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• 1 2023-06-14T14:54:24+00:00 The MCCH investigation of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs 96 plain 2024-02-13T00:04:50+00:00 The MCCH learned of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs from the New York Urban League. His father, Lawyer Hobbs, went several times to the 28th Precinct police station on West 123rd Street trying to get the name and shield number of the patrolman who had shot Lloyd, which the family had been too upset to get when they encountered him at Harlem Hospital. He also wanted to file a complaint against the officer. Although Hobbs "was told by the inspector that he could not file a complaint because he did not witness the affair, and knew nothing about it," no one at the precinct mentioned that Detective O'Brien was investigating the shooting. As police kept him "running up and down with no satisfaction," Lawyer Hobbs also went to the offices of the New York Urban League on West 136th Street. The Urban League was a social work and civil rights organization focused on the social and economic conditions of Black residents. James Hubert, the executive director, told Hobbs that they would look into it and to come back later. Although Hobbs did not mention it, someone at the Urban League also recorded his statement. Hobbs recounted what his son Russell had told him, that the boys had stopped to see what a crowd was looking at when a patrolman appeared telling them to "break it up." The boys joined everyone else in running; the patrolman then shot Lloyd. Hobbs also added the exchange he and his wife had with the patrolman at Harlem Hospital, when he told them he had shot the boy because he had not stopped when told to. Lawyer Hobbs returned on Monday, March 25, to find that Hubert had no results for him. However, three days later, on March 28, the Urban League sent a letter sent to the MCCH, which enclosed the statement by Hobbs and asked for ”cooperation” and “assistance.” The MCCH had appealed for information in the statement it gave the press after its first meeting on March 25.
  
  The MCCH responded to the information from the Urban League by including “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family" on the list of eyewitnesses asked to give testimony to the first public hearing on March 30. Near the end of the day-long hearing, as Captain Rothengast was being questioned about who had been shot during the disorder, the chairman, Arthur Garfield Hays, asked did he "know anything specifically about a boy by the name of Hobbs?" Hays then had Mrs. Carrie Hobbs stand up, to ask her if her son Russell was present, and called the boy up to testify. Rothengast knew nothing beyond what was in the arrest report, so Hays excused him so Russell could be questioned. His testimony, or at least as recorded by the stenographer, was a somewhat garbled version of what he had told his parents. He talked of stopping on 125th Street, not 7th Avenue, and the patrolmen running up on the pavement on a horse, not in a patrol car. Few newspapers stories about the hearing mentioned Russell's testimony, even as they reported Lloyd's death later that night. Hays, however, did pay attention to the testimony, not only because Lloyd had died. Hays made investigating deaths during the disorder and victims of police brutality the next focus of his subcommittee's hearings.
  
  On April 1, Hays wrote to the MCCH's secretary, Eunice Carter, telling her to have the Hobbs family attend the next hearing, on April 6, and to "have our investigators find out all they can about [the Hobbs case]." He also had an attorney at his law firm assisting him, Hyman Glickstein, write to Police Inspector Di Martini and the superintendent of Harlem Hospital to obtain their records relating to Lloyd Hobbs. Carter assigned the investigation to James Tartar, one of the staff who had sought witnesses to the causes of the disorder the previous week. He did what Detective O'Brien had not; he interviewed the Hobbs family "as the first source," having the advantage of knowing that Russell had been with Lloyd when Mcinerney shot him. Tartar complied a "social and economic history of the family" and took statements from Russell and his mother. He also learned from Lawyer Hobbs that he had been contacted by two eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore.
  
  Tartar met with the men at 213 West 128th Street, the apartment building in which they both lived, and recorded "their story." Malloy said he had walked past the automobile store almost two hours before McInerney alleged he had heard the window breaking and Hobbs taking items and the windows had been entirely broken with no merchandise remaining inside them. Not long before the Hobbs brothers arrived, he and Moore had come out to get ice cream for their wives, who were in the Moores apartment. As they arrived at the northwest corner of 128th and 7th Avenue, they saw a "commotion" on the block of 7th Avenue to the south. As they watched, people began to move toward them, breaking into a run. When Lloyd Hobbs turned west on 128th Street, they saw the patrolman shoot the boy without calling on him to halt. Nothing fell to the ground when the shot hit the boy. They also contradicted the officers' claim that objects had been thrown at them, saying that seeing both men had guns caused people in the area to stay away.
  
  On April 2, Tartar also spoke with ADA Saul Price, who told him "that the officer had not been exonerated, due to the fact that he was waiting to hear the story from the Hobbs family, particularly Russell Hobbs." An interview with the police department's ballistic expert produced no information as he had not received the bullet that hit Lloyd. Tartar's visit to Harlem Hospital was more successful, as Dr. Steinholz shared the boy's chart, which the investigator copied. An additional interview with Inspector Di Martini not mentioned in Tartar's report allowed him to make a copy of a report to Commissioner Valentine from commander of the 28th Precinct, Captain George Mulholland, on the subject of "The shooting of prisoner by Patrolman." It described McInerney observing Hobbs leaving the store window "with several objects in his hands," giving that evidence a far more prominent and specific place than they had in O'Brien's reports. Threats to the patrolman also received more attention, with allegations that "the colored people in the immediate vicinity threw bottles and other objects from the windows with the intent to strike the officer” and that the officers "dispersed a large crowd of colored men and women who had threatened them" before they could leave the scene.
  
  Tartar was among those who testified at the MCCH's April 6 public hearing, with Russell Hobbs and both his parents, Malloy and Moore, and a third man who had been with them when Lloyd Hobbs was shot, Samuel Pitts. Pitts' name was added in pencil to the MCCH's typewritten witness list, indicating they had not known he would be present. He likely came with Malloy and Moore, although he lived some distance from them, at 112 West 127th Street. Pitts witnessed the shooting from the same corner as those men, where he had been since about 10:00 PM, "looking after people and cops shooting[, and] talking about the riot." Russell's testimony was more in line with his statement than the previous week. Having continued to run up 7th Avenue fearing a beating by police, he had not, however, seen his brother shot. His parents testified that when they found Lloyd in the hospital, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” McInerney, guarding the boy, said "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" Malloy, Moore, and Pitts, who all had seen the shooting, described the same details. Arthur Garfield Hays had also expected Patrolman McInerney to testify, but although he was at the hearing, District Attorney Dodge had refused to allow officers involved in cases in the legal system to give evidence. The police officer who did testify, also not on the MCCH list of witnesses, was Detective Thomas McCormick, the stenographer who recorded Lloyd's statement at Harlem Hospital. He read that statement, which echoed what the boy had told his parents when they found him in the hospital: he had done nothing but run when the patrol car pulled up but McInerney had shot him. The hearing also heard from medical staff from Harlem Hospital. The case of Lloyd Hobbs was the first about which Hays asked them. All Dr. Arthur Logan could tell him was the nature of the boy's injuries; he had not said anything in the doctor's presence and no items had been found in his clothing. While the Black press (except for the New York Amsterdam News) highlighted the testimony on the case, among white publications only the radical Daily Worker and New Masses gave it similar prominence in reporting the hearing, and only the New York Times and Home News among the mainstream white press even mentioned Lloyd Hobbs.
  
  Hays announced plans to continue hearing evidence about the killing of Lloyd Hobbs at his subcommittee's next public hearing, in two weeks, the New York Times, New York Age, and Afro-American reported. However, Detective O'Brien delivered subpoenas to the three eyewitnesses after they appeared before the MCCH. Two days later, ADA Saul Price drew the men into the police investigation.
  
   
• 1 2022-10-29T16:00:08+00:00 Preparation for the public hearing on March 30 43 plain 2024-02-13T14:15:30+00:00 The MCCH’s investigations in preparation for the public hearing on the events of the disorder are described in the “Report of the Secretary, March 26-March 29, 1935, inclusive," in correspondence in the MCCH files in the records of Mayor La Guardia and in documents in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays.
  
  According to the report, two of the four investigators initially assigned to the MCCH started their work investigating the events of the disorder, focusing on the “immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19” and interviewing possible witnesses for the first hearing. That division of resources fit how the MCCH presented its plans in the statement to the press after its first meeting; the investigation of the immediate situation as one part and “a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem” as the other. Hays, who took over leadership of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder from Toney soon after the first meeting, asked that the investigators “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.”
  
  The result of that work was a “list of eyewitnesses” “expected to be at the hearings on March 30” that Carter gave to Hays on March 29. That list is likely the nine typewritten names on a section torn from a page in the Hays Papers. One of those on the list had been among the forty-nine individuals and organizations that Carter reported wrote to the MCCH in its first four days of existence (The New York Times made an unattributed claim that by March 29 more than 80 wanted to testify). Other witnesses were on a list likely provided to Hays by the Communist Party when he met with James Ford. It is not clear how the investigators identified the remaining people.
  
  The first name in the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses was Louise Thompson, the sixth person to testify on March 30. Her name was also first on another list of twelve names in the Hays Papers headed “For Mr. Hays,” most of whom were identified as members of the Communist Party or groups affiliated with it. Thompson, however, was not identified as a member of an organization but by the information she had: “testimony to the issuing of the leaflet.” As establishing that the leaflet issued by the Young Liberators had not triggered the disorder was a major concern of the Communist Party, the list highlighting that part of Thompson’s evidence offers further confirmation that it likely came from Ford. Four other women appeared on the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses, three listed after Thompson, “Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative)” at the bottom of the page. None of those women testified on March 30. Those women were likely present in the Kress store at some point on March 19 after Rivera was grabbed by staff, part of a crowd widely reported to be almost entirely made up of women. Only one of those women could be identified. A photograph of Effie Diton, a forty-five-year-old Black woman, appeared in the New York Age in 1935, identifying her as the president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. Her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini Diton, had helped found that organization and served as its president in the 1920s. The New York Age had reported their marriage twenty years earlier, when they both worked at Paine College in Georgia. In 1930 they lived at 188 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 120th Street, close enough to 125th Street for Effie Diton to have shopped at the Kress store. “Mrs Jackson, Mrs Ida Hengain, Mrs. Effie Diton” are also on a handwritten list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. (The hearing on March 30 took the whole day, so Hays likely ran out of time to call those witnesses, although there is no evidence that they were present.) Hays called for those three women by name in the subcommittee’s second public hearing on April 6. None of them were present at that time, and they never testified in a public hearing.
  
  The sixth name on the likely list of eyewitnesses was “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family.” Sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs had been shot by a police officer during the disorder. The New York Urban League provided the details of the shooting in a letter sent to the MCCH on March 26, which enclosed a statement by Hobbs’ father and asked for "cooperation” and “assistance.” (The statement appears to have been put in a different file in the MCCH records.) The letter is one of several sources that misidentified the boy’s father as also being named Lloyd; his first name was Lawyer. In listing Lloyd Hobbs as a witness, Carter may have meant Lawyer Hobbs or could have assumed that Lloyd would recover from his injury and be able to testify himself. As it happened, neither Lloyd nor Lawyer Hobbs testified on March 30. Instead, it was Lloyd’s younger brother Russell, who had been with him during the disorder and was thus an eyewitness unlike his father, who testified on March 30. Lloyd Hobbs died that evening. Hays would make the investigation of the boy’s shooting a focus of the subcommittee’s next hearing on April 6 and return to it in later hearings on April 20 and May 14.
  
  “Mr Campbell,” the next name on the likely list of eyewitnesses, very likely Fred Campbell, whose statement is in the MCCH files. Although undated, it referred to him coming to the “Office of the Bi-Racial Commission,” a name used only until March 29, when the members voted to adopt the name MCCH. Campbell’s statement recorded he had been sent to the MCCH offices by Delany “as he had some information that he thought might be of value to us regarding the riot on Tuesday night March 19th.” “Mr Campbell" also appeared in the list of five "Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. Hays, however, did not call for him in the second public hearing and he never testified. As his evidence related to events away from the Kress store on which the hearings focused, Hays may have decided his testimony was not relevant.
  
  The final name on the list is “Mr Irving Kirshaw.” That name is also the final name on the list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. On that list the name is followed by “garage owner” in parenthesis. The garage referred to is likely the one behind the Kress store at which a hearse parked, prompting a crowd to attack the rear of the store. Hays did not call for Kirshaw at the second hearing, and he never testified. Instead, Benjamin Todman, the driver of the hearse, testified at the public hearing on May 4.
  
  In addition to the nine typewritten names, a tenth name was handwritten at the top of the likely list of eyewitnesses, “Cole,” with a check mark, both crossed out. In the Hays Papers is a letter L. F. Cole had written directly to Villard on March 23 saying “I was in Kress’ store when the boy was maltreated by three white clerks” and asking that Villard “invite me to one of your meetings of the Bi-Racial Commission.” Cole testified on March 30, the first eyewitness to give evidence, and again on May 14..
  
  The names of two other men who testified on March 30 appeared with “X” marks next to them on the list "For Mr Hays" likely supplied by the Communist Party, James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators and James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem. Hays told the MCCH at their March 29 meeting that “he had held a conference with Mr. Ford of the Communist Party, and that he and several representatives of his organization would be present at the hearing on Saturday.” A story published in the Daily Worker on March 30 that named several “militant leaders who will demand to be heard” at the public hearing that day fitted the names on the list: Ford, A. W. Berry, Williana Burroughts and “representatives from the Harlem Unemployed Councils, the Harlem International Labor Defense, and the New York District I. L. D.. Of the others named on that list, only one, Frank Wells, likely had information on the events of the disorder. His name was second after Thompson on the list and was likewise annotated with a check mark, with “police brutality” after it. Wells was arrested for allegedly breaking windows on West 125th Street during the disorder. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH, he was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street," again at the police station and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20. The officer who arrested Wells, Patrolman Eppler, would testify at the second public hearing although not about that arrest, but Wells himself never did. ILD lawyer Edward Kuntz tried to ask Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the District Attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case. Handwritten notes related to one other name on the list, William Burroughs, suggest that Hays or an investigator interviewed him as a possible eyewitness. The notes indicated that they found he was not: “has only hearsay evidence of police brutality – was not in Harlem on Mar. 19.” (Three of the remaining names on the list have “Ernst” handwritten next to them, likely indicating that their evidence was relevant to housing, the subject of the subcommittee that Ernst led. Two others are identified as part of the International Labor Defense, which had written to the MCCH saying they had information on conditions in Harlem, rather than the events of the disorder. The final name, A. Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, has an “X” written next to it, as Taylor and Ford did, but he was not among those who testified in hearings chaired by Hays.
  
  Carter’s Report indicated that the MCCH had been assured that police witnesses would be present at the hearing, likely either by Inspector Di Martini or by Lt. Samuel Battle, the city’s senior Black police officer. The assurance was reported directly after the information that an assignment of police to the hearing had been arranged through Di Martino and an “interview was also held with Police Lieutenant Jesse [sic] Battle.” The police witnesses mentioned are “Inspector of the Sixth Division [Di Martini] and officers in charge of the forces handling the crowds on Tuesday March 19 together with the crime Prevention officer who was called to the Kress store at the time of the youth’s apprehension.” On March 30, Di Martini, Donahue (the Crime Prevention Officer), Captain Rothengast (who took charge of police in front of the Kress store at 8:30 PM) and Battle testified. Additional police officers testified in the second hearing. Hays secured an additional law enforcement witness. He told the MCCH on March 29 that he had contacted the District Attorney’s office and they had agreed to send a representative to the March 30 hearing. ADA Alexander Kaminsky was the third witness to testify.
  
  The final witness who testified was Lino Rivera. There is no mention of arrangements for him to appear at the public hearing in either the MCCH records or the Hays Papers. He was photographed at the hearing with Donahue, who likely brought him and ensured his attendance.
  
  There is evidence that the MCCH had sought additional witnesses. A telegram sent to Carter on March 29 by Dorothy McConnell reported that she “Could not get names of eyewitnesses.” That the telegram went on to suggest Carter “Call on Mrs Imes and Louise Thompson at Hearing” suggests that McConnell had been searching for women who had been in the Kress store on March 19 in addition to those on the eyewitness list. Louise Thompson would later say she tried to get some of the women she had met in the store to testify "but they were scared." The name and address of one woman who had been in the store was known, but she would not testify at a public hearing. According to an undated note from Inspector Di Martini to Hays, Margaret Mitchell, described as “the woman who was arrested in the store at the time the boy was in the store,” “refused” the request of a detective to appear. Hays asked about Mitchell at the first hearing; Lt. Battle testfied that when he called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing, “she refused to come.” When Hays again asked Battle about her testimony three weeks later, he reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing." As the MCCH did not have subpoena power, they could not compel her attendance. Perhaps because they lacked that power, the MCCH appeared to have relied on police to bring at least some of the witnesses to its public hearings. The list of eyewitnesses in the Hays Papers is headed “Police Department.”
  
  Police had also sought to bring at least one staff member from the Kress store to the hearing on March 30. A handwritten memo from Di Martini dated that day informed the MCCH of Steve Urban, “the man supposed to be treated by an ambulance has worked all night and left the store, present whereabout unknown.” A police officer had evidently called at the store for Urban as the memo attributed that information to “W. F. Woodman ass’t manager Kress Dept Store 256 W 125th St.” Urban never did testify before the MCCH. The other man involved in grabbing Rivera, Charles Hurley, did, on April 6. The MCCH also sought to have the store manager, Jackson Smith, testify; in the hearing on March 30, Di Martini told the MCCH, “I have spoken to Mr Smith, manager, who said that he was busy and he could not get away.”
  
  Finally, Hays requested at the March 29 meeting of the MCCH that “an investigator be sent to Harlem Hospital to secure information relative to victims of the disturbance on March 19th.” It was unlikely that he expected those investigation to produce witnesses for the hearing on March 30. In the second public hearing, on April 6, staff from the hospital gave evidence about the injuries suffered by Lloyd Hobbs and Andrew Lyons, and by two other victims of alleged police brutality.
• 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.