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Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [Villard's draft of the subcommittee report], 1, "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 26, Folder 4, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University).
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- 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
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The MCCH and the subcommittee report
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Villard sent his draft report to Hays on May 27, the day before the MCCH was scheduled to meet. He proposed that they “read the report to the whole committee and discuss any suggestions or criticisms.” Only six other MCCH members joined them at that meeting, only Ernst of the four other white members and five of the seven Black members, Roberts, Carter, Toney, Robinson, and Cullen. All five members of the subcommittee on crime were among those in attendance. Villard read the report, “a few necessary corrections” were made, and then Ernst moved that the MCCH adopt the report and arrange to submit it to the mayor. Hays’ copy of Villard’s report is marked up with several corrections and additions. They are likely a combination of changes made by Hays and those made at the MCCH meeting.
The MCCH made several changes to reduce the violence in the report’s portrayal of the events of the disorder. “Riot” was replaced with “disturbance” in the opening sentence and the account of police fetching Rivera from his bed to show he was unharmed. Hays later explained that due to the small proportion of the community involved in the disorder, the MCCH “often referred to the incidents of that night as a 'disturbance' rather than a 'riot.'” The violence described in the report was further reduced by corrections to claims not supported by the information gathered by the MCCH. The reference to five deaths in the preface to the findings that opened the report was corrected to several deaths. Opting to refer less precisely to several deaths reflected the uncertainty surrounding two of the four deaths the MCCH had investigated, with no clear evidence of the circumstances in which August Miller and Andrew Lyons had died. There is no mention of a fifth death. A later reference to “five men who lost their lives were killed by police” was removed. The possibility that police were responsible for all the shootings during the disorder had been examined during the first public hearing, but they had been established as responsible only for killing Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. Also removed from the middle of a long quotation of Louise Thompson’s testimony to the first public hearing was a mention of a woman breaking an umbrella on the head of a police officer in the Kress store. None of the other testimony about events in the store had mentioned such an attack.
At the same time as they downplayed the violence of the disorder as a whole, MCCH members heightened their criticism of the actions of the police and district attorney in the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. As well as additions highlighting how unlikely it was that Hobbs had time to enter the automobile store, loot it, and leave carrying items in his hands as the police described, a further denunciation was added: “A policeman who kills becomes at once prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.” Criticism of the district attorney was made more pointed, with the reluctance to seek an indictment of Patrolman McInerney becoming a result of the “killer” being a police officer.
One other set of cuts to the report changed its portrayal of participants in the disorder. The MCCH removed two descriptions of the Black population that employed racist stereotypes that implied a degree of responsibility for the disorder. Villard had allowed, in introducing the section on police conduct, that “the excitable nature of the people with whom the police were called upon to deal” would have contributed to the actions of police during the disorder. In the final sentence he had also attributed the danger radical propaganda posed to “public order” in Harlem not only to the economic and social conditions but also to “a people peculiarly subject to emotional appeals.” The description of participants as coming from the criminal class, which Villard had used in place of Hays description of them as hoodlums, was changed to hoodlums. Presenting participants as troublemakers rather than criminals reduced the threat posed by the disorder, in a parallel with the change from riot to disturbance.
Hays sent Villard a “clean copy” of the report on May 29, which included an additional section he wrote addressed to the mayor and police commissioner urging them to take the opportunity to change the system and psychology of police. After Villard returned it with “a few typographical and stylistic changes on June 1, Hays responded suggesting adding a final sentence highlighting the recommendations to create community oversight of the police and change police behavior could be adopted even in the midst of a depression as they required no extra spending, a version of which appeared in the final report. Both those additions were made without reference to the other MCCH members.
At the next meeting of the MCCH, on June 4, Hays reported that the edited report was ready to be signed by MCCH members, after which he would deliver it to the Mayor’s office. Ten MCCH members signed the report. The signatures of A. Philip Randolph and William Schieffelin were missing because they were out of town, Hays wrote in the letter accompanying the submitted report. Father McCann had “refused to sign the Report, apparently not approving thereof.” Although the priest had not been at the meeting on May 28 that had read the report, he was present the next week when it was ready for signatures but apparently had not voiced his objections at that time. However, when the subcommittee report was released, McCann would publicly challenge the MCCH account of the events of the disorder and the role of police in the violence.
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Villard's draft of the subcommittee report
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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.