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• 1 2022-10-29T16:00:08+00:00 Preparation for the public hearing on March 30 43 plain 2024-02-13T14:15:30+00:00 The MCCH’s investigations in preparation for the public hearing on the events of the disorder are described in the “Report of the Secretary, March 26-March 29, 1935, inclusive," in correspondence in the MCCH files in the records of Mayor La Guardia and in documents in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays.
  
  According to the report, two of the four investigators initially assigned to the MCCH started their work investigating the events of the disorder, focusing on the “immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19” and interviewing possible witnesses for the first hearing. That division of resources fit how the MCCH presented its plans in the statement to the press after its first meeting; the investigation of the immediate situation as one part and “a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem” as the other. Hays, who took over leadership of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder from Toney soon after the first meeting, asked that the investigators “examine such persons as claim to be eyewitnesses to the events of March 19 in order that time at the hearing might not be taken up by people, in actuality, who knew nothing of the events of that night.”
  
  The result of that work was a “list of eyewitnesses” “expected to be at the hearings on March 30” that Carter gave to Hays on March 29. That list is likely the nine typewritten names on a section torn from a page in the Hays Papers. One of those on the list had been among the forty-nine individuals and organizations that Carter reported wrote to the MCCH in its first four days of existence (The New York Times made an unattributed claim that by March 29 more than 80 wanted to testify). Other witnesses were on a list likely provided to Hays by the Communist Party when he met with James Ford. It is not clear how the investigators identified the remaining people.
  
  The first name in the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses was Louise Thompson, the sixth person to testify on March 30. Her name was also first on another list of twelve names in the Hays Papers headed “For Mr. Hays,” most of whom were identified as members of the Communist Party or groups affiliated with it. Thompson, however, was not identified as a member of an organization but by the information she had: “testimony to the issuing of the leaflet.” As establishing that the leaflet issued by the Young Liberators had not triggered the disorder was a major concern of the Communist Party, the list highlighting that part of Thompson’s evidence offers further confirmation that it likely came from Ford. Four other women appeared on the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses, three listed after Thompson, “Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative)” at the bottom of the page. None of those women testified on March 30. Those women were likely present in the Kress store at some point on March 19 after Rivera was grabbed by staff, part of a crowd widely reported to be almost entirely made up of women. Only one of those women could be identified. A photograph of Effie Diton, a forty-five-year-old Black woman, appeared in the New York Age in 1935, identifying her as the president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. Her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini Diton, had helped found that organization and served as its president in the 1920s. The New York Age had reported their marriage twenty years earlier, when they both worked at Paine College in Georgia. In 1930 they lived at 188 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 120th Street, close enough to 125th Street for Effie Diton to have shopped at the Kress store. “Mrs Jackson, Mrs Ida Hengain, Mrs. Effie Diton” are also on a handwritten list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. (The hearing on March 30 took the whole day, so Hays likely ran out of time to call those witnesses, although there is no evidence that they were present.) Hays called for those three women by name in the subcommittee’s second public hearing on April 6. None of them were present at that time, and they never testified in a public hearing.
  
  The sixth name on the likely list of eyewitnesses was “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family.” Sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs had been shot by a police officer during the disorder. The New York Urban League provided the details of the shooting in a letter sent to the MCCH on March 26, which enclosed a statement by Hobbs’ father and asked for "cooperation” and “assistance.” (The statement appears to have been put in a different file in the MCCH records.) The letter is one of several sources that misidentified the boy’s father as also being named Lloyd; his first name was Lawyer. In listing Lloyd Hobbs as a witness, Carter may have meant Lawyer Hobbs or could have assumed that Lloyd would recover from his injury and be able to testify himself. As it happened, neither Lloyd nor Lawyer Hobbs testified on March 30. Instead, it was Lloyd’s younger brother Russell, who had been with him during the disorder and was thus an eyewitness unlike his father, who testified on March 30. Lloyd Hobbs died that evening. Hays would make the investigation of the boy’s shooting a focus of the subcommittee’s next hearing on April 6 and return to it in later hearings on April 20 and May 14.
  
  “Mr Campbell,” the next name on the likely list of eyewitnesses, very likely Fred Campbell, whose statement is in the MCCH files. Although undated, it referred to him coming to the “Office of the Bi-Racial Commission,” a name used only until March 29, when the members voted to adopt the name MCCH. Campbell’s statement recorded he had been sent to the MCCH offices by Delany “as he had some information that he thought might be of value to us regarding the riot on Tuesday night March 19th.” “Mr Campbell" also appeared in the list of five "Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. Hays, however, did not call for him in the second public hearing and he never testified. As his evidence related to events away from the Kress store on which the hearings focused, Hays may have decided his testimony was not relevant.
  
  The final name on the list is “Mr Irving Kirshaw.” That name is also the final name on the list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. On that list the name is followed by “garage owner” in parenthesis. The garage referred to is likely the one behind the Kress store at which a hearse parked, prompting a crowd to attack the rear of the store. Hays did not call for Kirshaw at the second hearing, and he never testified. Instead, Benjamin Todman, the driver of the hearse, testified at the public hearing on May 4.
  
  In addition to the nine typewritten names, a tenth name was handwritten at the top of the likely list of eyewitnesses, “Cole,” with a check mark, both crossed out. In the Hays Papers is a letter L. F. Cole had written directly to Villard on March 23 saying “I was in Kress’ store when the boy was maltreated by three white clerks” and asking that Villard “invite me to one of your meetings of the Bi-Racial Commission.” Cole testified on March 30, the first eyewitness to give evidence, and again on May 14..
  
  The names of two other men who testified on March 30 appeared with “X” marks next to them on the list "For Mr Hays" likely supplied by the Communist Party, James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators and James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem. Hays told the MCCH at their March 29 meeting that “he had held a conference with Mr. Ford of the Communist Party, and that he and several representatives of his organization would be present at the hearing on Saturday.” A story published in the Daily Worker on March 30 that named several “militant leaders who will demand to be heard” at the public hearing that day fitted the names on the list: Ford, A. W. Berry, Williana Burroughts and “representatives from the Harlem Unemployed Councils, the Harlem International Labor Defense, and the New York District I. L. D.. Of the others named on that list, only one, Frank Wells, likely had information on the events of the disorder. His name was second after Thompson on the list and was likewise annotated with a check mark, with “police brutality” after it. Wells was arrested for allegedly breaking windows on West 125th Street during the disorder. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH, he was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street," again at the police station and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20. The officer who arrested Wells, Patrolman Eppler, would testify at the second public hearing although not about that arrest, but Wells himself never did. ILD lawyer Edward Kuntz tried to ask Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the District Attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case. Handwritten notes related to one other name on the list, William Burroughs, suggest that Hays or an investigator interviewed him as a possible eyewitness. The notes indicated that they found he was not: “has only hearsay evidence of police brutality – was not in Harlem on Mar. 19.” (Three of the remaining names on the list have “Ernst” handwritten next to them, likely indicating that their evidence was relevant to housing, the subject of the subcommittee that Ernst led. Two others are identified as part of the International Labor Defense, which had written to the MCCH saying they had information on conditions in Harlem, rather than the events of the disorder. The final name, A. Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, has an “X” written next to it, as Taylor and Ford did, but he was not among those who testified in hearings chaired by Hays.
  
  Carter’s Report indicated that the MCCH had been assured that police witnesses would be present at the hearing, likely either by Inspector Di Martini or by Lt. Samuel Battle, the city’s senior Black police officer. The assurance was reported directly after the information that an assignment of police to the hearing had been arranged through Di Martino and an “interview was also held with Police Lieutenant Jesse [sic] Battle.” The police witnesses mentioned are “Inspector of the Sixth Division [Di Martini] and officers in charge of the forces handling the crowds on Tuesday March 19 together with the crime Prevention officer who was called to the Kress store at the time of the youth’s apprehension.” On March 30, Di Martini, Donahue (the Crime Prevention Officer), Captain Rothengast (who took charge of police in front of the Kress store at 8:30 PM) and Battle testified. Additional police officers testified in the second hearing. Hays secured an additional law enforcement witness. He told the MCCH on March 29 that he had contacted the District Attorney’s office and they had agreed to send a representative to the March 30 hearing. ADA Alexander Kaminsky was the third witness to testify.
  
  The final witness who testified was Lino Rivera. There is no mention of arrangements for him to appear at the public hearing in either the MCCH records or the Hays Papers. He was photographed at the hearing with Donahue, who likely brought him and ensured his attendance.
  
  There is evidence that the MCCH had sought additional witnesses. A telegram sent to Carter on March 29 by Dorothy McConnell reported that she “Could not get names of eyewitnesses.” That the telegram went on to suggest Carter “Call on Mrs Imes and Louise Thompson at Hearing” suggests that McConnell had been searching for women who had been in the Kress store on March 19 in addition to those on the eyewitness list. Louise Thompson would later say she tried to get some of the women she had met in the store to testify "but they were scared." The name and address of one woman who had been in the store was known, but she would not testify at a public hearing. According to an undated note from Inspector Di Martini to Hays, Margaret Mitchell, described as “the woman who was arrested in the store at the time the boy was in the store,” “refused” the request of a detective to appear. Hays asked about Mitchell at the first hearing; Lt. Battle testfied that when he called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing, “she refused to come.” When Hays again asked Battle about her testimony three weeks later, he reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing." As the MCCH did not have subpoena power, they could not compel her attendance. Perhaps because they lacked that power, the MCCH appeared to have relied on police to bring at least some of the witnesses to its public hearings. The list of eyewitnesses in the Hays Papers is headed “Police Department.”
  
  Police had also sought to bring at least one staff member from the Kress store to the hearing on March 30. A handwritten memo from Di Martini dated that day informed the MCCH of Steve Urban, “the man supposed to be treated by an ambulance has worked all night and left the store, present whereabout unknown.” A police officer had evidently called at the store for Urban as the memo attributed that information to “W. F. Woodman ass’t manager Kress Dept Store 256 W 125th St.” Urban never did testify before the MCCH. The other man involved in grabbing Rivera, Charles Hurley, did, on April 6. The MCCH also sought to have the store manager, Jackson Smith, testify; in the hearing on March 30, Di Martini told the MCCH, “I have spoken to Mr Smith, manager, who said that he was busy and he could not get away.”
  
  Finally, Hays requested at the March 29 meeting of the MCCH that “an investigator be sent to Harlem Hospital to secure information relative to victims of the disturbance on March 19th.” It was unlikely that he expected those investigation to produce witnesses for the hearing on March 30. In the second public hearing, on April 6, staff from the hospital gave evidence about the injuries suffered by Lloyd Hobbs and Andrew Lyons, and by two other victims of alleged police brutality.