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Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, The complete report of Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 21.
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- 1 2021-10-14T14:40:24+00:00 Anonymous Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, The Complete Report of Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Stephen Robertson 15 plain 2024-02-23T23:03:04+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bf
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The MCCH investigates
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The group that Mayor La Guardia appointed moved ahead with its work even before he finished adding members. Investigating the events of March 19 was one of the first tasks on which they embarked. Over the next two and a half months, a subcommittee assigned that task sent staff drawn from city government agencies to find eyewitnesses to the events in and around the Kress store and to conduct investigations into the deaths that occurred during the disorder. They later extended the investigations to cases of police brutality. MCCH investigators gathered pages of official records and undertook nearly one hundred interviews in the commission’s offices and in homes and another fifteen interviews with police and hospital staff. Individuals and organizations from the Harlem community wrote to the MCCH or visited its offices to provide information. Fifty-seven witnesses identified by those means testified at five public hearings held by the subcommittee members and attended by audiences of 300 to 400 people.
While the MCCH members had a program for those hearings, the audiences interjected their own issues and perspectives. "The commission as well as the witness found themselves face to face with an aroused public which demanded that its grievances be heard," E. Franklin Frazier, the Black sociologist hired to lead the committee's investigation of Harlem, wrote in the Final Report of the MCCH, "and that no technicalities of court procedure or rules of order were to thwart its right to be heard." He singled out the hearings of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder as one of those in which the audience expressed itself "most forcibly" with "vociferous condemnations." Many white observers dismissed those contributions as coming from Communists and other radicals. So too did some mainstream Black leaders such as James Hubert of the Urban League. The hearings were "a sort of Roman holiday for the soapbox orators who regard it as their outstanding opportunity to heckle and vilify publicly anyone and every organization that is attempting to deal with the problems at hand," he complained to Eunice Carter, the MCCH secretary. "It was a most disgusting scene that these agitators were injecting all sorts of silly and unrelated questions at a time when the Commission is dealing with one of the most serious problems that has challenged our community." Frazier insisted to the contrary that the Black men and women who made up most of the audience "were truly a cross-section of the Harlem population" whose "various reactions at the hearings expressed the general feelings of the community."
At the end of May, the subcommittee chair Arthur Garfield Hays would draw on the testimony at the hearings and the audience reactions to it to draft a preliminary report on the "Events of March 19" for submission to the mayor. -
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Public Hearings (5)
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The subcommittee on crime held five public hearings in one of the courtrooms of the Washington Heights Court. Fifty-seven witnesses testified in those hearings before audiences of around 400 men and women. The hearing on March 30 was the first public hearing held by the MCCH, and all twelve members attended (Father McCann was not appointed until the next week). Most members also attended the next two hearings in April, with a smaller group attending the last two hearings in May.
Stenographers recorded the testimony for the use of MCCH members. While an invaluable record, those transcripts are not always accurate, or at least are not always consistent with what journalists reported. Certainly, Arthur Garfield Hays considered them a “poor report” of the hearing. The stenographers did not always make clear who was speaking. They also clearly struggled to hear comments and questions called from the audience, and the transcripts omit almost all of the audience reactions reported extensively in the press. Newspaper stories about the first hearing, particularly those in Black newspapers, described the testimony in some detail. Subsequent hearings were reported with less discussion of the testimony and an increasing focus on audience reactions and clashes between MCCH members and those asking questions. The audience dominated the stories published about the two hearings in May.
A key feature of the hearings was the extent to which the audience participated. By E. Franklin Frazier's count, at least 122 audience members who gave their names and could be identified questioned witnesses across the twenty-one hearings held by the MCCH's subcomittees. Just how many audience members participated in the hearings of the subcommittee on crime is difficult to establish. The transcript frequently did not identify who was speaking and occasionally misidentified speakers. Newspaper stories identified some of those speakers, but also misidentified them in some cases. The white ILD lawyers clearly did play a significant role in questioning witnesses, as did Charles Romney, a West Indian radical, who inserted himself into the proceedings.
Just who made up the audience was a subject of some debate. The crowd was racially mixed, but dominated by Black men and women according to newspaper reports. Many observers from both the conservative white press and establishment Black organizations claimed that most of those in attendance were members of the Communist party or other radical groups and so not representative of the Harlem community. Black journalists who attended, on the other hand, portrayed the audience as expressing the views of the Black community. So too did the MCCH members who wrote the subcommittee report, Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard, and E. Franklin Frazier in the MCCH report.