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Gathering in 100 Negro rioters, police meantime were looking high & low for the cause of it all: Lino Rivera. It was not until 2 a. m. that he was discovered in his widowed mother's apartment. He was hastily taken to a police station house, exhibited and photographed to prove that he had not been harmed, then sent home. Following evening Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia circulated thousands of posters throughout the area urging the responsible element in Harlem to make the rest of the neighborhood behave itself. By next day Governor Lehman could tell Harlem's white merchants that the city authorities had the situation well in hand.
Whose Fault? Only in the inflammatory shorthand of the tabloid Press was that night's ruckus in the largest Negro centre in the U. S. described as a RACE RIOT. Black citizens did not fight white citizens as they did in the inter-racial affrays at Chicago, East St. Louis, Philadelphia and Washington a decade and a half ago. But last week's Harlem riot was New York City's most violent civil disturbance in 35 years. Whose fault was it?
With the indictment of 16 ringleaders (including a bumptious young white radical from nearby College of the City of New York) for assault, burglary and incitement to riot, Tammanyite District Attorney William C. Dodge loudly attributed the whole affair to a Communist plot, started a grand jury investigation. Negro Communist Solomon Harper, War veteran, inventor and member of the radical League of Struggle for Negro Rights, absolved his organization of complicity, denied any connection with the Young Liberators whose members, he said, were all in their ''early twenties."
Speaking more soberly for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Managing Editor Roy Wilkins of The Crisis declared that it was "a great mistake to dismiss the riot as a demonstration of a few Communists and agitators." Dr. Robert W. Searle, general secretary of the Greater New York Federation of Churches, echoed this view: "We cannot make the Communists the scapegoats for a basic condition which made possible such a hysteric outburst." Most sociologists agreed with Dr. Searle that the "basic condition" was economic discrimination against New York's Negroes, which had in turn set up a tragic train of unemployment, undernourishment, bad housing, disease, vice, unrest and, last week, resentful disorder. In three centuries the Negro has attained legal and political equality with the white citizen in New York City. Economically and socially, however, his position has stood still.