyd Hobbs was charged with burglary in order to justify the policeman's claim that he was forced to shoot in order to effect an arrest

  Although Hays expected all three police witnesses to answer those charges on April 20, only Patrolman Watterson and Detective O'Brien testified. While no explanation was offered at the hearing for Patrolman McInerney's absence, Tartar recorded that the officer had been "granted a sick leave." Hays required that he be at the next hearing as his absence “gave the public a bad impression,” according to the Home News, but his leave extended until at least June 7, after the subcommittee final hearing, so he never testified publicly. The testimony of his partner, Patrolman Watterson, did not entirely answer the first charge about which the MCCH sought facts. He had not left the patrol car. While he had seen a man come out of the automobile store window with items in his hand, he could not identify him as Hobbs. McInerney told him it was Hobbs. Watterson heard his partner call out to the men outside the store to stop, but did not see what happened after that. He was reversing the patrol car to follow McInerney and the men as they ran north on 7th Avenue. He turned the car into 128th Street, and then saw his partner standing over Hobbs and a horn and socket set on the ground next to the boy. Contradicting the police reports, he testified that objects were not thrown at him and McInerney until after his partner shot the boy, when a crowd began to gather. Watterson then grabbed his rifle, leveled it at the crowd and told them to come no further while McInerney loaded Hobbs into the patrol car.
  
  Watterson's testimony was cut short when Hays took exception to heckling from an audience member, who had called out, "Will the dog bark a little louder, please?” Hays had warned, in his letter to Dodge after the grand jury's decision, that, "One of the most ominous features which emerges from the evidence we have taken appears to be a lack of confidence the people of Harlem have in the police, and their feeling that Negroes cannot expect justice." The heckling, hissing, and booing with which the audience reacted to the police witnesses that appeared in public hearings as the MCCH investigation of the killing continued bore out that warning.
  
  While Watterson did not return to the stand after Hays adjourned the hearing to regain order, Detective O'Brien later appeared to testify about his investigation of the shooting of Hobbs. He was questioned about the items that Hobbs had allegedly stolen, which were not recorded in the police blotter or the report sent from the 28th Precinct to Commissioner Valentine that Tartar had obtained. O'Brien testified that while McInerey mentioned the stolen items when they spoke at the hospital immediately after Hobbs was shot, he did not actually see them until the patrolman brought them to the District Attorney's office on April 1. ILD lawyers questioning the detective seized on that twelve-day interval to suggest McInerney could have obtained the horn and socket set after he shot the boy to justify his actions. Hays asked for the items to be fingerprinted to see if Hobbs had actually touched them.
  
  After the hearing, Tartar made further attempts to identify eyewitnesses and "to get information concerning the whereabouts of the stolen items." 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. That meant that the patrolman had those items in his possession for nineteen days after the shooting. Hays questioned O'Brien about that information at the subcommittee's final hearing on May 18, to which the detective brought the horn and socket set. O'Brien said he did not know when they had been turned in, but countered that they were described in the arrest record. As Tartar later explained to E. Franklin Frazier, who led the MCCH's research, the arrest record was a book containing a form that was filled in as the next record keeping step after a summary was entered into the police blotter, the record the MCCH investigator had seen. O'Brien had made no mention of the arrest record in his previous testimony or the reports he filed as part of his investigation. He also testified that no fingerprints had been found on the items — or more precisely, that only smudges had been found.
  
  Three additional eyewitnesses also testified in the MCCH hearing on May 18. Tartar reported that they had been found as a result of a survey of the neighborhood, implying that he had found them. However, at the hearing, Clarence Wilson testified that he had obtained the addresses of two witnesses from Lawyer Hobbs. One, John Bennett, did not respond when called on, but Wilson encountered another man who was an eyewitness, Marshall Pfifer, when looking for Joseph Hughes, the second witness. Hughes was too sick to attend the hearing, so Wilson recounted what he had seen. Warren Wright, the third man, provided no details of how he had been found. All three men told the same story as Malloy, Moore, and Pitts had in the earlier hearing: Hobbs was not carrying anything and McInerney had not called out for him to stop before shooting him. Wright and Hughes saw those events from different perspectives than the earlier witnesses: Wright was at the entrance to the apartments above 2150 7th Avenue, south of the automobile supply store, while Hughes was in 201 West 128th Street, toward which Hobbs was running when McInerney shot him. (Pfifer was on the same corner across 128th Street from the store as Malloy, Moore and Pitts, and, like the later man, had been there since around 10:00 PM.) Around April 20, Tartar also interviewed the owners of the businesses on the same block as the automobile supply store, to obtain information on when their windows were broken and what losses they suffered, providing some support for the testimony that the automobile supply store's windows were broken before Hobbs arrived offered by Pfifer, as well as Malloy and Moore.
  
  The audience for the results of the MCCCH's continued investigation was clearly not simply the public. Hays informed the hearing on May 18 that Commissioner Valentine had told him the police department was still investigating the case, a reference to exchange of letters between the men on May 2 and May 3. Hays' letter made clear that even before the new witnesses testified, he felt that the "large number of witnesses" who had testified proved that Hobbs had not been looting notwithstanding the grand jury's response to their evidence. During the hearing, Williams raised that efforts were being made "to get this case to go to the Grand Jury" again, which likely included ILD lawyers. Hays responded that the case was "now being taken up with the District Attorney."
• 1 2022-04-09T20:48:27+00:00 James Tartar's investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs 61 plain 2023-12-15T02:53:59+00:00 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]." Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, one of the staff who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. The thirty-year-old Black former shipping clerk was an investigator for the Department of Public Welfare who lived on the western boundary of Harlem, at 448 West 151st Street. Born in Tennessee, he had lived in North Carolina at the time of the 1920 census, moving later to Ohio, where he worked as a secretary and married in 1924. The family was living in New York City by 1926, and at 759 St. Nicholas Avenue in 1930. As a Black Harlem resident, Tartar reinforced the Black presence on the MCCH and would have received a less hostile reception from residents than the white police detective investigating the shooting. At the same time, his occupation put him among the upper ranks of the Black population, different from most of the witnesses he interviewed.
  
  The records of Tartar's investigation should have been in the files of the MCCH in the records of Mayor La Guardia, but were retained by Arthur Garfield Hays, for whose subcommittee he investigated the shooting, and E. Franklin Frazier, who led the MCCH's research. Several reports by Tartar from his early investigations are filed in the Hays Papers. A narrative summary of his investigation and the case are in the Frazier Papers. Tartar also testified in the MCCH hearing on April 7 about his investigation up to that point. He mentioned details of the investigation in correspondence with Frazier after the MCCH investigation was completed.
  
  In the week leading up to the MCCH hearing on April 7, Tartar interviewed the Hobbs family "as the first source." He recorded statements by Russell and his mother. Notes from undated conversations appear in another document, describing Lloyd's funeral, their belief that Lloyd would not have committed a burglary, and the information Lawyer Hobbs had received from Howard Mallloy and Arthur Moore about what they had witnessed. The funeral took place on April 2; those conversations took place after that date. Tartar was also assigned to do a "Social and Economical History of the Hobbs Family," submitting a page and a half summarizing the family's origins in Virginia and life in New York City.
  
  Tartar contacted the two eyewitnesses identified to him by Lloyd's father, Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore. He met with the men at 213 West 128th Street, the apartment building in which they both lived, and recorded "their story." That document is dated April 5, but Tartar's signature is dated April 4. Both dates provided sufficient time for the MCCH staff to organize the men's presence at the hearing on April 7.
  
  A second strand of the investigation included Tartar gathering information from a variety of law enforcement sources. His records include notes on a series of interviews conducted on April 2. He spoke with ADA Saul Price, who told him he "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. Sometime during the week he also visited the 28th Precinct, and recorded the contents of the police blotter, where officers recorded a summary of an arrest. Lieutenant Greenberg read him that material as at that time there was no definite understanding between the Commission and the police department with regards to taking transcripts of confidential police records, he later informed Frazier. That information appears in the records in the Hays Papers; however, there was no record of the interview with Inspector Di Martini that he mentioned in his testimony to the MCCH hearing on April 7. At that time he made a copy of a report by the commander of the 28th Precinct, Captain George Mulholland, "The shooting of prisoner by Patrolman," submitted to Commissioner Valentine on March 30, immediately after the death of Lloyd Hobbs. Tartar's notes did mention the report as being incorporated in his records but it was not in the files in the Hays Papers (a transcription appeared in the transcript of the MCCH hearing on April 20). Tartar was among those who testified at the MCCH's April 6 public hearing, recounting his interview with ADA Price and introducing a copy of the report from the 28th Precinct to Commissioner Valentine so Hays could have details in it contradicted by Russell Hobbs and the three eyewitnesses, Malloy, Moore, and Samuel Pitts.
  
  Hays announced plans to continue hearing evidence about the killing of Lloyd Hobbs at his subcommittee's next public hearing, in two weeks. However, those plans were overtaken by grand jury hearing on April 10, which led Hays to focus on having witnesses who appeared before the grand jury testify in a public hearing. The only further investigation Tartar did before the April 20 hearing was to interview the owners of the businesses on the same block as the automobile supply store, and draw a sketch of the storefronts on the block, to obtain information on when their windows were broken and what losses they suffered. Both those documents are dated April 20, the day of the MCCH hearing. The information they contained provided some support for testimony that the automobile supply store's windows were broken before Hobbs arrived, by Malloy and Moore on April 20 (and by another eyewitness, Marshall Pfifer, on May 18).
  
  After the hearing on April 20, Tartar made further attempts to identify eyewitnesses and "to get information concerning the whereabouts of the stolen items." 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. That meant that the patrolman had those items in his possession for nineteen days after the shooting. There are no records of those investigations in Hays' files; Tartar mentioned them in his narrative summary. Hays relied on Tartar's investigation when he questioned Detective O'Brien about where the horn and socket set had been when the officer produced them at the MCCH public hearing on May 18.
  
  Three additional eyewitnesses also testified in the MCCH hearing on May 18. Tartar reported that they had been found as a result of a survey of the neighborhood, implying that he had found them. However, at the hearing, Clarence Wilson testified that he had obtained the addresses of two witnesses from Lawyer Hobbs at the request of a member of the MCCH. One did not respond when called on, but Wilson encountered another man who was an eyewitness, Marshall Pfifer, when looking for John Bennett, the second witness. Bennett was too sick to attend the hearing, so Wilson recounted what he had seen. Warren Wright, the third man, provided no details of how he had been found.
  
  The evidence heard at the May 18 hearing was presented to the grand jury on June 10. Tartar claimed a prominent role in ADA Saul Price's decision to re-examine the case in the narrative of his investigation. After being notified by inspector Di Martini that he was resubmitting the case to the district attorney, Tartar attended the conference in the district attorney's office about the case and and by his own account, "after much argument," "convinced the District Attorney that the new witnesses would testify to new facts and that they should be heard." Tartar also accompanied Detective O'Brien to serve subpoenas on the four witnesses whose testimony was heard on May 18, an arrangement set up by Hays. After hearing from Bennett, Hughes, Pfifer, and Wright, Price agreed to take the case to the grand jury again. Tartar himself also testified in the grand jury hearing. He told the grand jury that McInerney had not handed in the allegedly stolen items until April 8 and that police records indicated that "no loot had been found on the person of Lloyd Hobbs." Tartar clearly spoke to journalists from the New York Age and the Afro-American about his testimony, as it featured in the stories that those Black newspapers published about the grand jury decision.
  
  Tartar recounted that he urged Inspector Di Martini to hold such an investigation after the grand jury decision. In fact, such a hearing had already been planned, in the aftermath of the decision of the first grand jury. Tartar, with E. Franklin Frazier, attended the hearing when it took place, on June 14. The account in his narrative summary was the only source of information on the hearing, which went unreported in the press.
• 1 2023-06-14T14:48:34+00:00 Patrolman John McInerney in the grand jury (June 10) 43 plain 2024-01-26T23:24:41+00:00 Just over a week after the last public hearing of the MCCH's Subcommittee on Crime, on May 22, their investigator, James Tartar, was notified that Inspector Di Martini planned to resubmit the case to the district attorney for consideration for presentation to the grand jury. He attended the subsequent conference, and by his own account, "after much argument," "convinced the District Attorney that the new witnesses would testify to new facts and that they should be heard." Tartar also accompanied Detective O'Brien to serve subpoenas on the four witnesses whose testimony was heard on May 18, an indication that the new legal proceeding was instigated by the MCCH. On March 28, ADA Saul Price heard testimony from Marshall Pfifer, Joseph Hughes, Warren Wright, and John Bennett, the latter evidently recovered from the illness that kept him from the MCCH hearing. There were no records of Bennett's testimony. Price then decided to resubmit the case to the grand jury.
  
  The New York Amsterdam News reported the pending hearing in its June 7 edition, information that likely came from someone in the MCCH. The story attributed the resubmission of the case to testimony at the May 18 hearing and listed four "facts brought out by the Commission" that it evidently understood as the arguments that would be made in the hearing:

  (1) That McInerney did not list any stolen articles when he made a record of the youth's arrest at the 123d street station following the shooting
  (2) That a number of objects, allegedly stolen, were shown to the Grand Jury on April 4, although police officers were unable to account for their presence during the March 19 and April 4 period.
  (3) That tests, made at the suggestion of Attorney Arthur Garfield Hays of the Mayor's Commission, failed to show Hobbs' fingerprints on the stolen articles
  (4) That Detective John J. O'Brien, assigned to investigate the shooting, made no attempt to look into the boy's background, but concentrated his efforts on proving Lloyd Hobbs a thief. He did not call on the boy's family until after Lloyd's death on Harlem Hospital on March 30.

  In addition to the four new eyewitnesses, Russell Hobbs and his parents, Patrolman Watterson, and Detective O'Brien again testified. Patrolman McInerney too again sought to appear, resulting in the hearing being postponed from June 7 until June 10 as he was on vacation. The witnesses "testified to practically the same as they had before," according to James Tartar. The MCCH investigator himself also testified. He told the grand jury that McInerney had not handed in the allegedly stolen items until April 8 and that police records indicated that "no loot had been found on the person of Lloyd Hobbs." The latter statement had been contradicted on May 18 by O'Brien's claim that the horn and socket set were listed in the arrest record, and likely was again on June 10. Arthur Garfield Hays "took an active part" in the hearing, according to the New York Age, although on what basis he could have done so is not clear. Again, the grand jury decided it did not need to hear from McInerney, although on this occasion they "deliberated for fully thirty minutes," Tartar reported. And again, they dismissed the case against the patrolman.
  
  Tartar clearly spoke to journalists from the the New York Age and the Afro-American about his testimony, as it featured in the stories that those Black newspapers published about the grand jury decision. (Despite reporting the pending hearing, the New York Amsterdam News did not publish a story about its outcome.) What "registered with the grand jury," according to the Afro-American, was "the officer's claim and the evidence of the loot." While Black journalists expressed frustration with the decision — the headline in the New York Age read, "Grand Jury Refuses to Indict Policeman Who Fatally Shot Youth in Riot," while the Afro-American's headline read "2 Grand Juries Won't Indict Cop Who Killed Boy" — it went unreported in the white press.
  
  With the end of the legal proceedings, the only remaining means of holding McInerney accountable was a police department hearing. Tartar reported that he urged Inspector Di Martini to hold such an investigation after the grand jury decision. In fact, such a hearing had already been planned, in the aftermath of the decision of the first grand jury. Hays had asked Commissioner Valentine that the police department "make an investigation," to which he had responded that the case would be "thoroughly investigated and appropriate action taken." Hays had written in the Report of the Subcommittee on May 29, before the second grand jury, that a hearing was pending. It appeared to have been delayed because the officer assigned to conduct it, Deputy Inspector McGrath, was away from the city until May 23, according to a phone message left for Arthur Garfield Hays on May 17. Tartar was likely responsible for Black journalists reporting that a police hearing was a possibility rather than pending. McInerney "may still, however, face departmental action," the New York Age reported. The Afro-American reporter was both more explicit that a "police department trial was being pushed" rather than being considered at the initiative of the police department, and dismissive of its value: "this gives no hopes to Mr and Mrs Lawyer Hobbs...that the case will pass the investigating stages."
• 1 2023-06-14T14:50:59+00:00 The police hearing (June 14) 39 plain 2023-12-15T02:22:08+00:00 Less than a week after a grand jury decided not to indict Patrolman John McInerney, on June 14, a police department hearing on the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs took place. Only three of the seven eyewitnesses were at the hearing, Howard Malloy, John Bennett, and Warren Wright. Why Moore, Pitts, Hughes, and Pfiffer were not present was not mentioned. Louis Eisenberg, the store owner, also did not testify, nor did the medical examiner. Russell Hobbs and his parents were heard, as were Patrolman Watterson and Detectives O'Brien and McCormick. None said anything different from their testimony in the grand jury hearings and in the MCCH hearings, according to James Tartar, who was in attendance, together with E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist who had recently started work leading the MCCH's investigation of Harlem.
  
  The tenth witness at the hearing was Patrolman McInerney, whose testimony had not been heard in either the legal proceedings or the MCCH hearings. For Tartar, the hearing provided his "first opportunity to hear Patrolman McInerney's version of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs." He found it far from persuasive; in fact, he judged it "rehearsed" as it was "as if he were reading the testimony of Patrolman Watterson," his partner. McInerney's testimony that on the morning of March 20 he had taken the horn and socket set to Eisenberg for him to identify the items as coming from his store, and then kept them in his locker, Tartar saw as evidence he had obtained them after he learned that the shooting was being investigated. Seeing the arrest record in which O'Brien had testified the horn and socket set had been recorded only confirmed his opinion: he discovered that part of the record had been "changed to show the quantity and type of articles alleged to have been shown." Tartar claimed that when he made Inspector Di Martini aware of the changes, he agreed that the arrest record had been altered.
  
  Despite what Tartar found in the arrest record, the outcome of the hearing was only a reprimand for Patrolman McInerney for failing to turn in evidence at the proper time. Not only Tartar, but Arthur Garfield Hays and E. Franklin Frazier, drew different conclusions from the testimony. While Tartar could only express his belief that McInerney "had committed a crime" in reports for the MCCH, Hays and Frazier had the opportunity to condemn the police officer's killing of Lloyd Hobbs in reports that were eventually made public.
  
  The report of the subcommittee characterized the shooting as "inexcusable." "The record of Lloyd Hobbs and that of his family are presumptive evidence that he was not the kind of boy to engage in looting" and "it is the testimony of several reputable witnesses that McInerney did not call upon the boy to halt before firing and that his first and only shot hit the boy." Even had Hobbs done what the patrolmen claimed, the report argued that shooting him was not justified: "there was no public disorder at the time to call for violent action, a life should not have been taken for the offense, and the officer should certainly have fired into the air, if necessary, rather than shot to kill immediately. Better still would have been the continuation of the pursuit and at least a genuine effort to run the boy down."
  
  After the report of the subcommittee was made public, Hays wrote to Commissioner Valentine about its recommendations and what had been done regarding the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs and the other cases of police brutality it described. Valentine responded that each of the cases had "been thoroughly investigated by the appropriate officials of this Department and no cause for disciplinary action was found." In regards to Hobbs specifically, he simply stated that two grand juries had exonerated McInerney. Public censure by the MCCH clearly did not trouble the police department.
  
  Six months later, Frazier echoed the subcommittee report in describing the killing of Lloyd Hobbs as "inexcusable" in the final report of the MCCH, adding that it was "a brutal act on the part of the police." In dismissing McInerney's account of the shooting, Frazier argued that "besides the testimony of witnesses, there are several acts which cast serious doubts on the statement of the police," enumerating the questions about the items Hobbs was alleged to have stolen. He also invoked Lloyd's "good record in school and in the community" and the family's "good standing and character" as further evidence that the shooting was unjustified and "that the life of a Negro is of little value to the police."
  
  Police Commissioner Valentine's response to the final report effectively confirmed Frazier's conclusion. He devoted only six and a half lines of the six-page report to Mayor La Guardia to the "Case of Lloyd Hobbs," significantly less than any of the other five cases of police brutality discussed in the report. The killing was simply "the outcome of Hobbs burglarizing premises 2150 7th Avenue," Valentine wrote, an assessment that the grand jury had confirmed when they "exonerated" McInerney. In perhaps a further indication of how little attention Valentine and his staff paid to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, the letter mistakenly stated that McInerney had testified before the grand jury.
   
• 1 2022-11-11T17:08:36+00:00 Investigations (April 6-April 19) 22 plain 2024-01-24T19:51:08+00:00 While twenty witnesses had testified at the public hearing on April 6, their testimony did not complete the investigation of the events of March 19 as MCCH members had planned. As a result of Dodge's instructions limiting police testimony, Patrolman McInerney and his partner, Patrolman Watterson, had not testified about the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs. The absence of staff from the Kress store prevented wrapping up testimony about what had happened in the store. In addition, there had been no time to hear testimony on the cases of police brutality about which the MCCH had begun gathering information. With so many of the witnesses asked to attend the April 6 hearing not heard, the next planned hearing that Hays had announced to the MCCH meeting might have been expected to be held the next week, on April 13. However, it did not take place until another week later, on April 20. Dodge’s injunction against police involved in legal proceedings testifying might have been one reason for the delay, which would have allowed the legal process to be completed. Hays may also have not been available to chair the hearing until April 20. He did not attend the MCCH meetings on April 12 and April 19.
  
  Whatever plans Hays had for continuing the investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, they were disrupted when he read in the press that the district attorney had presented the case to the grand jury on April 10. They decided not to indict Patrolman McInerney. Having listened to the testimony of the eyewitnesses, Hays clearly found that decision surprising. He immediately wrote to the district attorney, asking if those witnesses had testified before the grand jury and who else had given evidence. He told the district attorney he was anxious to have any other witnesses appear in a MCCH hearing to publicly present all the evidence "so that if there was any justification for the shooting, the public may know it." Dodge replied the next day that "the District Attorney's office called every witness who knew anything with reference to this case against McInerney." That list included all those who had testified in the public hearing. Those who had not appeared were Louis Eisenberg, the owner of the store allegedly looted, Detective O’Brien, who had conducted the police investigation of the shooting, and McInerney and Watterson. The MCCH could now hear the testimony of the three police officers, as the grand jury's decision meant that the district attorney’s restriction on officers involved in legal proceedings testifying no longer applied to them.
  
  Tartar also continued to gather information about the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, as well as three other cases about which the MCCH still had to hear testimony. He interviewed the storekeepers on the block where Lloyd Hobbs was shot, gathered records from the 23rd Precinct about the cases of Thomas Aiken and Edward Laurie, and interviewed Aiken and the aunt of James Thompson, the other Black man known to have been killed by police during the disorder.
  
  Adding to the backlog of witnesses, the MCCH learned of additional incidents of police brutality. By the time the MCCH met on April 19, the subcommittee had decided “there were far too many” cases for all of them to be investigated in public hearings, Villard reported. “Some other investigations” would be made of the other cases. (They later approached the Harlem Lawyers Association to take on that task.) For the public hearings, the focus remained the cases that the MCCH had begun investigating the previous week.
• 1 2022-05-23T17:58:22+00:00 7:30 PM to 8:00 PM 21 plain 2024-01-11T20:44:15+00:00
  
  On 125th Street near the Kress store, a reporter for the Afro-American watched around 7:30 PM as “mounted police rode the sidewalk keeping the crowd back.” On the other side of the street, however, where police made no efforts to clear the street, “the crowd was growing thicker.” He listened as “Young men and women talked about mass action, about the beating up of "the poor little boy," about "if this was a white neighborhood and a colored man had hit a white boy, they would have strung him up long ago." Police as well as the Kress store staff were targets of the people on the street; the reporter told a “youth” who stopped to “harangue the police” to “move on.”
  
  The crowds across the street continued to be fed by people on their way to the theaters that lined that side of 125th Street. Among them were Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black boy and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell, on their way to a show at the Apollo Theater. Leaving their family home at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue only a block and a half from the theater around 7:30 PM, they had passed “groups of people standing on corners and along 125th Street,” far more police officers than usual and “windows in many stores broken.” Unlike Channing Tobias a few hours earlier, that scene did not discourage the brothers from continuing on to the theater. Unfortunately, as Tobias had feared, when they emerged from the theater after midnight, the disorder in Harlem would have grown.
  
  At the opposite end of the block, Charles Romney arrived on the corner of 7th Avenue to find groups of people talking about a boy being murdered by police. Like the Hobbs brothers, he saw “lots of windows smashed” on 125th Street. People had begun to throw objects at previously undamaged store windows east of Blumstein’s department store as Romney saw the broken glass from the corner. At least some of the damage done to Myladys shop, the W. T. Grant department store, and the McCrory and Woolworths 5 & 10 cent stores was likely done at this time. Glass might have been broken in businesses on the other side of West 125th Street; however the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits, Minks Haberdashery, Savon Clothes store, and General Stationery & Supplies store may not have been damaged for another hour or so, when there were reports of glass breaking in neighboring stores.  Even as police reinforcements continued to arrive, including the emergency truck that had originally stopped at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, there is no evidence that officers on 125th Street arrested anyone for breaking windows at this time. They may have arrested some of those on the street; Romney saw police putting people into radio cars at the corner of 7th Avenue. He left when threatened with arrest by one officer, walking to the rear of the Kress store on 124th Street in search of information. While he found an “excited” crowd on the corner of 124th Street and 7th Avenue, a police officer at the store entrance told him to get away from the area. Worried that his wife was about to leave to visit her mother, Romney decided to go to his home to warn her not to go out on the streets.
  
  As Romney was leaving 125th Street, many other people were arriving as rumors spread through Harlem. Carlton Moss, a twenty-six-year-old Black actor and writer, who was initially unconvinced by an actor’s claim that he had seen a riot break out on 125th Street in response to a young Black boy being beaten to death, soon heard other reports of “rising riots” that caused him to abandon a rehearsal and investigate what was happening. Going south on 7th Avenue, he found “throngs of spectators all hastening in the same direction.” On 125th Street, the journalist from the Afro-American watched as “the crowd became bigger until it just overflowed across Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Newcomers were initiated into the mysteries of the Young Liberators and white and colored 'evangelists' in the crowd.” In some cases that information would have come from the leaflets the Young Liberators continued to distribute. The idea that a boy had been killed took hold among those arriving on 125th Street even though the journalist observed that “the same people who were saying, 'They beat him to death' could not have given any further proof than the fact that 'they say so' or 'so they say.'”
• 1 2022-11-11T19:35:05+00:00 Investigations (May 4-May 17) 16 plain 2024-01-27T03:27:24+00:00 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 did not appear to still 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.
• 1 2023-06-26T18:44:50+00:00 Preparation for the public hearing on May 18 14 plain 2023-12-15T03:45:11+00:00 No secretary's report by Eunice Carter providing an overview of the work of the MCCH staff was found for any week after March 30-April 5. There was little correspondence from this period related to the investigation of the disorder in either the records of Mayor La Guardia or the Hays Papers.
  
  Although there are no reports from James Tartar from this period, the narrative summary of his investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs in the Frazier Papers described additional efforts to find information. Tartar presented that investigation as his own initiative: "Your investigator, 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." His survey of the neighborhood found four new witnesses, Tartar reported. However, Clarence Wilson would testify in the hearing on May 18 that he had encountered one of those witnesses, Marshall Pfifer, while looking for another man on the day of the hearing. As an unnamed member of the MCCH had sent Wilson to bring the other three witnesses to the hearing, Tartar could have identified the other three witnesses. However, Wilson had been sent to Lawyer Hobbs, the boy's father, for the men's addresses. Hobbs had provided the MCCH with the names of the three witnesses who had testified on April 6, so he seems more likely to have found this second group than Tartar.

  What Tartar clearly did do was "get information concerning the whereabouts of the stolen items" that Patrolman McInerney claimed Lloyd Hobbs had looted and dropped when 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. There are no records of those investigations in Hays' files; Tartar mentioned them in his narrative summary.