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• 1 2023-07-02T17:40:14+00:00 The mayor and the MCCH report 69 plain 2024-02-21T14:24:09+00:00 Mayor La Guardia received the MCCH’s final report on March 31, 1936. He did not send it back to the MCCH for revision "as it was considered too progressive," as historian Lindsay Lupo has argued. Lupo confused Frazier's draft for a version of his report revised by the MCCH. The MCCH members made the changes that she attributed to pressure from La Guardia before they submitted the report to the mayor. What La Guardia did instead was send copies to the heads of city departments rather than release the report as the MCCH wanted. He asked those officials to report “where there were misstatements of facts or where conclusions have been made on erroneous facts,” he explained to Paul Kellogg, the editor of the Survey Graphic magazine. La Guardia presented his action more neutrally as a request that the commissioners “study and report" when he informed the MCCH members on May 5. The mayor promised the MCCH members that when he had received reports from all the department commissioners, he would call them for a meeting “so that you may be advised of the action taken as well as of any issue of fact arising.” In the meantime, the mayor agreed to allow Alain Locke of Howard University a “preliminary, confidential go at the Harlem reports” for an article in the Survey Graphic on the condition that Locke prepare for him a “confidential memo on their implications.” The combination of the MCCH report and the department responses would “constitute a complete report," La Guardia told Kellogg.
  
  Commissioner Valentine responded to the mayor on April 30. He insisted that allegations that police in Harlem showed “little regard for human rights and constant violation of the fundamental rights of citizens” were “in error.” He devoted only six and a half lines to the "Case of Lloyd Hobbs," significantly less than any of the other five cases of police brutality discussed in the report. The killing was simply "the outcome of Hobbs burglarizing premises 2150 7th Avenue," Valentine wrote, an assessment that the grand jury had confirmed when they "exonerated" McInerney. In perhaps a further indication of how little attention Valentine and his staff paid to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, the report mistakenly stated that McInerney had testified before the grand jury. Valentine also rejected the report’s narrative of events, instead arguing that the disorder “was caused by a false circular, issued by the Young Liberators.” Rather than resenting the police, he claimed that “law abiding citizens” had “confidence” in the police. “Any resentment which does exist is borne by the lawless element because of the police activity directed against them.” If support for the police had not been expressed in the MCCH public hearings, it was because doing so would have resulted in being “ridiculed by the audience, composed of irresponsible persons.”
  
  Locke provided the mayor with his response on June 12, after seeing the MCCH report and the department responses on May 20 and again on June 9. Valentine featured in the memo as one of three department heads who disputed facts in the report. In Locke’s assessment, Valentine’s complaints lost weight because he had refused to cooperate with the MCCH investigations. In addition, Locke reported “personal observation” of antagonism between the community and the police that was at odds with the police commissioner’s assertions. Warning that those tensions risked triggering more disorder, Locke endorsed the MCCH’s recommendation that a citizens' committee be set up to hear complaints and urged that the heavy police presence in Harlem be reduced. He also urged La Guardia to immediately release the report. Locke’s memo likely contributed to the mayor moving to set up the meeting with the MCCH that he had promised them in his letter in May.
  
  On June 29, Roberts and Hays announced that members of the MCCH would be meeting with the mayor the next day. As far as they were concerned, the subject of the meeting was “publication of the committee’s final report.” La Guardia’s agenda, however, remained what he had laid out when he wrote to the MCCH, to review the city’s response. He appeared to have prepared the ground for a focus on the city's response and for the report not to be released with leaks to journalists, a speech in Harlem, and the release of a copy of Frazier's draft of the report's final chapter, the conclusion, and list of recommendations. Speculation about the meeting reported in the press focused on the idea that releasing the report would be dangerous. Stories in the New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal described the report as “said to be couched in vigorous language," while the Home News drew out the implications, that it was “couched in such strong language that it is regarded as highly dangerous.” The same speculation was framed differently in the New York Times and the New York Post. The former reported “it was said that the Mayor intended to discuss another version which would present the findings and conclusions in a less controversial way,” while the later more succinctly claimed that “Another report is that the Mayor wants the committee to tone down some of the findings.” Stories in the New York Sun, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Chicago Defender also included speculation that the release of the report had been delayed so the city could develop a response because the findings of the report were dangerous, not just the language. “Persons close to the situation have hinted,” according to the New York Sun, “that publication of the report without suggestions for reform could have serious consequences, so alarming is the picture it paints of Harlem.”
  
  Ahead of the meeting, La Guardia reviewed the recommendations in the MCCH report in a speech opening a new health center in Harlem reported in the New York Amsterdam News on June 27. "He went down a numerical list," in the story's account, "to show that he had already done, or was having done, all the recommendations made by the commission." When the meeting between the mayor and the MCCH was announced, the city's white press received a copy of Frazier's draft of the report's final chapter, containing the conclusion and list of recommendations, which journalists confusingly referred to as the "preliminary report." The mention of the events of the disorder in that chapter came in the opening, which described the disorder as a "spontaneous outbreak" "symptomatic of pent-up feelings of resentment and insecurity" derived from "the injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of police, and the racial segregation." All the newspaper stories that reported the upcoming meeting other than the New York Times referred to the contents of that document (it was not mentioned in the Black press). Claims published in the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and New York American that the final report “contained substantially the same material” as the preliminary reports may have come from the mayor’s office, to blunt interest in securing the final report. The New York Herald Tribune published a detailed summary of both the conclusions and recommendations (so detailed, in fact, that the Chicago Defender, in highlighting the story, mistakenly reported that the report had been released). Less detailed summaries of the conclusions appeared in the New York Sun and Home News, while the New York World-Telegram added details of just the conclusions regarding discrimination in health and education to its summary, and the New York Post highlighted only the conditions in Harlem Hospital. Predictably, the New York American focused on the possibility of more violence, quoting in its story the warning in the conclusion that the increased police presence in Harlem was an irritant that might lead to a recurrence of the disorder. The brief story in the New York Evening Journal included a one sentence summary of the range of conclusions, leaving its emphasis to the subheading, "Police Condemned."
  
  Seven MCCH members met with La Guardia for two hours on June 30. Toney, Carter, Delany, Hays, Robinson, Roberts, and Grimley, according to the New York Times and New York Amsterdam News, so four Black members and three white members, including one, Grimley, who had not signed the report. The group went over the report’s recommendations, according to the New York Times: “As each point was brought up, the Mayor recounted what had been done about it, referring occasionally to the reports of the department heads concerned.” La Guardia then took the same approach in speaking to journalists, reporting progress on the committee’s recommendations. That focus avoided any discussion of the causes or events of the disorder. Asked about “police conditions in Harlem,” he offered only that police abuses would not be tolerated, and all complaints would be “very carefully and rigidly investigated,” while insisting that the situation in Harlem was any different from elsewhere in the city, according to the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, Daily News, and Home News. Only the New York Post among the white press explicitly questioned that response, noting that ’The Mayor was somewhat vague about committee charges of police brutality. He said abuses of police authority would not be tolerated in Harlem or anywhere else but did not go into the charges in detail.” In a striking contrast, discussions about the behavior of police dominated the New York Amsterdam News story about the meeting. Efforts to convince the mayor that police harassment did take place led the story, first that white and black couples were challenged by police, and then residents were searched for policy slips without a warrant. It took Charles Roberts relating his own experience being searched to convince La Guardia. In this account, the mayor’s statement about police brutality was the result of MCCH members making him see the light. The Black MCCH members who spoke with journalists from the New York Amsterdam News evidently did not share the same information with Harlem's other Black newspaper, the New York Age. It did not publish anything about the meeting.
  
  La Guardia presented the meeting to journalists as the start of a process. He promised “a more detailed analysis of the committee’s report to include recommendations of the various City departments concerned,” the Home News reported, in keeping with the view of that combination as representing he had expressed to Kellogg. Another meeting with the MCCH would also take place later in the summer, according to the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times. Only the New York Amsterdam News, relying on information from the Black MCCH members, reported a more extended process: “At occasional periods the mayor and the commission will not only spill words on the report and the problems of Negroes in general, but will be able to discuss how far the mayor has gone in meeting Harlem’s needs.”