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

The subcommittee on crime's report (June 11, 1935)

Only three weeks after the final hearing of the subcommittee on crime, the MCCH submitted its preliminary report to Mayor La Guardia. Arthur Garfield Hays sent a rough draft to Oscar Villard five days after the hearing. Villard returned a revised version of that document four days later. He read that draft at the MCCH meeting the next day, May 28. The eight members in attendance made edits to that document, from which Hays produced a clean copy that he sent to Villard the next day with an additional section that he had written. He again promptly responded three days later with some small changes, after which Hays suggested adding a final sentence. When the MCCH met again on June 4, Hays announced the report was ready for the members to sign. It took a week for Hays to obtain the signatures of ten of the eleven MCCH members in the city at the time (A. Philip Randolph and William Schieffelin were away). Father McCann refused to sign.

Through that process, the MCCH produced a report that compiled the narrative of events in the Kress store and outside on 125th Street from the testimony of witnesses at its public hearings as had been its goal. However, the process of gathering testimony added additional elements to the report. Eyewitnesses to Patrolman McInerney killing Lloyd Hobbs introduced police violence. Testimony from the officer's partner and the detective who investigated the death, and the failure of the grand jury to indict McInerney, failed to justify the shooting. The anger MCCH members felt about the boy's killing was intensified by the reactions of the audiences at the hearings. Testimony about other cases of police brutality that Hays had intended to be a separate subject of investigation became intertwined with the killing of the boy. Again, the audience at the hearing intervened and reacted to emphasize that testimony. Their powerful demonstration of the scale and scope of the antagonism created by police actions and attitudes made such an impression on MCCH members that criticism of police became the most pronounced feature of their report. That criticism was far more direct than was expected of a group convened by the mayor, and well beyond what the conservative Father McCann would endorse.

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