This page is referenced by:

• 1 2023-07-02T17:39:00+00:00 Writing the final report 13 plain 2024-02-03T19:49:47+00:00 While members of the MCCH wrote the preliminary reports submitted to Mayor La Guardia, they were not the authors of the commission’s final report. Instead, E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist they had employed to conduct a survey of conditions on Harlem, wrote the document that became the most widely cited account of the disorder. Frazier, at least, did not seem certain that was going to be the case. He told a meeting of the MCCH on September 11, 1935 that the survey was far enough along that he would begin to “write this stuff up” and expected to be done by January 1, 1936. But the work of the staff he directed was not the only material which the MCCH had gathered. The public hearings chaired and attended by MCCH members, in which Frazier did not have a role, had produced just over 2,000 pages of testimony. The preliminary reports, including that of the subcommittee on crime, had been based on the hearings. As the final report would necessarily be a combination of material from those hearings and Frazier’s study, the MCCH members who presided could have been involved in writing it as they had the preliminary reports. That they ultimately were not produced significant differences in tone and content between the account of the events of the disorder in the subcommittee report and the final report that have helped distort historians’ understandings of what happened in 1935.
  
  Frazier gradually made clear his desire to write the entire report at meetings of the MCCH in October 1935. After telling the four members present at the meeting on October 9 that the study “will be written in any manner the Commission wishes it,” he asked the larger group at the next meeting, on October 23, for “instructions concerning the kind of report they wanted.” The record of the discussion in the minutes is somewhat garbled, but Frazier’s statement that “he would not want to be part of an amalgamated report” highlighted the issue. Some MCCH members apparently were not immediately ready to give up a role in writing the final report, perhaps in part because Frazier's report on hospitals read earlier in the meeting had met with “some criticism.” Eventually Hubert Delany said in the case of the preliminary report of the subcommittee he chaired on discrimination in employment, he was willing for Frazier “to write the type of report he wants to and in his own way.” Charles Roberts seized on that offer to end the discussion, suggesting that “the Commission hold their judgment in abeyance until the report on discrimination is presented.” Frazier agreed to complete that report by the next week, October 31, and a meeting was set for that date. He likely missed that deadline, as he reported to the MCCH meeting two months later, on December 27, that he was still working on Delany’s preliminary report. There are no records of the meetings in the interim, but by this time Frazier was also writing the final report, so apparently the commission had decided to make him the sole author regardless of their assessment of the report on discrimination. His plan, he told the meeting, was to send the chapters “two at a time so the Committee can read over them and digest them.” One of the first two chapters MCCH members received covered the events of the disorder. It included sections that most members found hard to stomach.