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the unemployed — one that stressed direct action over negotiation. On other
occasions, these actions escalated into civil disobedience, as when an Unemployed
Council demonstration blocked the entrance to the Family Welfare Association
office to protest inadequate relief; the police intervened, and arrested five
participants. Once in a while demonstrations at relief offices became virtual city-
wide affairs. In early 1934, the Unemployed Councils mounted two days of
escalating actions demanding greater emergency relief from the Baltimore
Emergency Relief branch office in Northwest Baltimore, bringing supporters from
all over the city (including longshoremen from the southeast), and attracting larger
and larger local crowds. Several details of police were mobilized and forced to
evict wave after wave of protesters from the office entrance and the surrounding
wall. Another frequently-used direct action tactic was to physically resist the
eviction of families from their homes or to take an evicted family's belongings back
inside as soon as the authorities left. Arrests often occurred during such actions,
and those arrested frequently demanded jury trials as a forum for popular
education on unemployment. Drawing on the example of the unemployed
movement elsewhere in the U.S., this tactic became especially popular in Baltimore
from early 1931 through the mid-1930s, and, significantly, the evidence suggests that
•ji
it was most often applied in the Black community.—
Not all of the locally generated actions of the Baltimore Unemployed
Councils were aimed at the neighborhood level, however. On January 19,1931, for
example, a reported 150 men and women, Black and white converged on City Hall
from 2 locations — from largely white ethnic East Baltimore, and area of mixed
white immigrant ethnicities, and from predominantly Black northwest Baltimore -
in a local "hunger march" sponsored by the councils demanding a municipal
appropriation of $20,000 for relief and unemployment insurance. This
demonstration was followed up two months later with a trip to Annapolis by an
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