|
196
and a portrait of her alone was printed as the first page of the Forum's annual
pamphlet.28
The Jacksons, as female leaders, were by no means alone. In 1934,10 of the
15 executive committee members, including 3 of 6 vice presidents, were women; 8
of 11 heads of standing committees or bodies were likewise female. Nineteen
thirty-four may have been an exceptional high point in terms of female leadership,
for by 1935 all the vice presidents (four that year) were men, but women still held
majority of the executive committee positions. Evelyn Burrell, speaking of the
Baltimore freedom movement (including the Forum) a few years later, remarked,
"You know, its been the women, usually, who have been at the top of this. So many
of us in the movement were females, although there were males. But the push
came from the females." The Forum, for which this was true from the beginning,
helped strengthen the tradition of women's leadership that has been so important
in the Baltimore freedom movement. "
The main public activity of the Forum was, as its name implies, holding
weekly mass forums on Friday nights from October through April of every year.
Given that, by 1933, these Friday night meetings were regularly drawing 1,000 to
2,000 or more people (almost entirely Black), it is easy to assume that the Forum
was basically an educational organization— a kind of popular university. Indeed the
youth of the Forum did see such education as a key part establishing their
"constructive program with city-wide community influence." Each meeting focused
on a social, artistic, or moral question, and featured a presentation by a speaker or,
less often, a panel of speakers. The stated purpose of the presentations was: To
afford the people of Baltimore information by experts in various fields concerning
the variety of problems that confront them." The "experts" invited were sometimes
locally-based, but more often from out of town; sometimes they were visiting
Baltimore for other reasons, on other occasions they came expressly to address the
Forum, receiving only travel expenses, raised by a collection at the end of the
|
