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

Reporting the investigation

The MCCH had planned to quickly complete a report on the events of the disorder as a necessary step before focusing their attention on the survey of the conditions in Harlem that they saw as the cause of those events. Delays in securing testimony meant that it was two months before Arthur Garfield Hays began work on that report, after the final public hearing of the subcommittee on crime on May 18, 1935. The delayed submission of the report was not the only way that it was changed from the MCCH's original plan. The participation of audiences at the public hearing introduced a concern with the actions and attitudes of police. MCCH members disagreed over just how far to go in their criticism of police. Hays' rough draft of the report focused its criticism on the patrolman who shot Lloyd Hobbs and cases of brutality at other times than the disorder. Oscar Villard rewrote that draft to include much more direct criticism of police highlighted in a section on their conduct. The other members of the MCCH tempered that criticism somewhat while also casting the violence of the disorder in lesser terms, as a disturbance, not a riot. In all its drafts, the report described the events of the disorder beyond the Kress store as the actions of only a few thousand "hoodlums" with little detail of the nature and scale of the violence against people and property. Rather than examining what had happened, the report emphasized what had not. The events of March 19 and 20 were "not a race riot." As a result, what most struck those who read the report was its pointed criticism of how police treated the Black residents of Harlem.

More discussion of events during the disorder featured in final report of the MCCH without addressing the details of the violence. While the report incorporated the investigation of the events of the disorder, along with the testimony and material gathered by the other subcommittees, it was not a compilation of the preliminary reports written by MCCH members. Rather, E. Franklin Frazier, the director of the MCCH's Harlem survey, produced a document of his own. His chapter on the events drew some elements from the preliminary report, specifically the narrative of events in the Kress store, the creation and distribution of leaflets by the Young Liberators, and the discussion of Patrolman McInerney killing Lloyd Hobbs. The largest portion of the text came from Frazier's own reading of the testimony, other evidence gathered by MCCH investigators, and newspaper stories. He described events beyond 125th Street as including Black participants of a variety of ages and backgrounds, not just hoodlums, who directed their violence at property, not persons, without sparing Black-owned businesses. Frazier followed the subcommittee report in framing that picture of events as "not a race riot." Other than a discussion of the killing of Hobbs even more critical of police than the MCCH members had been, Frazier emphasized the antagonistic attitude of police toward Black residents rather than the violence they directed at them as their contribution to the disorder. He did not address the violence directed at white men and women, the injuries suffered by Black residents at the hands of police, the arrests, or the scale of the property damage.

Most MCCH members accepted Frazier's narrative notwithstanding how it departed from the account they had developed. What they objected to was the credit he gave to Communists for preventing the violence from becoming a "race riot" involving clashes between Black and white crowds. Although MCCH members voted to remove that section, it somehow remained in the final version. Mayor La Guardia ultimately frustrated his commission's efforts to edit Frazier's text by refusing to publicly release their version. In response, a copy of the report was eventually shared with the New York Amsterdam News for publication, but it was Frazier's original draft, not the version edited by the MCCH.

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