This page is referenced by:

• 1 2020-02-26T20:10:18+00:00 Under Investigation 38 The Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem plain 1898 2024-02-14T04:01:25+00:00 In the aftermath of the disorder, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed “a committee of representative citizens” to investigate the causes of the disorder and plans to prevent its repetition. The twelve men and one woman that La Guardia eventually chose to be part of that group included seven members of Harlem's Black community. The group selected prominent Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier of Howard University to conduct research on conditions in Harlem.

  The story of the investigations by this committee reveals how they came to marginalize and obscure the events of the disorder and diminish its violence while directing attention to police violence. Most of its members wanted to focus on broader conditions rather than the events of the disorder. After their very first meeting, the MCCH announced their conclusion that "the disturbances 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." In taking that position, the group joined a chorus of Black community leaders pointing to economic conditions as the cause of the disorder. That argument typically involved statements that what happened on March 19 was “not a race riot.”
  
  The members of the mayor's committee did appoint a subcommittee to investigate the events of the disorder which convened a public hearing only ten days after the disorder. However, by the time of the hearing, the focus of the subcommittee had been expanded to crime and the group had formalized the broader focus of their investigation in the name they chose for themselves: the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem (MCCH). While the subcommittee went on to hold five further public hearings, the subject of those inquiries gradually shifted from the events in the Kress store to instances of police brutality, only one of which, the fatal shooting of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs, had occurred during the disorder. Questions from Communist lawyers and audience reactions to testimony during the hearings challenged and reshaped that program. Those interventions drew attention to police actions and to how their attitudes toward the Black community contributed to the disorder.
  
  The subcommittee’s twenty-one-page preliminary report, authored by white members Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard, reflected that shifted focus. They provided details of the events in the Kress store and on 125th Street but mentioned subsequent events only to assert that Jewish businesses had not been specifically targeted nor Black-owned stores spared, without providing any details of the violence against property. No information was included about the number of people arrested during the disorder or the outcome of the legal proceedings against them. Nor was any mention made of violence against white men and women other than the conclusion that the disorder “was not a race riot in the sense of it being a physical conflict between persons of the white and colored groups.” The largest section of the report was instead devoted to a critical account of police conduct that included the killing of Lloyd Hobbs and instances of police brutality at times other than the disorder.
  
  When E. Franklin Frazier wrote the nine-chapter final report of the MCCH’s investigations six months later he dedicated one chapter to the “Events of March 19.” His text featured some general statements about the nature of the disorder across the evening and who participated that had not been in Hays and Villard's preliminary report. While Frazier included a broad cross-section of residents among the participants, and so implicated the Black community to a greater degree than the MCCH members' portrayal of participants as "hoodlums," he balanced that by portraying the violence of the disorder in less threatening terms. The disorder was “an attack upon property and not upon persons" in his assessment, a reduction of the violence that had occurred, extended by his omission of any details of the scale and extent of the damage to property. The closest Frazier came to discussing the violence against whites was an oblique mention that in the beginning of the disorder “resentment was expressed against whites” that he immediately restricted to “whites who owned stores and who, while exploiting Negroes, denied them the opportunity to work.” Otherwise, he followed Hays and Villard in focusing on what happened in and around the Kress store, the fatal police shooting of Lloyd Hobbs, and how police actions and their antagonistic attitude toward the Black community shaped the disorder. This report would become the source on which subsequent accounts of the disorder relied, amplifying its distorted and simplified picture of what happened.