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oppressive conditions among the popular classes. Unlike the Communist Party the
Forum was almost entirely locally grown. And like the Communist Party (in fact, in
concert with the Communist Party at times) the Forum reinvigorated the larger
social movement in Baltimore far beyond its own ranks.
The culmination of the Forum's first years of activity was an alliance with a
local Black nationalist-led grouping in a boycott movement in late 1933 — an
alliance that galvanized the Baltimore Black community into protest. This
movement in turn precipitated the regeneration of the older-adult Black freedom
movement, especially the reorganization of the local branch NAACP in 1935 which
then grew, by the early 40s, to be the second largest and one of the most active
branches in the country. The Forum also provided the model and the initial
leadership for the national NAACP youth movement, launched in 1935. And it
established much of the central leadership of the Baltimore movement for the next
five decades, most particularly the leadership of the Jackson and Mitchell families.
The founding of the Forum was, in a very real sense, the founding of the modern
phase of the Black freedom movement in Baltimore.
Between the return of the Jackson sisters in mid-1931 and the emergence of
the Forum as a rising power in the Black community and in Baltimore as a whole in
late 1933, a process of constructing what W.E.B. DuBois call a most "unusual
organization" took place. It is worth looking in some depth into the origins and
functioning of that organization.
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The social and familial background of the Jackson sisters indicates much
about the social basis, origins, and character of the Forum that they were to initiate
and lead.
Born respectively in 1911 and 1913, Virginia and Juanita, along with their
younger siblings Marion and Bowen, were the children of Lillie Carroll Jackson and
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