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• 1 2022-11-11T17:11:55+00:00 The public hearing of the MCCH's subcommittee on crime (May 4) 26 plain 2024-05-31T19:10:17+00:00 Three witnesses testified in the Washington Heights Magistrates court to events on 125th Street at the beginning of the disorder at the hearing on May 4. A slightly smaller group of MCCH members heard the testimony than at the previous hearing, with only Toney (again) and Delany of the Black members absent and Ersnt (again) and Scheiffelin of the white members. Harry Gordon and Daniel Miller, the two white men who tried to speak to crowds outside the Kress store, testified about how they came to be in the area and the circumstances of their arrest. Their account of how they came to be there was new; the details of their arrests fit with testimony the MCCH had heard earlier from Louise Thompson and Patrolman Moran. While only the New York American mentioned Miller’s testimony about being beaten at the police station after his arrest, what Gordon said was more widely reported. Detailed summaries appeared in the New York Times, Home News, New York Age, and Atlanta World, while the New York American and Afro-American mentioned only that he been beaten by police. Reflecting the racial focus of the Hearst press, the New York American highlighted that Gordon and Miller were white in its headline. While Thompson had briefly mentioned Gordon's beating in her earlier testimony, Gordon provided details, and added violence during his time in custody, testimony that attracted the attention of journalists who otherwise showed little interest in details of the events of the disorder. However, stories about the hearing in most white newspapers did not mention the men’s testimony, focusing instead on the behavior of the audience (and the police brutality case that occurred away from the disorder, the killing of Samuel Laurie, about which the MCCH heard testimony).
  
  The third witness, Benjamin Todman, was the driver of the hearse seen outside the store. He testified he had been on his way to a garage where the hearse was parked, on West 124th Street in the block behind the Kress store. Only the New York Evening Journal reported his testimony.
  
  The audience continued to insert their perspectives into the hearing and disrupt the MCCH’s agenda as significantly as they had in the previous hearing, perhaps more so. Certainly a larger number of newspapers made the audience the headline of their stories than had in their stories reporting the previous hearing. The New York Evening Journal and Afro-American, who had used such headlines in their earlier stories, were joined by the New York World-Telegram, New York Post, New York Sun, Daily News, New York Times, and the New York Age. Among the white press only the Home News and New York American, and the Atlanta World among the Black press, opted for headlines about the subject of the testimony, police brutality (this edition of the New York Amsterdam News has not survived). The New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, and Daily News went further, reporting only the audience without mention of the testimony to which they had reacted. Two white publications with different political positions explicitly marginalized the positions taken by the audience, casting them as at odds with or not contributing to the investigation. The Hearst publication the New York Evening Journal reported that “unruly and obstructionist audiences at the hearings virtually prevented the discovery of any facts.” The MCCH “encountered an audience so disorderly that it made little progress in the examination of witnesses,” according to the New York Post, a regular critic of the Hearst press.
  
  What the white press increasingly reported simply as disorder continued to be efforts by the audience to shape the MCCH agenda and highlight the issues in the events of March 19 and 20. The hearing began with a direct challenge to MCCH’s agenda from members of the audience. Welch, Tauber, Ford, Mrs. Burroughs, Vernel Williams of the Harlem Lawyers Association, and Romney himself, pushed Hays to hear testimony on Romney’s allegation that his recent arrest was an effort by police to intimidate him. Hays, anxious to complete a report on the events of the disorder, insisted that testimony about that topic had to be heard first. Neither of the major disruptions later in the hearing related to events of disorder, but both focused on police. An unidentified woman criticized the patrolman who had killed Samuel Laurie, calling out after he had testified that he had been a police officer for three years that “That’s three years too long.” The second disruption was again provoked by Charles Romney, who called for stool pigeons to be removed from the hearing, a reference to Lieutenant Samuel Battle to whom he had already applied that label.
  
  In response to the testimony that was heard, audience members continued to amplify the criticisms of police. While Gordon testified, the audience was “thrown into uproar” (Atlanta World, Home News), heckled and booed (New York World-Telegram), and “voiced its anger” (Afro-American, New York Times). The effect of those reactions was better captured by the descriptions in the New York Age that the audience “interrupted [with] demonstrations against the police” and in the New York Sun that “Jeers, boos and catcalls from the audience punctuated the testimony of witnesses.” The noise was an intervention that emphasized testimony that described police violence. What distinguished this hearing from the last was that these interventions crossed racial lines. An audience reported as being made-up almost entirely of Black men and women was “all with Gordon,” as the Home News put it, a white man, and directed much of its anger toward Lieutenant Samuel Battle, a Black police officer, who had predictably been tasked with representing the police department. Such interracial action would have thrilled the Communist Party members at the hearing, who were working to organize Harlem along those lines. It likely also lay at the root of the increased emphasis in the white press on marginalizing the contribution of the audience to the information being gathered in the hearings.