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• 1 2022-10-29T19:10:54+00:00 MCCH Meeting (March 29, 1935) 42 plain 2024-01-28T17:19:50+00:00 The second meeting of the MCCH on March 29 attracted significantly less attention in the press than the first meeting. A story in the New York American on March 27 mentioned that it would take place. Only the New York Evening Journal published a story clearly based on the statement the MCCH released after the meeting, briefly announcing a hearing would take place on March 30 and the membership of the subcommittee holding it, including the recently appointed Rev. Robinson. A copy of the meeting minutes is in the MCCH records, together with multiple copies of the agenda. A report Carter prepared was on the agenda for this meeting.
  
  The only member not to attend was A. Philip Randolph; he had been called to appear before the National Mediation Railroad Board in Washington, DC on the day of the meeting. The other ten original members were joined for the first time by Rev. John Robinson, whom Mayor La Guardia had formally appointed that same day, fulfilling the commitment he made at his meeting with the Interdominational Preachers Meeting of Greater New York and Vicinity on March 25.
  
  Hays gave a report of the “Committee to Investigate the Happenings of March 19th.” He had evidently taken over from Toney, the chairman appointed at the first meeting. There is no mention of that change in any sources. Hays' report focused on preparations for a hearing the next day, March 30; there is also no evidence of when after the first meeting the decision to schedule that event had been made or by whom. While the upcoming hearing was reported the day after the meeting in the New York World-Telegram without attribution, the New York Herald Tribune attributed that information to Villard; however, that seems unlikely as the statement he wrote included a vague commitment rather than that information. It was Hays whom the Home News quoted a day later, on March 27, identifying him as “a member of a subcommittee which will meet at the Heights Court at 10 a. m. on Saturday 'to welcome anybody who has anything to tell us about what happened.'” The same statement later appeared in the Afro-American, in a separate story from the one that mentioned the first meeting of the MCCH, suggesting it had been made at a different time. On March 27, the Daily Worker reported that Hays’ statement announcing the hearing had “followed by a few hours a statement issued by Oscar Villard,” and included an attack on District Attorney William Dodge for suggesting he would use the criminal anarchy statute to prosecute Communists arrested during the disorder. The New York American also reported Hays' comments on March 27, and said he made them “yesterday,” March 26, the day after the committee met and Villard released his statement. The decision to hold a hearing on March 30 thus appeared to have been made between the MCCH’s first meeting and the first meeting of the subcommittee.
  
  Reports by Delany and Ernst on the subcommittees they chaired also mentioned planned public hearings, on housing on April 6 and on discrimination on April 13. (The MCCH had use of two courtrooms, making it possible to hold hearings on different topics at the same time.) Villard’s statement announced both those hearings as well as the hearing on the events of March 19th taking place the next day.
  
  The future program of work adopted by the MCCH at this meeting gave a far smaller place to the investigation of the events of the disorder going forward than indicated in the statement to the press after their first meeting. The extensive program outlined by Randolph, with contributions by Ernst, did not mention those events. However, it did appear to assume they were being investigated as an item under “Methods for making work of Commission effective” that called for “Release [of] sections of Report from time to time” listed as the first such section, “Immediate cause of riot Tuesday, March 19.” Randolph emphasized that recommendation in a letter to Carter informing her he would not be able to attend the meeting, writing “In order that the public, colored and white, may not develop a mordant and cynical pessimism toward the Commission, I think it proper to dramatize the work by the release of sectional reports by various committees from time to time. The first section released might well be on the immediate case of the riot Tuesday night, March 19.” The suggested program of work Walter White of the NAACP sent the mayor and MCCH on March 26th, likely discussed at the same time, gave a similar limited place to investigation of the events of the disorder. The “Immediate Causes of Rioting March 19th and 20th” was the second to last topic in his outline, which he envisioned as warranting attention at the outset of the investigation: “It is suggested that the committee might well devote, at the beginning of the” investigation, as much time as it deems wise to checking the facts on immediate causes of the riot to establish responsibility and to settle controversial points where, in the opinion of the committee, there is sufficient legitimate doubt on these points to merit investigation.” White, like Randolph, argued that it was “desirable for the committee to issue a preliminary report as soon as possible on its findings in this regard.”
  
  After the MCCH adopted an outline of the work drawn up by Randolph, “certain changes in Committee assignments were accepted.” Six new subcommittees were appointed focused on topics in the outline: education, health and sanitation, labor problems, law and legislation and relief agencies. The subcommittee on the events of the disorder was renamed “Crime.” (Randolph’s outline had proposed a subcommittee to investigate “Police – riot night – numbers and policy rackets.”) The members of that committee announced on March 29 appear to have been Hays, Toney, Schiefflin, Carter, and Robinson; those are the names reported in a New York Evening Journal story published on March 29, apparently based on the statement the MCCH released to the press. Robinson’s addition came at the instruction of La Guardia. A note in the files of the mayor indicated that a member of his staff had telephoned Hays on March 29 to tell him the “Mayor hopes it will be possible to have Dr. Robinson serve on Mr Hays subcommittee and requests that Robinson be advised of the next meeting of the committee.” At some point before it submitted its report, Villard was added to the subcommittee. He signed that report as a member, together with Hays, Toney, Carter, and Robinson. He could have replaced Schiefflin, whose signature was missing. However, Hays' covering letter submitting that report to the mayor noted that Schiefflin’s signature was missing as “he at present is in Europe.” Three undated lists of the subcommittee memberships filed in the records of the MCCH confusingly list only some of the members identified in those sources; they are likely drafts. What appears to be a copy of the press statement released after the meeting on March 29 included only Hays, Schiefflin, and Toney as subcommittee members, omitting Carter and Robinson, as well as Villard. Two documents in the same file, one entitled “Suggested Committees and Assignments” and the other “Chairman and Members of Each Sub-Committee,” listed Hays, Schiefflin, Toney, and Villard as members of the crime subcommittee, omitting both Carter and Robinson.
  
  It was also at this meeting, in a discussion of securing letterheads, that the MCCH chose a “formal name.” They had been referring to themselves as the “Bi-Racial Commission.” The new name may have been Villard’s suggestion; he moved the motion to adopt it.
• 1 2022-12-09T03:14:07+00:00 In court on March 26 19 plain 2024-01-26T21:14:12+00:00 Magistrates Renaud and Ford continued to dispose of those arrested during the disorder, but on March 26, for the first time, no newspapers reported any of those hearings (although reporters were likely in the courtrooms, as several newspapers routinely published stories about court proceedings). Each magistrate convicted three men and continued the investigation of an additional man. All six of those convicted had faced more serious charges, burglary in four cases, malicious mischief in the other two, that prosecutors reduced to disorderly conduct when they returned to court. What went unreported, then, were additional instances in which alleged participants in looting or breaking windows were revealed instead to have been only members of the crowds that police encountered on the streets.
  
  Renaud imposed a sentence of five days in the Workhouse or a fine of $25 on the three men he sentenced. Albert Bass and Bernard Smith were able to pay that fine. Smith was not released, however, as he was also charged with riot, for which Renaud sent him to the grand jury. David Terry did not pay the fine, so spent five days in the Workhouse.
  
  The three men Ford sentenced in the Washington Heights court had been arrested together and charged with burglary. Ford suspended the sentence of Raymond Taylor. Preston White and Joseph Payne he sentenced to close to the maximum term in the Workhouse, five months and twenty-nine days. The two men must have had criminal records, as Ford had denied them bail. Given Taylor’s sentence, those records rather than their actions in the disorder, likely led to their sentences.
  
  As the regular legal process continued, Dodge's grand jury investigation suddenly came to halt. Only the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, and Home News reported the announcement that the grand jury would return to "routine business" for the rest of the week. Just the day before, the New York Evening Journal had confidently predicted to the contrary that "at least a dozen more [persons] will be named in bills to be returned within a short time," with most of those charged "Communists or allied radicals." While the statement said the grand jury would return to such work in April, the temporary halt proved to be the end of the investigation. The only Communists charged by the grand jury would be Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators. At the end of the week, on March 30, the first public hearing of the MCCH would hear testimony that they were under arrest by the time the crowds spread beyond the Kress store, at odds with the blame Dodge sought to place on them. In April and into May, it would be the MCCH, not the grand jury, who would investigate the start of the disorder.
• 1 2023-03-09T22:02:20+00:00 Dodge grand jury hearings suspended, March 26 19 plain 2024-02-16T21:31:55+00:00 The additional indictments and more serious charges that Dodge mentioned on March 25 did not manifest the next day. To the contrary, stories in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, and Home News reported that Dodge announced that the grand jury would return to “routine” business rather than hearing further witnesses to the Harlem disorder for the rest of the week. When a new grand jury was impaneled in April, this group would “devote much of its time to the riot inquiry,” according to the New York American and Home News, or “devote itself exclusively to the rioting inquiry,” according to the New York Evening Journal. That statement went unreported in newspapers that did not share the anti-Communist editorial position on the disorder of those publications. None of the stories explicitly explained the change. The New York Evening Journal came closest, reporting Dodge as saying that routine work had "accumulated in the last few days."
  
  Also largely unreported was the attack on Dodge invoking the criminal anarchy statute by Arthur Garfield Hays, one of the members of the MCCH investigating the disorder alongside the DA. The New York American’s brief story on Dodge’s statement mentioned Hays as having criticized the DA’s investigation, asserting that “the criminal anarchy law, under which Dodge is seeking indictments, was used 'only when the Governments want to 'get' a man.'" The Home News made the disagreement the focus of its story, headlined “Mayor’s Riot Committee Splits with Dodge as Hays Raps Plan to Invoke Anarchy Law.” Hays was quoted making the same charge as appeared in the New York American, and adding, “They are never used against Fascists.” The New York Evening Journal did not mention Hays. The Daily Worker did report Hays' attack, in a story on the MCCH that did not refer to Dodge’s statement. Both the city’s Black newspapers folded Hays’ criticism into their stories, the New York Amsterdam News on March 30, and the New York Age in a later story on the first public hearing of the MCCH on March 30.
  
  When ADA Alexander Kaminsky appeared at that public hearing on March 30, sent by Dodge to discuss what his investigation had accomplished, he testified that to date it had resulted in 12 indictments, confirming that the grand jury had voted no additional indictments after March 25. Pushed by Hays to name those individuals, Kaminsky said he could identify only the five men who had pled guilty: Carl Jones, Joseph Wade, James Hughes, Thomas Jackson, and Hezekiah Wright. He also mentioned that four others had been charged with unlawful assembly and transferred to the Court of Special Sessions. That those men were widely recognized as being the four Young Liberators was evident in Hays' follow-up questions about whether they had been charged because of their political beliefs. In answer, Kaminsky said he was sure that the grand jury would not do that.
  
  Although a story in the New York Evening Journal the day before Dodge suspended the grand jury hearings had confidently predicted that "at least a dozen more [persons] will be named in bills to be returned within a short time," with most of those charged "Communists or allied radicals," Kaminsky's widely reported appearance was the last mention of Dodge’s investigation and of grand jury hearings related to the disorder in the press.