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• 1 2022-12-11T19:00:01+00:00 Investigations by the staff of the MCCH 32 plain 2024-02-13T14:18:54+00:00 James Tartar, one of the first six staff assigned to the MCCH from city government agencies, undertook most of the investigative work on the events of the disorder during the time public hearings were held. He was a thirty-year-old Black former shipping clerk working as an investigator for the Department of Public Welfare. A resident of Harlem since around 1926, he lived on the western boundary of the neighborhood, at 448 West 151st Street. After E. Franklin Frazier was appointed to conduct a survey of conditions in Harlem beginning on May 1st, 1935, additional staff were added. On October 25, the personnel listed as investigating crime were Tartar, identified as the supervisor, Miss Dewitt Brown, and Miss Lois Taylor. A list compiled on December 1, 1935 also included three staff working on the topic of "Crime and Delinquency," with Mrs. Gretchen Thornton taking the place of Taylor as a "research investigator" alongside Dewitt Brown.
  
  A quantitative summary of the MCCH's work recorded the details of the activities undertaken for the Subcommittee on Crime: nineteen investigations and two special investigations, and ten interviews with police and six with hospital staff, which included Tartar's investigations of the deaths during the disorder, including the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. The one appearance before the grand jury and the one appearance before a police department trial are both related to efforts to prosecute the police officer who killed Hobbs. Interviews made up the remainder of the work tabulated: seventy-five "office interviews," likely done in the MCCH offices, and fourteen "home interviews," likely done at the subject's residence. In at least some of those interviews, MCCH staff recorded statements and collected or transcribed a variety of police and hospital records.
  
  Additional information was sent to the MCCH. A count of correspondence compiled by Edna Hayes, who worked as Eunice Carter's secretary, provide some additional indication of the scale of that information. The documents appear to date from the end of 1935, when Hayes' time at the MCCH ended. Eighty-nine letters on the "Events of March 19th" were received and seventy-two letters sent related to that subcommittee. The only larger category was complaints about employment discrimination at the W. P. A., which amounted to 138 letters, and ninety letters received related to "social control." It is not clear if those totals included letters sent on behalf of the MCCH by Hyman Glickstein, an attorney who worked with Arthur Garfield Hays to secure information and witnesses from city government agencies.
  
  In addition, included under the topic of "social control" in the quantitative summary, was a collection of 2,900 newspaper clippings "in connection with Disturbance of March 19th" as well as "Commission Releases." Those clippings were not all in the MCCH files, but a file labelled "Newspaper Clippings" included some information on what was gathered. Back issues for the days immediately after the disorder were ordered from eighteen newspapers: twelve major white New York City publications, the city's two major Black newspapers, the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News, together with three other Black publications, the Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the Communist publication the Daily Worker (all of which are among the sources for this study, together with three others, the Times Union, and the Black newspapers the Atlanta World and Chicago Defender). Articles on the disorder from national magazines were also collected: the New Republic, the Nation, Newsweek, Time, Commonweal, the NAACP's Opportunity and the Communist-aligned New Masses.

  Events

• 1 2022-08-18T17:30:27+00:00 [Carlton Moss], Untitled account of the disturbance on the night of March 19, Harlem Survey: March 19th, Box 131-123, Folder 7, E. Franklin Frazier Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University). 11 Carlton Moss was a twenty-six-year-old Black actor who, after he arrived in Harlem, wrote radio plays, and would later help lead the Federal Theater Project. plain 2024-01-18T20:26:53+00:00 This first person narrative was unsigned. However, a letter filed separately in the Frazier Papers from Carlton Moss dated November 12, 1935, refers to an enclosed account of the disturbance on the night of March 19. Moss may have been encouraged to send the account by his wife, Annie Laurie Savage, who worked for the MCCH as supervisor of the study on "Family Organization and Disorganization" and later as the "Intake Interviewer for the study of social control." The couple married on July 6, 1935, in a wedding reported in a long story in the society pages of the New York Amsterdam News.
  
  Carlton Moss was a twenty-six-year-old Black actor who, after he arrived in Harlem, wrote radio plays, and would later help lead the Federal Theater Project. He also worked for the Federal Writers Project on "Negroes of New York," for which he authored a brief account of the MCCH public hearings, titled "The "Peoples Court," based on his observations of those proceedings.
   

  E. Franklin Frazier Papers