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Public Hearings (5)
Stenographers recorded the testimony for the use of MCCH members. While an invaluable record, those transcripts are not always accurate, or at least are not always consistent with what journalists reported. Certainly, Arthur Garfield Hays considered them a “poor report” of the hearing. The stenographers did not always make clear who was speaking. They also clearly struggled to hear comments and questions called from the audience, and the transcripts omit almost all of the audience reactions reported extensively in the press. Newspaper stories about the first hearing, particularly those in Black newspapers, described the testimony in some detail. Subsequent hearings were reported with less discussion of the testimony and an increasing focus on audience reactions and clashes between MCCH members and those asking questions. The audience dominated the stories published about the two hearings in May.
A key feature of the hearings was the extent to which the audience participated. By E. Franklin Frazier's count, at least 122 audience members who gave their names and could be identified questioned witnesses across the twenty-one hearings held by the MCCH's subcomittees. Just how many audience members participated in the hearings of the subcommittee on crime is difficult to establish. The transcript frequently did not identify who was speaking and occasionally misidentified speakers. Newspaper stories identified some of those speakers, but also misidentified them in some cases. The white ILD lawyers clearly did play a significant role in questioning witnesses, as did Charles Romney, a West Indian radical, who inserted himself into the proceedings.
Just who made up the audience was a subject of some debate. The crowd was racially mixed, but dominated by Black men and women according to newspaper reports. Many observers from both the conservative white press and establishment Black organizations claimed that most of those in attendance were members of the Communist party or other radical groups and so not representative of the Harlem community. Black journalists who attended, on the other hand, portrayed the audience as expressing the views of the Black community. So too did the MCCH members who wrote the subcommittee report, Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard, and E. Franklin Frazier in the MCCH report.
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- Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, The complete report of Mayor La Guardia's Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 21.
- Arthur Garfield Hays to Oscar Villard, May 23, 1935, "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 26, Folder 1, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University).