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community institution.
The exact social composition of Forum meeting audiences is difficult to
discern. The audiences were, as already noted, almost entirely African American,
with only a smattering of white progressives in occasional attendance. In terms of
the social class of the audiences, Juanita Jackson Mitchell recalled that the Forum
strove to attract many working-class as well as middle-class Black people to its
Friday night meetings and was largely successful in this endeavor. She attributed
the Forum leaderships desire for a broad mass following partially to the influence
of her mother, Lillie Jackson: "We believed in that, we were reared like that; my
mother and her protest against the intelligentsia — the intelligent Negroes who
segregate themselves from the masses of the Negroes — being so selfish; all that
education, instead of coming and helping." The educated, middle-class Forum
youth were committed to coming and helping the whole of the Black community.
Given the size of Forum audiences, the overwhelmingly working-class character of
the Baltimore Black community, the explicit targeting of the unemployed, and the
fact that the Forum publicized itself through a wide network of Black churches
(most of which were truly cross-class institutions) Juanita Jackson Mitchell is
undoubtedly right that the Friday meetings had a multi-class audience.
Nonetheless, given the character of the topics addressed by the Friday meetings, it
seems possible that the Forum drew its working-class following mostly from those
sectors of the class that were most educated, established, and literate, and that it
attracted fewer from the most oppressed, least educated, and more marginalized
layers of the class.^
Also in terms of the social composition of the Friday night Forum meetings,
it is interesting to note that despite the fact that the Forum was self-consciously a
youth organization, a majority of those attending Friday meetings, from very early
on, were adults. That is exactly what the Forum youth wanted. They did not define
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