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• 1 2023-06-24T20:59:42+00:00 Preparation for the public hearing on April 20 28 plain 2023-12-15T03:40:47+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. The investigative work being done has to be reconstructed from correspondence in the records of Mayor La Guardia and the Hays Papers, and from reports by James Tartar, the lead investigator for the subcommittee, which are also spread across those two collections.
  
  Roberts announced April 20 as the date of the hearing at the MCCH meeting on April 12. The sources contained no mention of why the interval before the next hearing was two weeks rather than one week as had been the case with the previous hearing. Hays was absent from both the April 12 meeting and the April 19 meeting, so may have been out of town or otherwise committed on April 13.
  
  After learning that the killing of Lloyd Hobbs had been presented to the grand jury on April 10, and dismissed, Hays exchanged letters with District Attorney Dodge about what evidence had been presented. The three eyewitnesses who had testified in the hearing on April 6 had clearly persuaded Hays that the shooting was not justified, as he committed to having the police witnesses testify in a public hearing now that the legal proceeding over and Dodge's instructions about what police officers could say in a public hearing did not prevent that testimony.
  
  McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson, and the detective who investigated the shooting, John O'Brien, both appear on a list of eleven police officers in the Hays Papers. That list appears to be officers from which the MCCH wanted to hear testimony and was likely prepared before the April 20 hearing. Tick marks appear next to the four officers who appeared in that hearing, Watterson and O'Brien, Detective McCormick, the stenographer who recorded a statement by Lloyd Hobbs at Harlem Hospital, and Patrolman Kaminsky, who testified about the death of August Miller. Two officers on the list had already appeared at a public hearing: Patrolman Donahue, who had released Lino Rivera, and Patrolman Eppler, who had arrested Frank Wells, but had been unable to testify about that case. The other police officers on the list did not testify in a public hearing. Patrolman Murphy was identified as a witness in the death of Andrew Lyons, and Patrolman MacKenzie, as a witness in the cases of Cornelius, Ford, and Jones. Detective Johnson was the officer who arrested Margaret Mitchell in the Kress store, according to a note from Lieutenant Battle in the Hays papers. There was no annotation about the cases about which the remaining two officers, Patrolmen Havilini and Kinstrey, had evidence.
  
  A document dated April 13 in the records of Mayor La Guardia suggests that a visit to the MCCH by Mrs. Nora Ford, the mother of William Ford, may have been responsible for Patrolman Mackenzie appearing on the list of police witnesses. She came to "lodge a complaint against the police department" related to his arrest by Mackenzie for breaking windows in the Kress store. The document recorded no details of her complaint, nor do any of the records of Ford's arrest and prosecution mention any complaint. There are no records of an investigation of the complaint by the MCCH.
  
  Hays did respond to one other complaint, from Gerald Hamilton on behalf of an unnamed Black woman who had been assaulted by an Italian baker during a dispute over him giving her a counterfeit coin whom the magistrate refused to punish. Hays requested that the woman come to the hearing on April 20.
  
  It appeared that those two complaints were not the only cases of "police brutality" about which the MCCH learned at this time. Villard reported to the MCCH meeting on April 19 that there were "far too many cases" to hold hearings on them all. Neither Nora Ford's complaint nor the one submitted by Hamilton would be part of the hearing on April 20, and were likely among those the subcommittee planned to investigate in some other way (later specified as having lawyers from the Harlem Lawyers' Association investigate). The MCCH had its investigator, James Tartar, gather information about the cases it had identified after the previous hearing.
  
  Tartar's reports record that in this two-week period 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. The interview with Aiken was dated April 19, and the other reports were dated April 20, so may not have been complete before the hearing on that date. Some copies were annotated "Memo to Mr Hays" and dated May 1, suggesting that Eunice Carter compiled them for Hays after the hearing on April 20. In that case, he may not have had this material for the hearing.
  
   
• 1 2021-12-09T01:50:40+00:00 William Ford arrested 27 plain 2023-11-09T16:56:32+00:00 At 10:40 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court he saw William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer, throw a brick through a large display window in Kress' 5, 10 & 25c store at 256 West 125th Street. Ford then allegedly shouted, "in a loud tone of voice 'Shed white blood, kill the cops, there has been enough black blood shed now.'" A "very large and threatening crowd" gathered in response to Ford's shouts, according to MacKenzie. By that time, the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, but some groups remained. Ten minutes before windows were broken in Kress' store, Claude Jones allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Blumstein's department store several buildings to to the east, and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumstein's, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Douglas Cornelius was arrested for allegedly throwing that rock.
  
  Patrolman MacKenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of not just Ford but also the two other men arrested nearby around the same time, Claude Jones and Douglas Cornelius. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. In court MacKenzie stated that he had witnessed Ford and Jones breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them (there are no details of the circumstances of the arrest of Cornelius). Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10:30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
  
  
  
  William Ford gave his address as 263 West 130th Street in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court, saying he had lived there for about four years. That address was five blocks directly north of Kress' store, just east of the intersection with 8th Avenue, so Ford could have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise and rumors circulating after the store closed. He was one of only four individuals under the age of eighteen years arrested during the disorder. Ford appeared in lists of those arrested in the disorder, but the charge made against him is different in each list: in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide he appeared among those charged with inciting a riot; in the list published in the New York Evening Journal the charge is disorderly conduct; and in a list published in the New York Daily News, Ford is charged with assault. On March 20, when he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book records the charge as inciting a riot, although the arresting officer's affidavit describes Ford breaking a window and calling on the crowd to attack police. Magistrate Renaud remanded him in custody.
  
  Ford was returned to the Harlem Magistrates Court a week later and held on bail of $1,000. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in the court docket book, in his case West-Indian born Hutson Lovell, prominent in the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity and the Elks Lodge, with an office at 240 Broadway (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and Douglas Cornelius, also had Black lawyers representing them). Two days later Ford appeared again, when Magistrate Ford sent him to the grand jury. After MacKenzie was not present for Ford's first scheduled appearance on April 8, it would be two weeks before his case was presented to the grand jury. On April 12 the grand jury transferred Ford to the Court of Special Sessions, with a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit recording both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot, and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. (As the malicious mischief charge was not recorded in the docket book Ford is not categorized as being charged with that offense.) There was no information on the outcome of that trial. Ford did not appear in the transcript of the 28th Police Precinct blotter that provides outcomes for most of those prosecuted in the Harlem Magistrates Court. No newspapers reported his appearances in court.
  
  The day after Ford appeared in the grand jury, his mother, Nora Ford, went to the MCCH to make a complaint about the police department in regards to his arrest. No details of her complaint appeared in the record of her visit, but the subcommittee on crime had begun to hear testimony in its public hearings about what it termed police brutality. Patrolman Mackenzie appeared on a list of police witnesses in the records of the chairman of that subcommittee, Arthur Garfield Hays, indicating that they had asked to have him testify in a public hearing. That did not happen. With a large number of cases reported to it, rather than holding hearings about them all, the MCCH asked Black lawyers from the Harlem Lawyers Association to investigate some cases, one of which may have been Ford's complaint. There is no evidence of the outcome of the complaint.