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favorably to many of the party's practices. Juanita Jackson Mitchell later
remembered that part of the impetus to form the City-Wide Young People's Forum
was the desire to provide a militant Christian organization to compete with the non-
religious Communists. The Forum did not reject the Communists as allies,
however, and worked closely with the ILD through much of 1932 and 1933, as will
be shown in the next chapter. Finally, some more conservative elements involved
with the civil rights movement in Baltimore bore witness to the growing influence
of the CP. In the July 1933 issue of Opportunity, the national organ of the Ui oan
League, white Methodist Episcopal minister Asbury Smith, a member of the
executive committee of the Baltimore Urban League, published an article entitled
"What Can the Negro Expect from Communism?" While initially discounting the
depth of Communist influence in the Black community and professing admiration
for the CP's racial egalitarianism, Rev. Smith spent most of his article worrying
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about the possible consequences of Blacks turning to Communism.'*
In short, in late 1933, at the end of the Euel Lee campaign, just as the Black
freedom movement was re-emerging in some force, the Communist Party in
Baltimore was in a position of potential influence.
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