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Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, The complete report of Mayor LaGuardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 11.
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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 LaGuardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1969). Anonymous 11 plain 2023-10-23T04:52:04+00:00 Anonymous
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Assaults on white men and women (29)
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At least twenty-nine white men and women were assaulted during the disorder, in addition to nine white police officers. This violence has been overlooked in most scholarship on the disorder, which has followed the lead of the final report of the MCCH. Assaults were only obliquely mentioned in that document, which instead emphasized attacks on property: “In fact, the distinguishing feature of this outbreak was that it was an attack upon property and not upon persons. In the beginning, to be sure, the resentment was expressed against whites—but whites who owned stores and who, while exploiting Negroes, denied them an opportunity to work."
Newspapers told a different story, particularly the New York Evening Journal, a Hearst afternoon publication that sought out and gave prominence to white men and women assaulted by Black men. The most sensational and racist example of that emphasis was a story by Richard Levitt published under the page-spanning headline, “Kill the Whites Roar Maddened Harlem Mobs.” It was more a litany of racist fears and stereotypes than an account of the events of the disorder, with the phrase "kill the whites" used as a refrain to separate different elements of the story not in descriptions of specific events. In none of instances was the alleged call associated with the events being described. Invoking Black violence, or fears of Black violence, was a longstanding racist trope, employed in white narratives about the race riots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only two specific cases that include such threats were reported in the newspaper. A call to “Kill him” is attributed to a crowd of Black men and women that the New York Evening Journal described threatening B. Z. Kondoul, a thirty-five-year-old white man. Again, only one story mentioned that detail. So too the alleged assault on Betty Willcox, as she waited in a parked car. The story that quoted Willcox appeared alongside Levitt's article. The Black men she described surrounding the car screamed "White- we'll get you' We'll get all of them around here!"
While the New York Evening Journal slanted its coverage to emphasize interracial violence, there was other evidence for all but four of the incidents that it reported. Other white publications reported that violence more sporadically, while the Black press generally did not report it at all. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Daily Worker dismissed the claims of the Hearst press that the disorder had been a race riot and gave credit to Communists on the streets and the leaflets they and the Young Liberators distributed for urging the "unity of black and white workers." However, the radical newspaper obliquely allowed that attacks on whites did take place: "In a few instances where small turbulent groups were suspicious of whites and disposed to attack them, white Communists were pointedly excluded from attack." Several papers reported clashes between bands of Blacks and whites, in line with patterns from earlier racial disorders, but none offered details and there are no reports of blacks injured in those circumstances. Those claims appeared to reflect tropes about racial violence not descriptions of events during the disorder. Violence against whites took place throughout the disorder and across a wide area centered on 125th Street. Assaults on whites are thus woven into the disorder not so marginal as to distinguish the disorder from outbreaks earlier in the century.
White men and women on the street, newspaper reporters and photographers, storeowners, and passengers in vehicles traveling through Harlem all allegedly suffered injuries at the hands of Black assailants.
Crowds threw stones and rocks at whites. The occupants of vehicles traveling through the neighborhood became targets, with Patricia O'Rourke hit in her car and Joseph Rinaldi in a Boston-bound bus. In other cases, whites standing apart, observing crowds came under attack, including a newspaper photographer Everett Breuer and his assistant Joseph Martin, and security guard James Wrigley. Others appeared at the hospital with similar injuries resulting from flying glass and rocks that they did not report as assaults, that did not result from efforts to injure them but from the attacks on property. One of them was likely the unidentified white man with a bleeding head wound after being hit by an object who appeared in a photograph published in the Daily News.
The remaining assaults involved attacks by individuals or groups who targeted white individuals they encountered on the street. The victims of those assaults were apparently observing the events, like those hit by objects or walking Harlem’s streets either around the entertainments of 125th Street or near the areas of white residents north of 116th Street. Almost all those attacks took the form of beatings, with only two men stabbed, Edward Genest and Morris Werner. Attacks on Betty Willcox, B. Z. Kondoul, and Timothy Murphy only ended when police officers intervened, while William Ken was saved by Black coworkers. Such violence was not endemic to the disorder. "All night until dawn on the Tuesday of the outbreak white persons, singly and in groups, walked the streets of Harlem without being molested," Claude McKay reported in an article in The Nation. While McKay insisted that "there was no manifest hostility between colored and white," it was clear that he mistook the lack of attacks on whites at some times and places for a general attitude. A Columbia University student's experience captured the intermittent presence of violence against whites among the variety of behavior during the disorder. Hector Donnelly reported being hit on the shoulder by a milk bottle while walking on West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue having gone to the neighborhood unaware of the disorder. As several members of the crowd on the street then moved toward him, he knew he was "in for it." A policeman came running, however, and dragged Donnelly away. Although the officer told him, "You better stay out of here," the white student met a reporter he knew so decided to stay "to watch the excitement." He remained despite further warnings from police until he "got into more trouble." A group of four or five men bumped him as they passed him on the sidewalk and then stopped and continued to push him. Again, a police officer came and "broke up the trouble." After that encounter, Donnelly decided that he needed to leave the neighborhood.
White storeowners also appear among those assaulted, but in very small numbers not as the focus of violence as the MCCH report claimed. Herman Young's injuries resulted from glass from a smashed window rather than a direct attack. Max Newman was attacked as he closed his store, as was Joseph Sarnelli, with his assailants also attempting to rob him.
Four white women appear among those assaulted in Harlem. Two of the women were attacked in cars, Patricia O'Rourke while driving through Harlem, Betty Willcox while parked. Alice Gordon was assaulted by a group on the street. Elizabeth Nadish was reported simply as having been “beaten."
Attacks on white men and women occurred throughout the disorder (information about timing is missing for thirteen of the twenty-nine assaults), but were more geographically contained than in race riots in the north earlier in the twentieth century. Other than one man attacked north of 145th Street in an assault likely unrelated to the disorder, most attacks occurred around 125th Street, with a small number further south, around the stores on 116th Street. The first reported assaults came early in the disorder as the crowd on 125th Street clashed with police and began smashing windows. William Kitlitz was allegedly assaulted by James Smitten around 8:30 PM, Timothy Murphy and Maurice Spellman by different groups of men around 9 PM, and Morris Werner around 9:30 PM. All these men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street to shop, seek entertainment, or access public transport, and on this evening caught up in the disorder. Around 11:00 PM, a small cluster of assaults took place on or near 7th Avenue north of 116th Street, as crowds moved away from 125th Street into an area with white residents. Further assaults occurred north of 125th Street around 1:00 AM, back near the entertainment district frequented by whites. The final assault the timing of which is known was of a storekeeper during the looting that intensified after midnight.
Most assaults on white men and women left few traces in the official record: police made arrests in only seven cases (there was no information on the circumstances that led to the arrest of two of the men charged with assault). Seven victims of alleged assaults appeared only in records of ambulance callouts and hospital admissions. Fifteen assaults are reported only in newspapers. Four cases appeared in only the New York Evening Journal, a publication that reported the disorder with an emphasis on violence against whites distinct from the rest of the press.
Only one of the five Black men arrested for assaulting whites, Rivers Wright, was convicted, but only summarily by a Magistrate for the misdemeanor offense of disorderly conduct, for which he received a sentence of ten days in the Workhouse. That charge likely indicated that Wright had not been involved in the assault, but had been on the street nearby and been mistakenly arrested by police pursuing the assailants. In one case, there was no evidence of the outcome, one case was dismissed by the grand jury, and two men were acquitted by trial juries.As Part of Related Categories:
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The MCCH and Frazier's report
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Just one of Frazier’s changes and additions to the narrative of the events of the disorder offered in the report of the Subcommittee on Crime provoked a reaction from MCCH members. On January 6, Oscar Villard wrote to Eunice Carter that, “I must record my astonishment at the treatment given to the Communists therein.” Arthur Garfield Hays shared a similar reaction with Eunice Carter, who agreed that “Mr. Frazier’s opening chapters contain misstatements as to the findings of the Commission and create a totally incorrect impression of the results of the Communist activities in the events of March 19.” Walter White of the NAACP, with who Judge Toney had shared the chapters, also took exception to Frazier’s “singling out of the Communists for credit” as “too sweeping” and indicating a “less than judicial appraisal of the New York scene” and “lack of knowledge of or inability to interpret properly the historical background.” White was hardly an objective observer in regard to the Communist Party. The NAACP was already resentful of the praise the Communist Party’s response to the case of the Scottsboro boys had received in Black communities.
Carter thought the Commission should take “definite action” on Frazier’s comments about Communists and told Hays she had suggested to Charles Roberts that he call a “full commission meeting” to discuss them. However, Roberts found it “very difficult to get the Commission members together.” (Villard blamed Roberts for the lack of meetings, telling Walter White he had "been a very poor chairman.") A meeting on February 4 was attended by just Roberts, Hays, Villard, Toney, and Delany and discussed only what would happen after the MCCH completed its work. In the following days the specific concerns about Frazier’s account of the events of the disorder were pulled into efforts to complete the MCCH’s work by the anniversary of the disorder, March 19. Roberts told the New York Amsterdam News that the "Mayor will have report in his hands before the anniversary." He notified MCCH members that the meeting called for February 14 was “probably the last meeting of the Commission,” as Frazier was “coming up from Washington for the last time and the complete report will be ready for approval of the Commission, together with a letter to the Mayor and the Foreword.” A week before that meeting Frazier wrote to Roberts that he still had three chapters to complete, so it was unlikely MCCH members had read the complete report at the time of the meeting.
When the MCCH members met on February 14, there was some discussion of eliminating the statement that Communists were not responsible for what happened as they did not distribute their leaflets until after the disorder started, a position which echoed the Subcommittee’s conclusion. Rev. Robinson raised making that change; Hays rejected it (there may have been further discussion before that exchange; the first page of the meeting minutes was missing). Hays, however, was in favor of cutting the section giving credit to Communists for preventing a race riot, as well as praise for the role that Communists played in the MCCH’s public hearings in the report’s second chapter. So too was Judge Toney, perhaps following the position taken by Walter White. Robinson also insisted that Communists in the hearing had done nothing more than spread propaganda. Those two passages, on the events and the hearings, are likely what Villard had in mind when he moved that “all information on the CP be struck from the report,” a motion seconded by William Schiefflin. (A. Philip Randolph, too ill to attend the meeting, may not have reacted to these passages in the same way as his colleagues. On February 6, he wrote to Carter that he had read the first two chapters and found them "quite discerning and well done." Father McCann, who was also absent, would certainly have supported Villard's motion.)
The MCCH members also debated how to review Frazier’s report more generally. Morris Ernst proposed letting each subcommittee examine the section covering their responsibility and “revise it.” Carter countered that she did not think that they should make any other report than this and not “chop up” Frazier’s text. Toney proposed an alternative, that a committee of two go over the whole report. The meeting adopted that approach and chose Hays and Villard for the task. With the report still to be approved, the MCCH adjourned until March 6.
On March 3, Hays sent Villard a version of the complete report with suggested changes and cuts, including the two passages discussed on February 14. He reported to Villard that he had been "particularly careful in cutting out the parts - not many of them - that referred to the capitalist system, communism, socialism, etc or that used words like "mass action", and others of the kind." That marked up copy of the report did not survive, but the sections Hays cut were identified by a correspondent in 1938. Hays later wrote that “there was a rather heated discussion during which I insisted that the eliminations be made which were marked on my copy.” All the assessment of the Communists' role in the hearings was cut in the complete version of the report sent to MCCH members, as was the sentence that attributed the economic status of Black workers to "the operation of our competitive capitalistic system," the statement that the ills of Harlem were too deeply rooted in the economic and social system to "be cured by an administration under our present political and civic institutions," and a mention of "mass action" against police as the result of the unifying effect of police brutality. Two other phrases were changed. "Mass action" became "organized action" and "black proletariat" became "angry crowd." Strikingly, the passage giving credit to Communists for preventing a race riot remained. It was not a position for which any member of the MCCH expressed support in their discussions, but it did serve to emphasize that the disorder was not a race riot. Judge Toney had expressed a desire to have the report "say some of the acts proved it was not a race riot" at the meeting on February 14, the view promoted by many of Harlem’s Black leaders. Concern to have explicit support for that position may have outweighed hostility toward the Communists.
It is likely the MCCH discussed those changes when it met on March 6, although there are no surviving records of that meeting. Hays was absent from the subsequent meeting on March 11 meeting, for which there are also no records. According to Carter, the March 11 meeting, and another on March 20, worked on the recommendations. Although the record of the March 20 meeting referred to "certain changes [being] made that were found necessary by the members," it was only revised recommendations that Carter sent to members after the meeting, on March 23. She wrote that they had had the complete report for some time.
Morris Ernst responded to the recommendations Carter sent on March 23 with changes, which were not included in the report submitted to La Guardia. Carter later evasively explained that “evidently it did not seem expedient at that time to incorporate them in the report. That was a matter not within my jurisdiction, but within the jurisdiction of the Committee as a whole and of Mr. Frazier.” As his changes had not been adopted, Ernst did not sign the report submitted to the mayor.
John Grimley and Father McCann joined Ernst in not signing the report. Neither appeared to have attended any of the meetings that discussed the drafts. In fact, all three had rarely attended meetings, with Grimley and McCann at the fewest, five of the twenty meetings, and Ernst at only six meetings. Grimley gave no reason for his refusal when contacted by MCCH staff. McCann never responded at all. While the report’s foreword nonetheless acknowledged Grimley as having contributed “intimate knowledge of the manhood of Harlem” and “technical advice relative to the problem of health,” it credited McCann only as having “represented the Catholic opinion of the community.” Hubert Delany came close to joining Ernst, Grimley and McCann, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he was part of the city government the report criticized and close to La Guardia. He stalled for several days before signing at the last possible moment on March 31. With his signature, all seven Black members of the MCCH endorsed the report, joined by only three of the six white members.
While the changes the MCCH made to the report were not extensive, and left intact Frazier's picture of the role of Communists in events, they did represent an assertion of the members' control of the report at the expense of Frazier. So too did the front matter the MCCH added to the report when they submitted it to the mayor. In the letter to the mayor that accompanied the report, Roberts described Frazier as having directed the research. The report’s foreword referred to him only as the MCCH’s technical expert, while detailing the expertise and contribution of the MCCH members at greater length. The report itself contained no indication of his authorship.
Ironically, the report edited by the MCCH members was not the version of the report that would be read by the public and studied by historians. The published document would be Frazier’s unedited text. Moreover, the front matter, which celebrated the MCCH members, would not be published. The story that accompanied the published report would describe Frazier as “director of the studies and surveys on which the commission based its reports.” However, the caption to a photo of Frazier accompanying the report would add, “He is reported to have had a large hand in the wording of the completed report.” -
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Frazier's report
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Frazier’s account of the events of the disorder was one of the first chapters circulated to MCCH members on January 2, 1936. It had a different form and tone than the report of the Subcommittee on Crime, as Frazier had told his Howard University colleague Alain Locke that the preliminary reports were “inadequate to represent his final conclusions." While it began with the same narrative of events in the Kress store as Hays and Villard had in the subcommittee report, Frazier’s chapter extended to events beyond 125th Street not covered in that document and recast the character of those involved in them. While finding the antagonism that police had generated throughout the events of the disorder, Frazier tempered the tone of the criticism of police in the subcommittee report except in regard to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. He was also less critical of the role of the Young Liberators and Communists, going as far as praising them for helping limit interracial violence.
The disorder after Rivera was grabbed resulted from a “fortuitous combination of subsequent events,” in Frazier’s narrative, rather than the being driven by the attitude of police towards Harlem residents that the earlier report had highlighted. The actions of officers in the Kress store “tended to infuriate the crowd,” while their quick and violent arrests of Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon when they tried to speak “only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd.” Those reactions were examples of “a lack of confidence in the police and even hostility toward these representatives of the law...evident at every stage of the riot.” Frazier's assessment fell short of the “intense hostility” toward officers seen as “lawless oppressors who stop at no brutality or at the taking of human life" described by Hays and Villard. Only in his discussion of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs by Patrolman McInerney did Frazier match the judgment of the earlier report, not only echoing it in labeling the shooting “inexcusable” but describing it as “brutal.”
The actions of groups affiliated with the Communist Party received even less criticism from Frazier than had been directed at them in the Subcommittee report. That document had described their distribution of leaflets suggesting that Rivera had been beaten as “highly censurable,” while simply noting that those leaflets did not appear until after the disorder had begun. Frazier couched his judgment of those actions in lesser, if more ponderous terms, as “exhibiting a lack of due regard for the possible serious consequences of acting on more rumors.” In addition to directly stating that Communists were “not responsible for the disorder,” he also redirected some of the blame toward one of their greatest adversaries, the Hearst press: “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that race riot was going on in Harlem.”
More strikingly, Frazier endorsed a Communist claim not mentioned in the earlier report that tied directly to the Party’s focus on interracial organizing in pursuit of worker's rights: “that they prevented the outbreak from becoming a race riot.” While not granting them “full credit,” he asserted that Communists “deserve more credit than any other element for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks.” The only evidence Frazier offered was that police arresting and beating two white men, Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon, for trying to “take the parts of the indignant Negro crowds” in front of the Kress store had “changed the complexion of the outbreak.” Louise Thompson had presented those events in similar terms in her testimony to the MCCH, but her ties with the Communist Party predisposed her to that view. The change to which Frazier alluded was to “an attack upon property and not upon persons.” Even if those events had the impact claimed on those on 125th Street at that time, the people there made up only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder. Moreover, as the MCCH had not taken up either violence that did not involve the police or attacks on property in its investigation, it was not clear on what Frazier based his claim. In fact, there was evidence of multiple attacks on white men and women that complicated if not contradicted Frazier’s characterization. Nonetheless, historians writing about the disorder have adopted his occlusion of interpersonal violence alongside his emphasis on violence against property.
In a departure from the focus of the Subcommittee on Crime, Frazier’s narrative extended beyond the outbreak of the disorder on 125th Street to events throughout the evening and across Harlem. While he followed the MCCH members in limiting the crowd to “a few thousand” including the “many unemployed” on the streets, he was not content as they had been to report that “those who looted stores obviously belonged to the hoodlum class who made use of the opportunity." That “criminal element” formed only part of the crowds in Frazier's account, alongside “many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals [who] joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure.” Their presence among the participants had been mentioned in the testimony of Captain Rothengast and Inspector Di Martini but omitted by Hays and Villard. Frazier also included “some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but had suffered years of privation, [who] seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property.” He also introduced a fluidity to the behavior of those crowds; they formed “here and there as the rumors spread,” “constantly changed their make-up,” dissolved and reformed, “showed various needs and changed their mood from time to time.” Jarringly, straying close to racist stereotypes, Frazier claimed, “Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key.” Only Captain Rothengast had briefly mentioned such behavior in the public hearings, noting, "I don’t believe they were indignant about the rumors. I saw a number of them yelling and laughing about things that were being done." If the crowds were not all criminals in Frazier’s account, neither was their behavior a significant threat to “the safety and welfare of the community,” and certainly not a sufficient threat to justify the beatings and arrests Black residents experienced during the disorder.
Frazier vaguely attributed these details of the events of the disorder to “available sources of information” and the “testimony of observers.” Again, the MCCH hearings had not taken up those events, which had been only briefly mentioned by a handful of witnesses. Although it was not a topic in his proposal for the survey, Frazier and his staff had taken statements from several individuals and collected information from the police about some of those arrested and hospital records for some of the injured. However, none of those sources characterized the crowds and events of the disorder in the terms Frazier did. That picture had more in common with the accounts published in the press. Back issues of eighteen white and Black newspapers from the days of the disorder and its immediate aftermath were also among the material gathered by MCCH staff, in September, 1935, when Frazier directed their work. For all Frazier dismissed the value of the press accounts of the public hearings – "a sociologist is supposed to be a better reporter than a newspaper reporter" – it did appear that he took a different approach to reporting on the events of the riot.
Whatever their basis, some of Frazier's departures from the subcommittee report would prompt objections from MCCH members and changes to the chapter. Lindsay Lupo, the only historian who has written about the details of the MCCH report, argued that this text was not Frazier's draft but a version rewritten by MCCH members. However, correspondence between Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard not examined by Lupo detailed changes that MCCH members agreed to make that are revisions of this text, establishing it as Frazier's draft.