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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

The public hearing of the MCCH's subcommittee on crime (April 6)

Twenty witnesses testified at the hearing on April 6, the largest group at any of the hearings. Their testimony covered a wider range of events than the previous week. Three witnesses added to the picture of events in the store. Charles Hurley, one of the Kress staff who grabbed Lino Rivera, testified about both about what happened to the boy and subsequent events in the store. Officer Eldridge, the Crime Prevention Bureau officer summoned to take custody of the boy, testified about how Rivera came to be left with Patrolman Donahue. Patrolman Shannon testified about efforts to disperse the crowds after the boy had been released. Three women staff from the store testified they knew nothing about what had happened to Rivera. Rivera himself testified again in response to persistent questions about whether he was actually the boy who had been in the Kress store. No newspapers covered the testimony in the detail they had the first hearing. The nature of the hearing would have made that difficult as "scores of witnesses presented different angles of the rioting," as the correspondent for the Afro-American described it. Or as the more critical assessment of the New York Herald Tribune journalist put it, "Additional facts as to the actual riot were elicited in a wordy, sometimes redundant question and answer session guided by Arthur Garfield Hays." Several publications devoted as much or more space to the reactions of the audience as to the testimony as Black residents and Communists asserted their view of the events and the situation in Harlem. All the MCCH members other than Judge Toney were in attendance to hear from both the audience and the witnesses, although Morris Ernst and Rev. Robinson were only present in the afternoon as in the morning they presided over a public hearing on housing in a courtroom on another floor.

Hurley’s testimony described the circumstances that led to Rivera being caught. He and the store manager had seen Rivera take a knife, after which he and the store detective grabbed the boy and took him out the front of the store. The store detective then left to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer to take the boy into custody, which Hurley testified was the store’s practice with shoplifters rather than having them arrested. When Rivera continued to struggle with Hurley, Steve Urban came to help. They were the two men Donahue saw the boy bite. Once Officer Eldridge, the Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived, Hurley claimed he went to the back of the store. He insisted that he played no further part in the events in the store, merely observing the exchanges between police and women shoppers. Neither Rivera nor Donahue had mentioned Eldridge’s presence in their testimony the previous week. The officer testified he arrived at the store when the ambulance doctor Donahue had summoned was treating Hurley and Urban for their bite wounds. That Eldridge did not leave with Rivera was due to Hurley wanting him arrested for assault for biting him. It was Hurley later changing his mind that left Donahue having to decide what to do with Rivera. (Hurley himself insisted that it was Urban, not him, who wanted to charge Rivera.) Few journalists saw anything sufficiently new in the details these witnesses provided to make them worth including in their stories. Only the New York Sun and Home News mentioned Hurley’s testimony, reporting just his denials that Rivera had been beaten. The Afro-American listed Hurley and Eldridge among a group of witnesses who “testified to clinch the contention that Rivera is the boy who stole the ten-cent Kress knife,” a question which neither was asked.

Shannon arrived at the Kress store at 4:00 PM, so his testimony filled in what had happened in the store between Donahue’s departure and the arrival of Louise Thompson. Going “from one crowd to another,” the patrolman told the shoppers that there was not a boy in the store basement, “but they would not listen.” Shannon claimed that he formed a committee of three shoppers, two men and one woman, whom he took to the basement to see that Rivera was not there. As he could not identify its members and no other witness mentioned it, that may not have happened. It was his decision to call for additional police at 4:20 PM. Still among the officers in the store trying to “reason” with shoppers when a second group of police reinforcements arrived, Shannon also heard the woman scream and pots and pans hitting the floor that Thompson had described. It was Hays' response to this testimony that attracted the attention of many of the journalists present. He twice suggested that police should have brought Rivera back to the store so that the crowds could see him. “That was up to my superiors,” Shannon replied on both occasions. Hays’ pointed rejoinder to that answer was also quoted in exactly the same language in the Home News, Daily News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Age, and New York Amsterdam News. "'I am not blaming you personally,' Hays said. 'You see this whole thing started from a false rumor, and it could have been stifled at the start, if it had been handled properly by the police.'" That statement was not included in the transcript of the hearing. It continued the criticism of police handling of Rivera’s release targeted at Patrolman Donahue in the previous hearing. The transcript and the press had differed then too about what had been said and by whom, reflecting how the audience inserted their reactions and questions into the MCCH’s agenda. However, given the consistent language of the quotation in white and Black publications, it was clear that Hays had picked up the audience's criticisms and more directly blamed police than he had in the first hearing. That did not mean that the press shared the same sense of the importance of this testimony. No mention of it appeared in New York Times, New York Post, or the Hearst papers the New York American and Daily Mirror. By contrast, the Home News and Daily News made Hays' statement the headline of their stories. The reactions of the Black press spanned the New York Amsterdam News identifying Hays criticism as one of three highlights in the hearing, the New York Age placing it near the end of its story, on an inside page, and the Afro-American not mentioning it (but focusing on criticism of police shooting Lloyd Hobbs).

Testimony about events on West 125th Street outside the store was given by three police officers. The MCCH had requested their presence so they could testify about events that had resulted in arrests, but District Attorney Dodge’s instructions prevented that testimony. Despite that injunction, Hays did question Sergeant Bowe, Patrolman Moran, and Patrolman Eppler about events around the arrests they made. Moran described Daniel Miller’s attempt to speak in front of the Kress store, the store window being broken, and Miller's subsequent arrest, in line with what Louise Thompson had described, and the later arrest of the three Young Liberators for picketing, which Thompson had not mentioned. Moran spent the rest of the evening moving crowds away from the front of the Kress store, in keeping with Thompson’s account. Bowe testified only that he witnessed the arrest of the Young Liberators. Eppler described what he saw on 124th Street, where his emergency truck first arrived to find nothing happening, and then on 125th Street, where he saw crowds and heard windows broken. None of that testimony was reported in the press. The New York Sun did mention Eppler and Moran, but mistakenly reported that “they told of the trouble in the store which preceded the riot." Dodge's restriction on police officers testifying attracted more attention than what those officers said. The New York Sun and New York Post made it the headline of their stories, and it featured prominently in the New York Times, Daily News, New York Age, and New York Amsterdam News, and less so in the New York Herald Tribune and Home News. Rather than elaborating details of the events of the disorder, the public record of the hearing focused on the politics of the investigation.

Details of Patrolman McInerney’s killing of Lloyd Hobbs were provided by eight witnesses. Lawyer, Mary, and Russell Hobbs testified, together with three Black men who had witnessed the shooting, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts, Dr. Arthur Logan, one of the physicians who treated Lloyd Hobbs, Detective Thomas McCormick, the police stenographer who had recorded a statement from the boy soon after he arrived at Harlem Hospital, and James Tartar, a Black investigator for the MCCH. 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. Malloy, Moore, and Pitts all described Hobbs breaking from the crowd to turn on West 128th Street and McInerney firing at him without calling on him to stop. Lawyer and Mary Hobbs testified that in the hospital their son had said “the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” According to their testimony, McInerney, guarding the boy, responded, "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" The boy's statement taken by Detective McCormick echoed what his parents said the Lloyd had told them. Dr. Arthur Logan’s testimony only described the nature of the boy's injuries; Lloyd had not said anything in the doctor's presence and no items had been found in his clothing. Tartar provided details of a report from the precinct commander about the shooting that was at odds with what the testimony of the eyewitnesses. The Afro-American made the killing of Hobbs the focus of its story, but the two New York City Black newspapers gave it less attention. It was the final item in the New York Age story and surprisingly not mentioned at all in the New York Amsterdam News, which had reported it extensively the previous week. While the radical Daily Worker and New Masses gave Hobbs prominence in reporting the hearing, only the New York Times and Home News among the mainstream white press even mentioned his killing.

The only other events in the disorder about which the hearing heard testimony were the deaths of Andrew Lyons, August Miller, and James Thompson. Physicians from Harlem Hospital testified to their injuries and treatment, but offered no information on the circumstances in which they died.

The audience of Black residents and Communists asserted their view of the events and the situation in Harlem and contested the testimony of some witnesses. It was their reactions to the testimony more than the questions asked by Communist lawyers that drew the attention of MCCH members and the press to issues. “Turbulent” was how the white newspapers the Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American, and New York Times described the hearing, with the later straying into racial stereotypes in adding “noisy and emotional.” A fuller picture of the proceedings was offered by the New York Herald Tribune: “persons in the crowded courtroom were asking questions as well as five attorneys representing a variety of Communist associations. The lawyers would quarrel from time to time, and when the din blotted out the shouted replies of witnesses Mr Hays would rap for order.” That story was also the only one to identify the audience, as mostly “Negro and Communistic.” Their boos, cheers, and outbursts highlighted the issues that mattered to them and the testimony which they contested: boos for Dodge’s ban on police testimony (Daily News, Daily Mirror) and the quality of care at Harlem Hospital (New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Amsterdam News); cheers for defense of the Communist pamphlets (New York Amsterdam News); accusations that Kress staff had been bribed to testify there had been no beating in the store; and calls for the arrest of Patrolman McInerney (Afro-American).

The audience joined with ILD lawyers to also force Hays to address the question of whether Rivera was the boy who had been in the Kress store, which consequently made its way into stories about the hearing. The New York Times’s reporting most clearly captured that process, with the challenges from the audience when Hays had Rivera testify again included in the narrative: “He’s a paid witness,” some of those in the room shouted. “He wasn’t the only boy in that store.” “The police are covering up,” another exclaimed.” They also booed Rivera, according to the New York Age. The Black press, the New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Afro-American, followed the lead of the audience and made debate over Rivera the headline in their stories about the hearing. The reactions would also make an impression on E. Franklin Frazier, the director of the MCCH's survey of Harlem. Although convinced by the evidence that Rivera was the boy in the store, he mentioned the debates in his final report to illustrate the "skeptical mood of the people in the audience who openly expressed a lack of confidence in the police and the representatives of established authority."

By contrast, several white newspapers ignored the audience interventions entirely. The Hearst newspapers, the New York American and the Daily Mirror, put the audience's complaints into the mouths of witnesses in stories devoted to sensationalized claims that another riot was imminent. The Daily Mirror also recast the audience’s concerns in the racial terms in which they portrayed the disorder: "The room was packed with colored people, openly hostile to any effort to justify the white participants in the riot.”
 

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