In the aftermath of the disorder, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia 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 appointed to that group included seven members of Harlem's Black community. They chose prominent black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier of Howard University to conduct research on conditions in Harlem.

The story of the investigations by this group reveals how they came to marginalize and obscure the events of the disorder and diminish its violence. Most of its members wanted to focus on broader conditions rather than the events of the disorder. After their very first meeting they 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 they 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 group did appoint a subcommittee to investigate the events of the disorder which convened the first of the group’s public hearings 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 toward instances of police brutality, only one of which, the fatal shooting of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs, had occurred during 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 business 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 Hobbs and instances of police brutality at times other than the disorder.

One chapter of the nine-chapter final report of the MCCH’s investigations written by E. Franklin Frazier was dedicated to the “Events of March 19.” He added some general statements about the nature of the disorder across the evening and who participated that had not been in the preliminary report. Otherwise he followed Hays and Villard in focusing on what happened in and around the Kress store, police actions, and their fatal shooting of Lloyd Hobbs (the other men presented as examples of police brutality appeared in a separate chapter on “Crime and the Police.”) 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.” While he instead emphasized the disorder was “an attack upon property and not upon persons, he provided no details of the scale and extent of that violence. This report would become the source on which subsequent accounts of the disorder relied.