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• 1 2022-11-11T17:02:24+00:00 Investigations (March 22-March 29) 38 plain 2024-02-14T20:54:32+00:00 The members of the MCCH gathered for the first time on March 22, to meet with Mayor La Guardia in his office at City Hall. That meeting lasted just over an hour but did not involve the selection of a chairman, as waiting reporters had expected, as Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard were both absent, still away from the city. What was announced was that the full committee would have its first meeting in three days' time, in the offices that would serve as their headquarters in the 7th District Magistrates court building on West 151st Street, on the northwest boundary of Black Harlem. Some commission members told reporters that they had spent much of the last two days in Harlem trying to determine the causes of the disorder.
  
  When all eleven committee members met on March 25, they again encountered reporters. As a result, the MCCH members made preparing a press statement their first business after electing their officers, the task deferred the previous week. The statement's first section, the most widely reported, indicated that the focus of the Commission would be the broader conditions in Harlem rather than the events of the disorder:

  "The committee is already agreed that the disturbance (of last Tuesday, which took a toll of three lives and extensive property damage) were merely symbols and symptoms: that the public health, safety and welfare in colored Harlem have long been jeopardized by economic and social conditions which the depression has intensified."

  However, the statement went on to put the events of the disorder on par with broader causes as one of two parts of the investigation:

  “It has, therefore, determined to divide its work into two parts, an investigation of the immediate situation and a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem, including housing, wages, rents, employment discrimination and other questions.”

  The approach the group had decided on at the meeting was not as balanced as the statement suggested. They established three subcommittees, two on broader issues, on discrimination and employment and on housing, and one “to investigate the police records and all facts pertinent to the happenings in Harlem on Tuesday, March 19th,” with Judge Toney as chair and made up of Arthur Garfield Hays, William Schiefflin, and Eunice Carter. After what the minutes recorded "as a general discussion as to whether [illegible] expedient to have a white or Negro Chairman,” the committee was initially poised to have to make that choice, between Oscar Villard and Judge Toney, before Villard withdrew citing health concerns and Charles Roberts was nominated in his place. Given the choice between those two Black candidates, the committee members elected Roberts as chairman, with Villard as vice chairman and Carter as secretary.
  
  On March 26, the day after the committee met for the first time, Hubert Delany secured a staff for them from the city’s Home Relief Bureau. Those four investigators and two stenographers set up offices in two rooms on the fifth floor of the Court House. Carter reported that two of the investigators, Weisberger and James Tartar, were assigned to working on “investigating the immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19 and interviewing prospective witnesses for the inquiry on Saturday, March 30.” Tartar was a thirty-year-old Black former shipping clerk who lived in Harlem for almost ten years. Sometime early in the week, Hays had taken over as chair of the subcommittee responsible for that investigation and scheduled the public hearing. The purpose of the interviews, Hays instructed the men, was to “examine such persons as claim to be eyewitnesses to the events of March 19 in order that time at the hearing might not be taken up by people, in actuality, who knew nothing of the events of that night.” Hays himself met with Communist Party leaders to identify witnesses, returning with a list of names. Carter also reached out to Black women she knew in Harlem, seeking to find women who had been among the shoppers in the Kress store. Committee members also contacted Inspector Di Martini and Lieutenant Samuel Battle to ensure that police officers who were at the Kress store at the beginning of the disorder would be present to testify at the hearing, together with Lino Rivera and staff from the Kress store. Other witnesses identified themselves by responding to the request for information made at the end of the press statement released after the committee's meeting.
  
  When the committee next gathered, for its regular weekly meeting on Friday, March 29, Carter had a list of eyewitnesses expected to attend the public hearing the next day to give Hays. The first four names, and another further down, were women who had been in the Kress store, “Miss Louise Thompson, Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative).” Louise Thompson was a Communist Party activist formerly married to author Wallace Thurman and involved in the social circles of the Harlem Renaissance. The Communist Party had provided her name to Hays. Forty-five-year-old Effie Diton was currently president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians, an organization her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini, had helped found. The other three women could not be identified. Missing from the list was another woman the committee knew had been in the store, eighteen-year-old Margaret Mitchell, who police had arrested. She steadfastly refused requests to testify. Three other witnesses on the list had approached the committee to give evidence. L. F. Cole, a sometime freelance journalist, had written to the committee to say he had been in the Kress store when Rivera was grabbed by staff. Fred Campbell, sent to the committee offices by Hubert Delany, owned two barbers in Harlem and had driven along 7th Avenue during the disorder. The family of Lloyd Hobbs, shot by police during the disorder, had been brought to the committee's attention by the Urban League; his younger brother Russell had been with Lloyd when he was shot, and together with his parents, had encountered the officer who shot him at Harlem Hospital. Irving Kershaw, the last name on the list, had likely been found by the committee investigators. He owned the garage opposite the rear of the Kress store where a hearse drew up early in the disorder. Hays had also marked another four names on the list the Communist Party provided him as witnesses to the disorder: James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators; James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem; Abner Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights; and Frank Wells, who police had arrested on 125th Street.
  
  While the committee's immediate focus on March 29 was on the events of the disorder, the plans they made at that meeting gave that topic a far smaller place in the investigation of the events of the disorder going forward than indicated in the press statement after their first meeting earlier in the week. The extensive program for the investigation, prepared by A. Philip Randolph, that the members voted to adopt did not mention those events. In reorganizing to accomplish that work, the committee created six new subcommittees focused on topics in the outline: education, health and sanitation, labor problems, law and legislation, relief agencies, and crime, with the latter encompassing the events of the disorder. Two additional members were added to that subcommittee: Oscar Villard and, at the request of Mayor La Guardia, the newly appointed Rev. John Robinson.
  
  It was also at this meeting, in a discussion of securing letterheads, that the group chose a “formal name." They had been referring to themselves as the “Bi-Racial Commission.” The new name reflected the broad agenda they adopted that day: the Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem.
• 1 2022-10-27T21:16:01+00:00 MCCH Meeting (March 25, 1935) 37 plain 2024-01-24T18:36:59+00:00 All eleven members of the MCCH met for the first time at 4:30 PM on March 25, at the Seventh District Municipal Court, 447 West 151st Street. Minutes of that meeting are in the records of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. The meeting was also widely reported in the press, having been announced the previous week, after some members of the MCCH met with the mayor. Aware of the presence of reporters, the MCCH members made preparing a statement for them their first business after electing their officers, the task deferred the previous week. That statement contributed to focusing attention not on the events of the disorder but on broader conditions in Harlem.
  
  Oscar Villard wrote and delivered the statement released after the meeting, having been appointed chair of a Publicity Committee that included Toney, Roberts and Carter. Although the minutes refer to a copy of the statement being attached as part of the record, one is not included in the file. Based on the newspaper stories, it appears to have had three sections. Only the Home News quoted all three sections, although it omitted a parenthetical statement in the first section that is quoted in the Daily Worker and New York Times.
  
  The first section, the most widely reported, indicated that the focus of the Commission would be the broader conditions in Harlem rather than the events of the disorder:

  "The committee is already agreed that the disturbance (of last Tuesday, which took a toll of three lives and extensive property damage) were merely symbols and symptoms: that the public health, safety and welfare in colored Harlem have long been jeopardized by economic and social conditions which the depression has intensified."

  All the stories in white newspapers quoted or paraphrased this statement, and in the case of the New York Times, New York World-Telegram, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker, made it the basis of the headline of their story. (The New York Times published an additional story at the end of the week, on the day after the first hearing, endorsing that approach and arguing that the MCCH needed to pursue “a thorough economic and social investigation” with the “assistance of technical advice.") The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and Home News folded the meeting into stories about the work of Dodge’s grand jury, which they made the subject of their headlines. The Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily Mirror, took that approach further, writing only about the progress of Dodge’s investigation without similar attention to the MCCH (keeping the Communists in the foreground). Only the New York Amsterdam News among the Black newspapers quoted this section; the other papers did not refer to the statement at all.
  
  The second section put events on par with broader causes as one of two parts of the investigation:

  “It has, therefore, determined to divide its work into two parts, an investigation of the immediate situation and a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem, including housing, wages, rents, employment discrimination and other questions.”

  Only the Home News and Daily News included this section in their stories, quoted in the Home News and paraphrased in the Daily News. It was not mentioned in New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker. Without this section, the stories pushed the events of the disorder to the background, giving the impression that the MCCH was not concerned with them — particularly the Daily News, which characterized the statement as a “preliminary report.”
  
  The third section was an appeal for information, and a notice that hearings would be held, without any dates.

  “To that end it asks public cooperation and will welcome any suggestions and information which should be sent directly to the secretary, Mrs Eunice Hunter Carter, in care of Seventh Municipal Court, 447 W. 151st St.
  
  Public hearings will be started at an early date.”

  This section was quoted in New York Times and Home News and paraphrased in three other newspapers: as “The public was invited to send any remedial suggestions” in the Daily News; as “beseeching the city to offer suggestions to clear up the Harlem sore spots” in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle; and as “it asks for public cooperation and will welcome any suggestions and information,” in the New York Amsterdam News. The New York Age mentioned only that the meeting took place, emphasizing that as the meeting was not open to the public the MCCH was “enveloping their activities in an obscuring cloud of secrecy that evoked considerable comment.”
  
  Three subcommittees were established at the meeting. The minutes recorded Judge Toney as chair of one appointed “to investigate the police records and all facts pertinent to the happenings in Harlem on Tuesday, March 19th,” with Hays, Schiefflin, and Carter. A meeting of the subcommittee, and two others, on discrimination and employment and on housing, was scheduled for March 27. (By the time the MCCH met again on March 29, Hays rather than Toney was acting as chairman of the subcommittee. There is no evidence in the sources about that change.) These subcommittees did not appear to have been announced to journalists after the meeting. Only the New York Amsterdam News provided any information on them: that story identified their members as those appointed in the meeting and reported that one subcommittee would “investigate the "outburst" (the committee rejected the term "riot"). There is no mention in the minutes of a decision that that subcommittee would hold a public hearing on March 30; Villard’s press statement referred only to hearings “at an early date.” However, Hays told journalists the day after the meeting that such a hearing would be held. Given that Hays announced the March 30 hearing before his subcommittee was scheduled to meet, it is not clear who else was involved in making that decision.
  
  The other work done in the meeting reported in the press was the selection of officeholders: Roberts as chairman, Villard as vice chairman and Carter as secretary. The previous week, a story in the New York Herald Tribune had suggested that Delany would be the chairman, as his name “led the list of appointments to the committee as made public by the Mayor.” Delany had rejected that possibility, telling the reporter that “he would rather have someone else, preferably a white, in that position.” When the MCCH met on March 25, the minutes mentioned “a general discussion as to whether [illegible] expedient to have a white or Negro Chairman.” Or at least that statement initially appeared in the minutes; someone later crossed it out. Before that discussion, Ernst had said “he thought that the Chairman should be a Negro,” and suggested Eunice Carter. She declined. After the discussion, Toney was nominated by an unnamed commission member, with Grimley seconding. Hays then nominated Villard, with Carter seconding, setting up a choice between a Black candidate and a white candidate. However, Villard withdrew due to “his uncertain health,” offering instead to be the vice chairman. Schiefflin then nominated Roberts, with Hays seconding. That nomination ensured that the MCCH would have a Black candidate, with Roberts winning the role on an 8-3 vote. (Villard would later write to Walter White of the NAACP lamenting his decision not to serve as chairman, “which was the wish of the majority,” complaining that “Roberts has been a very poor chairman and there has been no meeting for weeks and weeks and weeks, and there is to be no effort on the part of the Commission to carry out any of its recommendations.")
  
  The further business discussed in the meeting that was not made public was how the committee would do its work. The minutes record a “consensus” that “one trained person was necessary to correlate the reports.” The commission members voted to pursue Ira B. Reid for that role, but left the final selection to Roberts, Delany, and Carter. (After lobbying by Walter White of the NAACP, E. Franklin Frazier rather than Reid would be employed by the MCCH.) At Carter’s urging, the MCCH also decided to move forward with its investigation without waiting to fill that position, and charged Randolph, Ernst, Delany, and Carter “to formulate general plans of work for the committee” by the next meeting.