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Toward the end of the year, the Afro in frustration engaged in one of its periodic
calls to arms, berating the NAACP, the BUL and the Women's Cooperative
League for inaction in the face of disaster. Of course, spontaneous struggle
continued. As 1930 began, another Black family fought the hostility of its neighbors
and attempted to retain its position as the first African American household on a
white block. Occasionally the relative calm was decisively broken, as, for example,
when at the end of 1930, 2,000 African Americans protested the closing of a bank
that held their deposits that and sixty-four were arrested. Spontaneous popular
actions were, however, infrequent, usually small and isolated, and of little enduring
impact.
Although social tension rose as the depression worsened, the demoralization
of the existing institutions and protest organizations of Baltimore's working class
and racial/ethnic communities left a vacuum. No group was able to step forward
from the ranks of the traditional leaderships to organize really serious resistance to
the effects of the Depression. Instead, as the next few years would show, new forms
for struggle had to be created by new leaderships, forms that were capable of
grappling with the enormity of the Depression and that were firmly grounded in
local realities. As these new forms appeared and developed, they would eventually
stimulate the renewal and transformation of some of older forms, and would enable
the social movements of Baltimore to merge with rising national movements and
organizations. But this renewal and fusion with national processes did not become
the dominant direction in Baltimore until 1935. The interim period, 1930 through
1934, was one characterized by the development of newer, more inventive, more
localized organs of popular struggle. And the first of these newer organizational
forms to emerge in Baltimore was the local unit of the Communist Party (CP).
To refer to the Baltimore CP of 1930 as a new, locally-oriented organization
may seem surprising. It was in fact new: it was founded in 1928 and had been little
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