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Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 16, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2022-07-14T17:02:48+00:00
Police find Lino Rivera
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2023-09-02T14:46:03+00:00
Sometime during the disorder, police tried to locate Lino Rivera so they could show that he had not been killed or beaten. Chief Inspector Seely ordered the boy be located, according to the New York Times, which indicated that those efforts started after 9:00 PM when senior officers took charge of the police response. However, the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Times, Times Union and Afro-American newspapers simply reported that police searched for Rivera throughout the night. They were unable to find him because the home address they had was incorrect: 272 Morningside Avenue rather than 272 Manhattan Avenue. (The New York Age story written early in the disorder included the incorrect address) The Daily News reported that “the mistake was made” when Eldridge gave the address to an officer at the West 123rd Street station over the telephone – not that he had misrecorded the address as the New York Herald Tribune reported or that Rivera had given a false address as the Home News reported. According to Louise Thompson, a group of women who had tried to locate Rivera at the beginning of the disorder also had the wrong address, although one on the correct street: 410 Manhattan Avenue. Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, also heard a rumor that Rivera lived at 410 Manhattan Avenue and went to investigate around 7:30 PM.
At 1:30 AM, Officer Eldridge was woken at his home on Whitlock Avenue in the Bronx by a telephone call telling him to report to the Chief Inspector at the West 123rd Street station, he told a hearing of the MCCH. The police officers who had been at the Kress store, Eldridge and Patrolman Donohue, had gone off duty at 4:00 PM. Until he was woken Eldridge thought Rivera had been arrested and was unaware of what was happening in Harlem. He was able to go directly to Rivera’s home, arriving around 2:00 AM. He found him asleep, according to his testimony. The boy had not been there all night, as initially reported in the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun, but had gone out around 9:00 PM. Rivera had a cup of coffee and returned home after about twenty-five minutes because he "saw there was a lot of trouble around,” the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported. Rivera said Eldridge told him people thought he was dead, the New York World Telegram and New York Herald Tribune reported.
Eldridge took Rivera to the West 123rd Street station. Only the New York Sun described Rivera as “blubbering and frightened.” Rivera told a reporter for the New York World Telegram that he was at the station for about half an hour. During that time, police questioned him, he spoke with reporters and was photographed with Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge. Newspaper stories that quoted his statements mentioned that he spoke to two different officers, Kear, according to the Daily News, and Captain Oliver, according to the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun. Battle told the MCCH that he asked Rivera “if he had been hurt by anyone and had he been arrested.” The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York Sun, and New York American published separate stories about Rivera’s statements. The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune and Atlanta World appended his statements to larger stories on the disorder. Reporters also interviewed and photographed Rivera at his home later on March 20. The New York World Telegram, New York Herald Tribune and La Prensa published separate stories based on those interviews, while the New York Times included Rivera in a larger story.
Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle appear in the images. “It was my idea to get Lieut. Battle to pose with the boy and get the picture into the streets as soon as possible,” he told a hearing of the MCCH. Battle said the reason Rivera posed with him was “for the moral effect.” Not made explicit in either statement was that having the boy photographed with a Black police officer added to the credibility of the image and cut across the racial divisions expressed in the disorder. “A lot” of pictures were taken, Rivera told a MCCH hearing, but only six different published images have been identified. An Associated Press photo that showed Battle seated with his arm around Rivera, who was standing, was published in the New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun. Rivera was only 4 feet 8 inches tall according to the New York Herald Tribune, so that pose put the two on the same level. Their height difference was visible in an image of them standing in the same pose taken by an International Photo agency photographer. That difference was further emphasized in the photograph of this pose published in the Daily Mirror in which Battle is looking down at Rivera. (The Daily Worker took offense at Battle having "his arm protectively around" Rivera as the "Harlem masses...know that Battles would kill a worker on the slightest excuse.") Photographs taken by the International Photo agency and Daily News revealed that Eldridge was on the other side of Rivera in both poses. Eldridge did not have an arm around Rivera, as Battle did, so was detached from their grouping. A second Black officer added to message Di Martini wanted to send. However, Battle was in uniform and well-known as the senior Black police officer in New York City, while Eldridge was in plainclothes, a suit and tie, and not a public figure. It was likely on that basis that some photographers and editors decided not to include Eldridge. An ANS photo showed Rivera and Battle standing surrounded by white reporters, looking at a camera to their left. Where the other photographs showed Rivera unharmed, in contradiction of the rumors circulating in Harlem, the ANS image presented him as telling his story. Rivera, dressed in a leather jacket, is smiling in all the photographs. Photographed at home later that day, Rivera wore a suit and tie because he said his mother suggested he “dress for the picture." In the image published in the New York Evening Journal, a pensive expression rather than smiling. (The New York Times reporter who visited Rivera at home described him as "a dejected figure," "overwhelmed by the fact that his desire for a ten-cent knife had precipitated the riot and resultant bloodshed.")
If the primary purpose of finding Rivera was to show that he was alive and unharmed, his appearance at the police station also brought some consistency to reports about the identity of the boy who had been in Kress' store. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child" and the leaflets their organization distributed an hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories published appear to have relied on those rumors and leaflets in describing the boy; with neither Eldridge nor Donohue still on duty, police apparently did not have more precise information until Rivera was found. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23. Other stories in Black newspapers simply referred to the boy's age not his race: a 16 year old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16 year old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram, or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune and Times Union. The New York World-Telegram pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet. By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a “young Negro boy,”" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")
Police found Rivera too late for his appearance to impact the disorder, although it may have contributed to the violence not continuing the next evening. However, the delays in locating him fed rumors that he was not in fact the boy grabbed in Kress’ store. Reflecting questions raised in hearings, the MCCH report noted that, “The final dramatic attempt on the part of police to placate the populace by having the unharmed Lino Rivera photographed with the Negro police lieutenant Samuel Battle only furnished the basis for the rumor that Rivera, who was on probation for having placed a slug in a subway turnstile, was being used as a substitute to deceive people.” After members of the MCCH met with Mayor La Guardia soon after their appointment, on March 22, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun both reported that “some” of them said that many in Harlem did not believe that Lino Rivera was the boy who had been caught in the Kress store. (Stories about the meeting in the New York Times, New York Post, Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Daily Worker included no mention of those comments). An Afro-American journalist reported the rumors before the first hearing of the MCCH: “At the present time Harlem is divided into those who has been presented by the police as the boy in the case, is not the boy who was beaten in the store. They declare that Lino is being paid off to be the scapegoat and a camouflage....The AFRO reporter has run scores of tips about the boy who actually stole the knife, or a bag of jelly-beans, as it was first given out. Everything so far has run up a blind alley. One clue to the real boy is that all during the riot he was referred to as a 12-year-old boy, but became a 16-year-old one with the finding of Lino Riviera." The New York Age hinted at those rumors when it described Rivera as “believed to have been the cause of the whole affair.” Writing in The New Masses, Louise Thompson reported that a man and woman who had been in the store said Rivera was older and taller than the boy they saw. Other publications did not raise the issue. However, as the Afro-American journalist predicted, questions about Rivera were raised in a hearing of the MCCH. In the first hearing, Police Lieutenant Battle was asked, "Is there any evidence that would indicate that Rivera is not the boy? There has been such rumor." He simply answered, "No." L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk who had been in the Kress store, also testified that he had "no doubt" that Rivera was the boy he had seen taken away by police. The question was raised again at the third hearing on April 20. Mention that he had been on parole after being caught putting slugs in a subway turnstile prompted an interjection from "Mrs Burrows:" "My impression is that this boy is not the boy. We have testimony here that he got into trouble before March 19th, 1935. They had a boy under supervision. This is not the boy. They got a boy through these people and this is the boy they presented." Hays, chairing the hearing, pushed the ILD lawyers for evidence that another boy was beaten in the store. They had found none nor could they establish that Rivera had received lenient treatment. A month later, Jackson Smith, the store manager, confirmed in the subcommittee's final hearing that Rivera was the boy he saw from the office, with Donohue and again outside the Grand Jury room after the disorder. After listening to several questions trying to undermine the certainty of that identification, Hays announced "there is no question about it." Given the lack of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to think Rivera was not person grabbed in the store. The shoppers who saw him in the store could have assumed he was younger, given his height. Similarly, seeing that he was dark-skinned, they could have assumed he was a Black rather than Puerto Rican.
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2022-02-13T21:48:02+00:00
Margaret Mitchell arrested
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2023-08-25T02:31:02+00:00
Officer Johnson of the 6th Division arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, inside Kress’ 5, 10 and 25c store, sometime around 5.00 PM on March 19. Police alleged that she was “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. Pots and pans, and glasses, were knocked off counters and women screamed, after the store was closed and police tried to clear out those inside, Jackson Smith, the store manager, Patrolman Timothy Shannon, and Louise Thompson all testified. Only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise, most fully in an article in New Masses. After a woman she could not see screamed, Thompson joined part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed that crowd back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store left once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. Thompson remained with the woman she described knocking over pots and pans, who was not arrested, but she was clearly not the only person who knocked over merchandise in efforts to remain in the store until they had information about Rivera. Mitchell could also have been the woman whose scream drew Thompson and others to the rear of the store.
Margaret Mitchell appeared in many newspaper stories about what happened in Kress’ store, but almost all truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, in the process mistaking what Mitchell was alleged to have done and when she was arrested. The Home News reported that Mitchell “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried cut that the guards were beating the youth.” La Prensa also reported Mitchell trying to intervene. Although the Home News went on to claim that Mitchell was arrested at that time, neither Hurley nor Donohue mentioned a woman being part of their struggles with Rivera, and Donahue testified he did not arrest anyone while at Kress’ store. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, New York Evening Journal (and the New York Times on March 24) reported that Mitchell was arrested after she screamed when the boy was being beaten. However, the New York Times, Daily News, New York American, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker did not specify when she screamed (or spread rumors in the New York Times story or was “a leader of the disturbance” in the New York Herald Tribune story) – although the Daily News, New York American, and New York Post did elsewhere in their stories mention an unnamed woman running into street screaming at the time Rivera was grabbed. The New York Sun alone specified that Mitchell’s actions came later: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried cut that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.” Inspector Di Martini's report, while containing few details of events in the store, did distinguish Mitchell from the woman who reacted to Rivera, whose actions he located slightly later than the newspaper stories, "upon the arrival of the ambulance [to treat Hurley and Urban]," when the "unknown female screamed that the boy had been seriously injured or killed and otherwise caused a commotion which attracted a large number of persons." Mitchell's arrest came later, after which "this commotion was soon quieted."
The more specific allegation of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect” was recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter as “Disorderly in Kresses 5 & 10c Store.” That language echoed the offense with which the prosecutor charged Mitchell, disorderly conduct. She appeared in lists of those arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily News. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Mitchell was found guilty by Magistrate Renaud, who remanded her until March 23 for investigation and sentencing. The Times Union reported that she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” No other newspapers included that scene.
Mitchell returned to the court on March 23, telling Magistrate Renaud she was "sorry," according to the Home News and New York World-Telegram. In passing sentence Renaud commented that “he did not believe the girl acted maliciously,” those two publications and the New York Times and New York Age reported. The sentence reflected that assessment: three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10. The New York American reported only that outcome, obliquely reporting Renaud's comment by describing her as having "unwittingly started Tuesday's outbreak." A brief mention in the New York Amsterdam News gave the opposite impression by describing Mitchell as having been "found guilty" of "stirring up the mob." The Daily Worker pointed to what its reporter saw as the implications of her sentence, that it "beating of Negro children by Harlem white storekeepers of the police, as frequently has been the case." Mitchell was one of only three people convicted during the disorder who paid a fine. She was also one of only eighteen of those arraigned represented by a lawyer, in her case Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney.
The lawyer was likely obtained with the help of Mitchell’s father, Thomas E. Thompson. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. He and his family were among the earliest Black residents of Harlem, recorded in the 1910 census living in 55 West 137th Street. While not featuring on the social pages as Sidney Christian did, Thompson would have had the resources and the standing in the West Indian community to have known of and involved the lawyer. Mitchell, one of the youngest of Thompson's twelve children, had married in April 1934, and at the time of the disorder lived with her husband, David Mitchell, a handyman in an apartment building, at 287 West 150th Street. That she was in a store twenty-five blocks south of her home indicated the distance from which the businesses on West 125th Street drew their customers.
As the only person arrested in Kress’ store, and named in newspaper stories about the disorder, Mitchell was one of the few identifiable sources of information about the beginnings of the disorder for the MCCH. However, when Lt. Battle called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing on March 30, “she refused to come.” Asked again about her testimony three weeks later, Battle reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing."
Margaret Mitchell and her husband still lived in the same apartment when the census enumerator called in 1940. In January 1945, she joined 200 family and friends celebrating her parents 50th wedding anniversary, photographed alongside her siblings in an image published in the New York Amsterdam News. Her husband David was not part of the celebration; he was a sergeant in the U.S. military serving overseas, as were two of Mitchell’s brothers and four nephews. -
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Preparation for the Public Hearing on March 30
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2023-07-26T21:46:04+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, Donohue (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 Donohue, 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 soe 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 appear 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 that Steve Urban, “the man supposed to be treated by an ambulance has worked all might and left the store, present whereabout unknown.” A police officer had evidently called at the store for Urban as 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 Martino 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. -
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Hays 'rough draft' of the subcommittee report
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2023-07-22T19:35:55+00:00
The ”rough draft” Hays wrote shaped the testimony in the public hearings into a narrative. Villard would reorganize that material, create a section devoted to “The Conduct of Police,” and add interpretations and judgements of the events that Hays had described.
Hays' narrative focused on events in the Kress store and on 125th Street and the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, making only passing mention of the rest of the disorder. He began with Hurley and the store detective grabbing Lino Rivera, included Patrolman Donohue and Officer Eldridge becoming involved and police called to the store being unable to convince shoppers no harm had come to Rivera, and ended with the arrest of speakers on 125th Street and the distribution of leaflets by groups affiliated with the Communist Party after the disorder had begun. That narrative followed the testimony the MCCH had heard with only a handful of minor discrepancies. Hays omitted how Hurley's intention to charge Rivera with assault for biting him led to Eldridge leaving and Donohue having to make the decision about how to release the boy. Omitted also was the later arrest of the three picketers. Hays' narrative also mistakenly had the window in the Kress store broken after Daniel Miller was arrested, not as causing the arrest.
Hays followed that narrative with an extended discussion of what happened to Lloyd Hobbs that summarized the accounts offered by Russell Hobbs, the eyewitnesses and Patrolman McInerney and his partner before offering some assessment of each in turn. The report highlighted that the items Hobbs had allegedly stolen were not seen until McInerney brought them to the DA's office on April 1st; it did not mention the additional week before the patrolman turned them into the property clerk. Hays also pointed out that the police testimony was "wholly out of line with the testimony of many other witnesses and with the character and standing of Lloyd Hobbs."
Events beyond 125th Street received only brief and general mention. “The disturbance spread along 125th Street and in nearby avenues. Windows were broken and in many cases stores were looted. There were many arrests. The police were out in great number. Their effort was to keep crowds from gathering. Radio patrol cars sped from place to place. The police arrested about a dozen men who were charged with larceny, burglary and other crimes.” At the end of the report, Hays returned to those events to dismiss the claim that crowds had focused on stores owned by Jewish merchants. Instead, “such looting as there was was indiscriminate and seemed to have been indulged in chiefly by the hoodlum element.” (Hays characterized the hoodlums as "not the kind of people who would be influenced by such leaflets" as those distributed by Communists but who "may have used the rumors and leaflets as an excuse.") Most of the crowd that Hays put at “only a few thousand people” were “orderly.” He also asserted that “There was no element of a race riot involved in any way shape or manner, a fact which is greatly to the credit of both our colored and white citizens.”
In characterizing the events the disorder spread beyond 125th Street in that way, Hays was following police testimony in the hearings. Only Captain Rothengast used the term hoodlums to describe participants. Both he and Inspector Di Martini claimed the number of participants was small, smaller in fact than Hays reported, a few hundred rather than a few thousand. Di Martini mentioned they included the unemployed. Hays did not identify the participants as mostly young, aged in their late teens and early twenties, as both Rothengast and Di Martini did. It was Di Martini and Sergeant Battle who described the looting as indiscriminate. Both Battle and Rothengast answered in the negative when asked if the events had been a race riot. Just what damage was done during the disorder was not addressed in the draft, leaving the impression that police largely maintained order. Nor was there any mention of assaults, injuries or deaths. To the contrary, the assertion that the events were not a race riot implied that there had been no violence between Black and white New Yorkers during the disorder.
Hays enumerated seven topics raised by the narrative, which he called “a rather cursory statement of facts.” The identity of the boy in the store, which he concluded had been established as Rivera; that the Communist leaflets were false; that those leaflets were distributed too late to cause the disturbance; that Gordon had been mistreated by police after his arrest for trying to speak to the crowd; that Donohue was mistaken in his decision to release the boy out the back of the store, but “we do not feel he is to be condemned for this”; that police were concerned to “suppress any excitement” rather than providing information to the crowd; and that the “repressive treatment” of police had antagonized Harlem residents and contributed to causing the disorder. (He also criticized the ADA who appeared at a public hearing for being unwilling to testify). The first and last of those topics, the boy's identity and the actions of police, had been introduced in the hearings by questions from the audience and their reaction to testimony rather than being on the MCCH's program. Police officers failing to provide crowds with the information they sought was primarily the testimony of Louise Thompson, the only witness quoted in the report, and L. F. Cole, as was the conclusion that the leaflets appeared after the disorder had begun.
The remainder of the report described incidents of police brutality as examples of the behavior that had antagonized the community, covering the cases of Thomas Aikens, Edward Laurie, Robert Patterson. The "general condition" that Hays concluded was illustrated by police actions during and around the disorder was the view asserted by the audience at the hearings: "The rights of Negroes are not respected by police, nor is the law generally observed in police dealings with Negroes." The final section offered two recommendations, for a committee and that the District Attorney should take action against police officers who allegedly broke the law.