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national level. Fluidity and pragmatism appear to have been particularly
characteristic of Baltimore.
Among the Black freedom organizations and institutions in Baltimore that
were focused primarily on one or another aspect of the economic struggle, the most
prominent included the Black trade unions, two organizations of Black women, and
the local branch of the Urban League. The Black trade unions will be examined at
some length below; here, though, it should be noted that they were the bearers of a
long, resilient tradition of Black working class activity with roots in the Antebellum
era; that they were the only segment of the Baltimore Black freedom movement
that was not led by middle and upper class elements; that they represented the
more skilled and more privileged categories of Black male workers; and that, while
they had long been a constituent pan of the mainstream of the local Black freedom
movement, they were in 1930 the segment least fully integrated into the
movement's core.3'
The 300-member Cooperative Women's Civic League and the Housewives
League, which claimed as many as 2,000 members, were expressions within the
freedom movement of the high degree of social and culture activism among African
American women in Baltimore - an activism that, as Cynthia Neverton-Morton has
pointed out, is "often ignored by historians." As Neverton-Morton has shown, the
Cooperative League, well-known for its Annual Flower Mart and art contests, was,
for nearly two decades before the Crash, deeply involved in the fight for
neighborhood and residential improvement by means of both self-help and
pressuring the municipal government. Moreover, the Cooperative League also
concerned itself with education, and took part in the struggles over Black schools in
the 1920s. The League is also interesting as an embodiment of the possibilities and
limitations of middle-class women's solidarity across the color bar in Baltimore of
the era.38
The Cooperative Women's League was an outgrowth of the white Women's
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