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Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A history of police violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 149-164.
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Investigations (March 30-April 5)
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While Arthur Garfield Hays likely left the hearing on March 30 wanting to know more about the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs as an example of police actions during the disorder, the boy’s death later that evening would have made gathering information about what had happened more of a priority. On April 1st, he wrote to Eunice Carter, the MCCH secretary, asking to "have our investigators find out all they can about [the Hobbs case]" and to have the Hobbs family attend the next hearing on April 6. Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, the thirty-year-old Black resident of Harlem and former shipping clerk who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. He interviewed the Hobbs family, who gave him the names of two Black men who had contacted them to say they had witnessed the shooting. Tartar then interviewed those men, , Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore. He also visited the 28th Precinct and made copies of the police blotter and a report from the precinct commander to the Police Commissioner.
At the same time, Hays embarked on an investigation of police brutality both in the disorder and more broadly. While the MCCH had extended the subcommittee’s remit from the events of March 19 to crime, police brutality was not one of the topics under that umbrella in Randolph’s plan. It identified numbers gambling, ubiquitous in Harlem at this time, and juvenile delinquency, perceived to be increasing in the context of the Depression, as the topics to be investigated. While the NAACP was receiving complaints of police brutality about Black New Yorkers at this time, Hays’ concern with the topic more likely grew from the involvement of the ACLU in fighting the third degree and police violence against Communists and labor organizations. His intention was that the investigation of police brutality be a “separate project” of the subcommittee on crime, begun after the hearings on the events of March 19 had been completed and a report submitted to the mayor, he told members of the MCCH when they met on April 5. At that time, he reported that the subcommittee had decided another hearing on the events would be needed in addition to the one scheduled the next day. However, the two topics would prove to be intertwined. As a result, the subcommittee’s preliminary report would include both and argue that police brutality was a cause of the disorder as well as a feature of it.
Hays had Hyman Glickstein, an attorney from his law firm, write to senior police officers, the District Attorney, the Medical Examiner and Harlem Hospital seeking records about six cases. Four involved men who died during the disorder, Hobbs and James Thompson, Andrew Lyons and August Miller. Questions about those deaths had been raised during the testimony of Captain Rothengast at the hearing on March 30. The other two incidents had not occurred during the disorder. Edward Laurie had died at the hands of police soon after the disorder, a case that had been widely reported in the press. Thomas Aiken, blind in one eye after a beating by police just over a week before the disorder, had been brought to the MCCH's attention by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to who Aiken's mother had written. Glickstein asked that the police officers and physicians who had been involved in the cases be present at the next hearing. Witnesses to Aiken's beating and Laurie's family were also asked to be at the hearing.
To expand the investigation into police brutality, Hays again sought the assistance of the Communist Party. He had Glickstein write to the ILD lawyers James Tauber and Edward Kuntz, and James Ford, Robert Minor and Carl Brodsky of the Communist Party, seeking “all complaints of alleged police misconduct, not only on March 19th, but also on other occasions.” He told them to send him that information as soon as possible so he could have the police officers and physicians involved appear at the next hearing. At some point, the Communist Party sent the MCCH a list of seventeen "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem.” While it included the incidents involving Laurie, Aiken, and Frank Wells, an attack on an unidentified man, the arrest of a boy for lighting a fire in a school and the eviction of an interracial couple, the list mostly consisted of clashes with police at Communist Party meetings and protests.
Glickstein wrote to Hays on April 4 that “evidence on behalf of the various persons arrested, shot or beaten seems to be considerably more difficult to obtain. I am, however, keeping at it, and I think that at least three or four of the cases, and, perhaps more, will be presented in complete detail before the Committee on Saturday.” His requests for evidence from the Police Department were initially more successful. “You have my assurance that both the men and records will be made available to the Committee at its next hearing as well as subsequent meetings,” Valentine wrote to Glickstein. However, the day before hearing, District Attorney Dodge intervened to disrupt the MCCH’s plans to have police officers testify. He directed police commanders to “instruct all police officers who may have cases pending not to reveal any of their testimony at any public hearing.” Those instructions restricted what police officers could say, not their ability to testify, so the officers requested to be present nonetheless attended the hearing.
Those officers joined a crowd of other witnesses called to appear at the April 6 hearing. As well as the new witnesses that Tartar and Glickstein worked to secure, the subcommittee still had unfinished business from the first hearing. Five witnesses on the list prepared for March 30 had not testified, Mrs Jackson, Ida Hengain, Effie Diton and Mr [Fred] Campbell, and from Steve Urban of the Kress store. There were also additional police officers on the scene and staff from the Kress store whose appearances had not been secured. Although twenty witnesses would appear at the hearing, more than at any of the subcommittee’s other hearings, testimony would be heard about only one of the cases that Hays had investigated, the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. At that time the evidence that the MCCH heard on the other fives cases would be limited to the medical records recounted by doctors on the staff of Harlem Hospital.
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Crowds incited by white men (4)
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The arrests of white men for inciting crowds all occurred in the vicinity of Kress’ store on West 125th Street and involved efforts to speak or picketing. White men protesting in those ways on Harlem’s streets were a familiar sight by 1935. In the 1930s, the Communist Party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby: the International Labor Defense four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue, the Young Liberators at 262 Lenox Avenue, and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. Although the four men arrested did not identify themselves as Communists, the organizations of which they did admit membership — the Nurses and Hospital League in the case of Daniel Miller, the New York Student League in the case of Harry Gordon, and the Young Liberators in the cases of Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels — were all connected to the Party. The men also fit the profile of those the Party assigned to work in Harlem described to historian Mark Naison: they were “in their teens or early twenties and came either from the two colleges located in the Harlem Section — Columbia and City — or form the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding Black Harlem.” Miller was twenty-four years of age and lived on Morningside Avenue on the boundary of Harlem. Gordon was twenty years of age and lived in the Bronx. Jameson and Samuels were both nineteen years of age, with Jameson living in Washington Heights north of Harlem and Samuels in Brooklyn. The number of Black residents who joined the Party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by Communist Party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys.
Speaking from stepladders, as Miller and Gordon tried to do, and picketing, as Jameson and Samuels did, were favored tactics of Communist activity in Harlem. Party members joined the streetcorner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to historian Mark Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets, and challenged their calls for race-based action with appeals for unity between Black and white workers. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News. Communist Party pickets were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers, first on 135th Street and later on 125th Street, the Party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals, even as the campaign expanded in 1934. When that movement splintered, however, the Party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street, seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings led by Young Liberators, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire black staff.
The reaction of police to the white men protesting on 125th Street was typical of the violent repression of Communist Party demonstrations in New York City from when they began in 1928, a repression which was explored by historian Marilynn Johnson. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia had been trying to change the police approach since his election in 1934, historian Marilynn Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. Whatever the mayor prescribed, hostility to Communists remained strong among rank-and-file police. It was that attitude that was on display in the speed with which officers moved against the men in front of Kress’ store, while not arresting James Parton, who introduced the two white men who tried to speak, or Black members of the crowd.
Some other white men and women appear to have been among the crowds around 125th Street. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that she “did not see many white people," who amounted to only "a very few” percentage of the groups around 125th Street. Some of those white men and women may also have been affiliated with the Communist Party. Almost an hour after the arrests of Jameson and Samuels, the last of the four white men arrested, the Young Liberators distributed leaflets on 125th Street, and perhaps in surrounding areas. At least some of those handing out those documents would have had to have been white, given the makeup of the organization. So too would some of those who distributed a second leaflet, printed by the Communist Party an hour or so later.
The other four white men arrested in the disorder, however, do not appear to have been connected with the Party. Leo Smith, the one white man arrested for breaking windows, was apprehended early in the disorder when white Communist party members were among the crowds, but there is no evidence linking him to the Party. There is no evidence of what the one white man arrested for possession of a weapon, Jose Perez, was doing in Harlem, and he may not have been involved in the disorder at all. The two other white men were arrested for looting, one with stolen clothing in his possession, the other in unknown circumstances. The lack of information about those arrests means they do not offer clear evidence that white men were among the crowds on Harlem's streets after disorder spread beyond 125th Street.
Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH Report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”
The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”
Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a (Black?) member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.
White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.