A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore

394 Pages·2012·3.033 MB·English

by  Andor Skotnes

A New Deal for All?
A book in the series
Radical PeRsPectives
A Radical History Review book series
Series editors: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University
Barbara Weinstein, New York University

A New Deal for All?
Race and Class Struggles in Depression-E ra Baltimore
Andor SkotneS
duke univerSity PreSS Durham and London 2013
© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-f ree paper ♾
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Minion Pro with Verdana display
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
frontiSPiece:
Photograph by Paul Henderson.
Courtesy of the Afro-American
Newspapers Archives and Research
Center.
Contents
About the Series vii
Illustrations ix
Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 3
i The Context
1. Communities, Culture, and Traditions of Opposition 11
ii Emergences, 1930–1934
2. Disrupting the Calm: The Communist Party in Baltimore,
1930–1933 45
3. The City- Wide Young People’s Forum, 1931–1933 69
4. Garment Workers, Socialists, and the People’s Unemployment
League, 1932–1934 92
iii Transitions, 1933–1936
5. The Lynching of George Armwood, 1933 119
6. Buy Where You Can Work, 1933–1934 140
7. The Baltimore Soviet, the Acw, and the Pul, 1933–1935 163
8. Seeking Directions, 1934–1936 187
iv Risings, 1936–1941
9. The cio and the First Wave, 1936–1937 215
10. The cio, the Afl, and the Baltimore Workers’ Movement:
The Second Wave, 1938–1941 245
11. The New Baltimore nAAcP and the Metropolitan Region,
1936–1941 269
12. The New Baltimore nAAcP, the State, and the Country,
1936–1941 290
Epilogue 313
Notes 319
Bibliography 353
Index 365

About the Series
History, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from
authorial subjectivity; indeed, from politics. Political concerns animate the
questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For more than thirty years,
the Radical History Review has led in nurturing and advancing politically en-
gaged historical research. Radical Perspectives seeks to further the journal’s
mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-c onscious deci-
sion to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many
of us are currently struggling with the issue of what it means to be a radical
historian in the early twenty- first century, and this series is intended to pro-
vide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will
offer innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; compara-
tive, transnational, and global histories that transcend conventional bound-
aries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the
postcolonial move to “provincialize Europe”; studies of the public in and of
the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; his-
tories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class,
and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complications.
Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and
discursive community to explore the very issue of what constitutes radical
history. Within this context, some of the books published in the series may
privilege alternative and oppositional political cultures, but all will be con-
cerned with the way power is constituted, contested, used, and abused.
The city of Baltimore, with its unique geographic location and demo-
graphic profile, provides the singularly illuminating prism through which
A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression- Era Baltimore
views race and labor reform in the mid- twentieth- century United States.
Baltimore was at once the most northern of the country’s major Southern
cities and among the most southern of its leading industrial cities. As a seg-
regated Jim Crow city, Baltimore and its environs experienced the horrific
racial violence, including Klan lynchings, that riddled postwar border states;
as an industrial center, it attracted the large East European (and substantial
Jewish) immigrant and black migrant populations who came to the city for
jobs in its large and dynamic garment factories, steel plants, and service sec-
viii About the Series
tor. The coming of the Great Depression allowed race reformers, radicals,
and trade unionists to make common cause in their fight against race dis-
crimination and labor exploitation.
Historians have usually associated the histories of the radical labor and
black freedom movements with northern cities—and told their stories sepa-
rately. In A New Deal for All?, Andor Skotnes establishes a new paradigm
that sees these histories as imbricated in each other and uniquely visible in
this border metropolis. As Skotnes demonstrates in this wide-r anging and
conceptually ambitious book, the movements for black freedom and indus-
trial reform, from the 1930s through the onset of the Second World War,
must be told as part of the same story. The Black freedom movement in
Baltimore provided some of the nation’s most renowned civil rights leaders,
Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Thurgood Marshall among them. Skotnes, who
began his career as an associate director of the Columbia University Oral
History Program, and is one of the country’s premier oral historians, allows
their voices and those of leading union and communist labor leaders in the
nascent cio movement to animate his story. Making it clear that the “long
civil rights movement” has its origins in these struggles of the 1930s, Skotnes
makes it equally clear how thoroughly the histories of the struggle for racial
and class justice are entwined. At times, the two movements work in soli-
darity; at other times, they conflict. Yet they are always profoundly shaping
each other.
Illustrations
figure 1. Baltimore nAAcP Youth Council members demonstrating against
lynching. 2
figure 2. Center of the Baltimore metropolitan region in the city’s down-
town. 10
figure 3. Industrial, commercial, and residential zones of Baltimore radiating
from the downtown area. 15
figure 4. Bethlehem Steel complex, late 1930s. 19
figure 5. Carl Murphy, publisher and president, Afro-A merican news-
papers. 39
figure 6. Unemployed Hunger Marchers in Baltimore on their way to a dem-
onstration in Washington, D.C., December 7, 1931. 50
figure 7. Bethlehem Steel mill, Sparrows Point. 54
figure 8. Euel Lee being removed from jail in Snow Hill to be transported to
Baltimore to avoid a lynch mob. 58
figure 9. Euel Lee’s ild lawyers. 61
figure 10. Juanita Jackson in the early 1930s. 72
figure 11. Officers of the City- Wide Young People’s Forum, 1933. 83
figure 12. Charles Houston, early 1930s. 90
figure 13. Elisabeth Gilman, late 1910s. 106
figure 14. Broadus Mitchell, 1939. 109
figure 15. Edward S. Lewis, circa 1931. 111
figure 16. J. Green speaking at a Communist- led anti- lynching protest at Balti-
more City Hall, October 21, 1933. 129
figure 17. Clarence Mitchell of the Forum, late 1930s. 130
figure 18. Charles Houston and Virginia McGuire demonstrating against
lynching, 1934. 132
figure 19. Prophet Kiowa Costonie, 1940s. 141
figure 20. Boycott pickets on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of Tommy
Tucker’s store. 149
figure 21. Earl Parker and Milton Robinson got jobs in White- owned stores as
a result of the Buy Where You Can Work campaign. 156
figure 22. Bill Bailey and two other seamen during a waterfront strike,
1936. 169
figure 23. wPA workers in Baltimore. 181
figure 24. Working- class youth in Baltimore involved in National Youth Ad-
ministration Project. 183
figure 25. Bernard Ades with his attorneys, Charles Houston and Thurgood
Marshall, during his disbarment hearings. 195
figure 26. Thurgood Marshall, Donald Gaines Murray, and Charles Houston
preparing lawsuit against the University of Maryland Law School. 203