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• 1 2023-06-24T20:58:39+00:00 MCCH Meeting (April 19, 1935) 15 plain 2024-01-28T17:12:16+00:00 The minutes are the only source on the MCCH meeting on April 19, with no newspaper stories reporting it. As Hays was again absent, the work of his subcommittee did not receive the same discussion as the other subcommittees. Oscar Villard reported on his behalf. In deciding the program for the hearing the next day, according to Villard, the subcommittee had decided to focus on only some of the cases of police brutality it had identified "as there were far too many" to hold public hearings on them all. Instead of hearings, the subcommittee "was planning to make some other investigations of these cases."
  
  Those investigations would soon be subject to an additional influence. At this meeting, Hubert Delany announced that he, Carter, and Roberts had selected E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist, to conduct the MCCH survey of Harlem. Frazier would begin on May 1, 1935. No explanation for the decision was recorded in the minutes, but Ira Reid, the MCCH's initial choice, may have become entangled in concerns about the influence of the Rosenwald Fund, the white philanthropic organization best known for its support of Black schools in rural areas and fellowships for Black artists, writers, researchers, and intellectuals. The Rosenwald Fund had offered financial assistance to the MCCH, reported as $5,000 in the New York Amsterdam News. Reid had been the Fund's suggestion to lead the survey, according to that story. His previous work for the National Urban League, which had close ties to the Rosenwald Fund, likely contributed to his name being put forward. However, MCCH members decided at this meeting not to accept the fund's offer because, the minutes opaquely recorded, "certain facts were brought out in discussion." Just that week, an article by Loren Miller had appeared in New Masses questioning the influence over Black leaders exerted by the fund's white leadership, claiming that it amounted to the censoring of certain views. Radicals involved in the MCCH hearings saw the offer to the MCCH in those terms, as a bribe to make "an Uncle Tom Report," as the New York World Telegram reported "C. B. Jenkins, a Negro attorney" put it at a later hearing. Evidence that MCCH members had been concerned about that perception was provided by Roberts' answer when the New York Amsterdam News journalist questioned him about the decision to turn down the founding. "The commission does not wish to be subject in any way to any outside influence."