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organizations ranging from the local V/omen's Christian Temperance Union, to the
local National Association of College Women, to the Maryland Association of
Colored Women, to Cooperative Women's Civic League, to the Baltimore
Housewives' League. The latter organizations, it should be noted, highlighted the
remarkably active role African American women took in the life of their
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community.
Some institutions were explicitly tied to the various social classes and strata
of the Baltimore Black community. There were a number of Black trade unions
that carried forward a long tradition of African American working class struggle.
There were organizations of professionals like the Baltimore Branch of the
Maryland Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Association, the Medical Forum
(made up of younger Black physicians), the Schoolmasters' Association, and the
Social Worker's Roundtable. There were Black college fraternities and sororities.
And there was the Association for the Promotion of Negro Business which actively
encouraged African American enterprise through a variety of activities including
Negro Trade Week, an event which drew tens of thousands of onlookers each
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year/"-
Furthermore, by the late 1920s, Baltimore's Black community had partially
breached the divide between civil society and the state, as the community used, with
increasing effectiveness, some of the municipal structures that were developed to
institutionalize segregationism. An example was the Division of Recreation for
Colored People. In 1930 the division, recently annexed to the Board of Education,
had an all-Black staff and was beginning to set up neighborhood clubs to organize
dramatic, musical, and "Social-Civic" activities. By 1933 there were 71
neighborhood clubs involving over 5,000 people that, both alone and in cooperation
with churches and other Black community organizations, sponsored activities with a
total reported attendance of 87,097. More important, however, than the division of
recreation were the "colored schools" themselves.^
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