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

Reactions to La Guardia's appointments

The dissatisfaction of unnamed “anti-Red organizations” with the “distinct liberal leanings” and radical associations of the white men La Guardia appointed reported in the New York Sun as well as the anti-Communist New York American was soon overshadowed by editorial endorsements from the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and New York Herald Tribune. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Post both described the committee members as “distinguished.” Referring to the white men La Guardia appointed, the New York World-Telegram described them as “highly intelligent humanitarians.” A story in the New York Post offered an alternative description of the white members as “men who have the confidence of Negro leaders.”

By contrast, considerable criticism emerged in Harlem of the Black members of the committee. Even as Mayor La Guardia announced his appointments, he appeared to have had some concerns about the representativeness of those he had chosen. On the evening of March 20, he had Charles Roberts contact Reverend John Robinson, seeking a meeting with “the more sober and thoughtful portion of our Harlem residents.” The clergyman responded enthusiastically, writing at 11:30 PM that night suggesting that the mayor attend the Interdenominational Ministers meeting scheduled for the afternoon of March 25 at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. In the intervening days the criticisms of his appointments that the mayor feared did indeed emerge. La Guardia’s mistake, New York Amsterdam News columnist J. A. Rogers, wrote, was to choose only among “routine names” at a time when life in Harlem had become far from routine. What was needed instead were Black members who “had practical knowledge of conditions in Harlem,” as Charles Hanson of the Harlem Committee on Public Policy, an organization of business and professional men and women, put it at a meeting the group organized at the YMCA on March 22. Only A. Philip Randolph had that knowledge in Hanson’s opinion. Particularly unqualified, in the judgement of others who spoke at the meeting were Hubert Delaney, dismissed as a political ally of La Guardia, and Countee Cullen, labeled as just a “poet.”

Others echoed that assessment in the following days. The Consolidated Tenants League endorsed only Randolph as “sufficiently free from political and other affiliations and views to render them capable of obtaining the proper economic-social view of the problem.” More representative of the people of Harlem would be an unemployed person, in the opinion of men and women a New York Amsterdam News journalist interviewed on the street, labor leader Frank Crosswaith, a suggestion of the Consolidated Tenants Union and columnist J. A. Rogers, or a social worker, the proposal of the New York chapter of the National Association of College Women and James Hubert of the New York Urban League (who snidely dismissed Carter’s past experience when he wrote to La Guardia that “there is no one named up to now who is thought of as a social worker”). Several nationalist groups in the Puerto Rican community sought representation, even as Puerto Rican leaders disassociated their community from the disorder and attributed it to Black residents “with distinct problems, absolutely different interests, and ethnic characteristics that disassociate Hispanics from their colored American neighbors.”

The most widely criticized omissions from the committee, however, were representatives of Harlem’s Black clergy. La Guardia came face to face with that criticism on March 25 when he met with the Interdominational Preachers Meeting of Greater New York and Vicinity, a group of about fifty Black religious leaders, at the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. The mayor must have felt that he could marshal support from the ministers as he changed his original plan to meet with them privately and had journalists from both white and Black newspapers alerted that he was making the trip to Harlem. When he spoke to the meeting, appealing for them to help the committee in its investigation, La Guardia tried to preempt criticism, explaining that he had not appointed a minister because “If I had appointed one I would have had to appoint many others.” When he stopped speaking, it immediately became obvious that he had failed to convince his audience. A minister in the front row shouted, “There ought to be a minister on that committee! There is not a minister in this community who is not in touch with more persons than any member of your committee.” Others complained that the mayor had failed to recognize their leadership and standing in Harlem and psychological influence in the community.

As the criticism mounted, La Guardia backed down, admitting that it had been a mistake not to appoint clergymen. He committed to appoint a member of the group if they sent him a suggestion, and to add a second religious leader from a denomination not included in their ranks. Soon after the mayor left the group elected as its representative its leader, Reverend John W. Robinson, the retired pastor of St. Mark's, the city's largest AME church and a campaigner for education reform. An indirect political connection likely made La Guardia receptive to that suggestion: Robinson’s second wife, pharmacist Dr. Julia Coleman, was active in the Republican Party in Harlem. The mayor appointed Robinson four days later, on March 29, in time for him to attend the committee’s second meeting.

It took until April 4, almost a week after Robinson's appointment, for the mayor to finalize his choice of a second clergyman: Father McCann of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church on West 141st Street. On March 23, the priest had made public a pastoral letter blaming Communists for the disorder and calling for a movement to keep them out of Harlem. The priest's anti-Communism offered La Guardia a way to address those who had criticized him for the entirely liberal character of the committee. It provoked a furious complaint from the Communist Party that the appointment was aimed at "further stirring up racial animosity between Negro and while people" and "trying to place the blame of the March 19 events in Harlem on the Communist Party." However, La Guardia had clearly also decided the second clergyman on the committee should be Catholic as immediately after he met with the Black ministers he had sought advice about who to appoint from Edmund B. Butler, a prominent Catholic lawyer who was secretary of the city’s Emergency Relief Bureau. Butler suggested McCann as “he has always been very much interested in Negroes and volunteered for the work.” As that endorsement implied, the priest was a white man, likely another criteria for the appointment given that the committee had two more Black members than white members after Robinson was added.

No press statements were released announcing those appointments, and they went unreported other than in the New York Amsterdam News. Having included the two clergymen, La Guardia made no further moves to address the other criticisms of the committee's Black members. The investigation of the disorder proceeded under the direction of the group of twelve men and one woman.
 

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