This page has tags:

1. 1 2023-07-09T01:32:17+00:00 Anonymous "Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [Villard's draft of the subcommittee report], "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 26, Folder 4, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University). Anonymous 5 plain 2024-01-28T16:26:08+00:00 Anonymous

This page is referenced by:

• 1 2023-07-09T00:33:07+00:00 Villard's draft of the subcommittee report 19 plain 2024-02-03T00:24:03+00:00 Villard’s report, the product, he told Hays, of “five hours grinding on your report,” reorganized and reframed Hays' draft and added a series of judgements about the events. When he sent it to Hays, he noted he had omitted two topics in the draft: rumors about a woman in the Kress store having her arm broken, which he judged superfluous; and the behavior of ADA Kaminsky in the public hearing, which he judged would be defended as a response to being badgered by the audience. Villard's text began with a statement directed to the mayor that presented five findings about the events of the disorder and a statement about the longer-term issues that led residents to react as they did. He gave prominence to Hays' statements about the disorder not being a race riot nor being caused by Communists, adding that it was instead “spontaneous and unpremeditated” and highlighted the role of police and unemployment and discrimination as causes. Those findings were prefaced with a description of the disorder as far more violent than Hays had described, as involving “the loss of five lives, the injury of many persons and the arrest of still others, together with material damage to shops which ran into large figures.”
  
  The report itself began by largely reproducing Hays' account of events in the store and on 125th Street, sprinkling in judgements of those involved. Women witnesses in the store “grossly exaggerated” what happened. An ambulance was “unfortunately and unnecessarily” called to attend to the staff members whose hands had been bitten. Donahue was “mistaken” in his decision to release Rivera out of the back of the store. Police had “no determined or effective plan” to communicate that the boy had been released. Circulating pamphlets based on rumors as Communist groups did was a “highly censurable” action. Villard combined Hays’ mention of events beyond 125th with his point about Jewish businesses not being targeted, which he made more pointed by highlighting that “stores owned by Negroes” had not been spared (a point that Lieutenant Battle had made in a public hearing). He also further marginalized those who participated in the disorder by including among them not just the “criminal or semi-criminal class” but “idle onlookers” drawn from the “many unemployed of all ages standing on the streets.” Villard finished by recounting the evidence that established Rivera was the boy in the store. He did introduce one mistake into the narrative. Where two ambulances were called to the store, one to treat Hurley and Urban while the store was open and a second to treat Clara Crowder after the store closed, Villard had only one, the first, and tried to have it at the store before and after it closed.
  
  At this point, Villard departed from Hays' draft to highlight the criticisms of police, at the expense of some of the other issues Hays had identified. A new section was added, entitled “The Conduct of Police.” It began with discussion of the “intensity of the feeling against the police” displayed at the public hearings, which “which was proof positive that there is something seriously wrong in the attitude of the officers toward the people whom they are there to serve and to aid.” Here Villard was referring not simply to testimony but to the interventions of the audience at the hearing, whose jeers, boos, applause, cheers, and heckling literally intensified what was said. Villard then framed the remainder of the report as evidence that substantiated that attitude, as “a simple recital of facts brought out before us that will prove there is solid ground for the bitter resentment of the people of Harlem.” The section began with the behavior of police in the Kress store, followed by the beating of Harry Gordon, and finally the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. Villard added a paragraph to what Hays had written about the boy’s death laying out what made Patrolman McInerney’s actions “inexcusable.” There had been no public disorder at the time, and the officer should have fired in the air before shooting Hobbs and pursued him for longer before firing the gun at all. Several of those points had been made in questions yelled at witnesses by members of the audience at the hearing. The section then moved to the cases of police brutality beyond the disorder Hays had discussed, justifying their investigation as necessary give the “enormous importance” of the question of how police acted and the impact of their behavior on the Harlem community. Concluding that the cases were not exceptional, Villard urged a change in attitude by the police to respect the rights of Harlem residents was urgently needed.
  
  After a set of recommendations that largely followed Hays, combining those at the end of his report with several in the body, Villard concluded by tying the report’s focus on the sources of the resentment of Harlem’s residents to the anxiety about Communists expressed in the interpretations of the disorder he had debunked. “Harlem will be a fertile field for racial propaganda” until “the evils on which they base their arguments” are eliminated.