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• 1 2022-10-29T19:10:54+00:00 MCCH Meeting (March 29, 1935) 42 plain 2024-01-28T17:19:50+00:00 The second meeting of the MCCH on March 29 attracted significantly less attention in the press than the first meeting. A story in the New York American on March 27 mentioned that it would take place. Only the New York Evening Journal published a story clearly based on the statement the MCCH released after the meeting, briefly announcing a hearing would take place on March 30 and the membership of the subcommittee holding it, including the recently appointed Rev. Robinson. A copy of the meeting minutes is in the MCCH records, together with multiple copies of the agenda. A report Carter prepared was on the agenda for this meeting.
  
  The only member not to attend was A. Philip Randolph; he had been called to appear before the National Mediation Railroad Board in Washington, DC on the day of the meeting. The other ten original members were joined for the first time by Rev. John Robinson, whom Mayor La Guardia had formally appointed that same day, fulfilling the commitment he made at his meeting with the Interdominational Preachers Meeting of Greater New York and Vicinity on March 25.
  
  Hays gave a report of the “Committee to Investigate the Happenings of March 19th.” He had evidently taken over from Toney, the chairman appointed at the first meeting. There is no mention of that change in any sources. Hays' report focused on preparations for a hearing the next day, March 30; there is also no evidence of when after the first meeting the decision to schedule that event had been made or by whom. While the upcoming hearing was reported the day after the meeting in the New York World-Telegram without attribution, the New York Herald Tribune attributed that information to Villard; however, that seems unlikely as the statement he wrote included a vague commitment rather than that information. It was Hays whom the Home News quoted a day later, on March 27, identifying him as “a member of a subcommittee which will meet at the Heights Court at 10 a. m. on Saturday 'to welcome anybody who has anything to tell us about what happened.'” The same statement later appeared in the Afro-American, in a separate story from the one that mentioned the first meeting of the MCCH, suggesting it had been made at a different time. On March 27, the Daily Worker reported that Hays’ statement announcing the hearing had “followed by a few hours a statement issued by Oscar Villard,” and included an attack on District Attorney William Dodge for suggesting he would use the criminal anarchy statute to prosecute Communists arrested during the disorder. The New York American also reported Hays' comments on March 27, and said he made them “yesterday,” March 26, the day after the committee met and Villard released his statement. The decision to hold a hearing on March 30 thus appeared to have been made between the MCCH’s first meeting and the first meeting of the subcommittee.
  
  Reports by Delany and Ernst on the subcommittees they chaired also mentioned planned public hearings, on housing on April 6 and on discrimination on April 13. (The MCCH had use of two courtrooms, making it possible to hold hearings on different topics at the same time.) Villard’s statement announced both those hearings as well as the hearing on the events of March 19th taking place the next day.
  
  The future program of work adopted by the MCCH at this meeting gave a far smaller place to the investigation of the events of the disorder going forward than indicated in the statement to the press after their first meeting. The extensive program outlined by Randolph, with contributions by Ernst, did not mention those events. However, it did appear to assume they were being investigated as an item under “Methods for making work of Commission effective” that called for “Release [of] sections of Report from time to time” listed as the first such section, “Immediate cause of riot Tuesday, March 19.” Randolph emphasized that recommendation in a letter to Carter informing her he would not be able to attend the meeting, writing “In order that the public, colored and white, may not develop a mordant and cynical pessimism toward the Commission, I think it proper to dramatize the work by the release of sectional reports by various committees from time to time. The first section released might well be on the immediate case of the riot Tuesday night, March 19.” The suggested program of work Walter White of the NAACP sent the mayor and MCCH on March 26th, likely discussed at the same time, gave a similar limited place to investigation of the events of the disorder. The “Immediate Causes of Rioting March 19th and 20th” was the second to last topic in his outline, which he envisioned as warranting attention at the outset of the investigation: “It is suggested that the committee might well devote, at the beginning of the” investigation, as much time as it deems wise to checking the facts on immediate causes of the riot to establish responsibility and to settle controversial points where, in the opinion of the committee, there is sufficient legitimate doubt on these points to merit investigation.” White, like Randolph, argued that it was “desirable for the committee to issue a preliminary report as soon as possible on its findings in this regard.”
  
  After the MCCH adopted an outline of the work drawn up by Randolph, “certain changes in Committee assignments were accepted.” Six new subcommittees were appointed focused on topics in the outline: education, health and sanitation, labor problems, law and legislation and relief agencies. The subcommittee on the events of the disorder was renamed “Crime.” (Randolph’s outline had proposed a subcommittee to investigate “Police – riot night – numbers and policy rackets.”) The members of that committee announced on March 29 appear to have been Hays, Toney, Schiefflin, Carter, and Robinson; those are the names reported in a New York Evening Journal story published on March 29, apparently based on the statement the MCCH released to the press. Robinson’s addition came at the instruction of La Guardia. A note in the files of the mayor indicated that a member of his staff had telephoned Hays on March 29 to tell him the “Mayor hopes it will be possible to have Dr. Robinson serve on Mr Hays subcommittee and requests that Robinson be advised of the next meeting of the committee.” At some point before it submitted its report, Villard was added to the subcommittee. He signed that report as a member, together with Hays, Toney, Carter, and Robinson. He could have replaced Schiefflin, whose signature was missing. However, Hays' covering letter submitting that report to the mayor noted that Schiefflin’s signature was missing as “he at present is in Europe.” Three undated lists of the subcommittee memberships filed in the records of the MCCH confusingly list only some of the members identified in those sources; they are likely drafts. What appears to be a copy of the press statement released after the meeting on March 29 included only Hays, Schiefflin, and Toney as subcommittee members, omitting Carter and Robinson, as well as Villard. Two documents in the same file, one entitled “Suggested Committees and Assignments” and the other “Chairman and Members of Each Sub-Committee,” listed Hays, Schiefflin, Toney, and Villard as members of the crime subcommittee, omitting both Carter and Robinson.
  
  It was also at this meeting, in a discussion of securing letterheads, that the MCCH chose a “formal name.” They had been referring to themselves as the “Bi-Racial Commission.” The new name may have been Villard’s suggestion; he moved the motion to adopt it.
• 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.