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newspaper, the Afro-American* to see the Black churches, and were we lived.
Then we would go to dinner, take fellowship together. That was quite
something. We called them Good Will Tours. And Jeanette Lampson
would help us. She gave us respectability, from the Council of Churches.
Clearly, the Forum had some hope of initiating an interracial youth
movement, possibly similar to those Juanita Jackson participated in Philadelphia.
However, while the attempts of the Forum to build inter-racial understanding
probably affected the thinking of a number of white youth and developed some
important contacts, Jim Crow Baltimore was too hostile an environment for the
growth of a real interracial youth movement, especially in the churches. Forum
efforts at interracial understanding even occasionally received rude rebuffs. On
one occasion the white young people of the Epworth League of the McKendree
Methodist Episcopal Church invited the Forum to conduct a Good Will Tour with
them. However, on the Friday before the scheduled tour, the pastor of the church,
Rev. Asbury Smith, a member of the executive committee of the Baltimore Urban
League and reputedly the most anti-racist of the few liberal white ministers in the
city, called the Forum leadership and asked them to not to come. The trustees of
the church had met, nullified their Epworth League's invitation, and threatened to
bar the church doors if the Forum delegation showed up. The Forum canceled the
tour, and subsequent attempts by Rev. Smith (apparently encouraged by the
Forum) and allies in his congregation to change the church's racist board of
trustees failed. '
The arena in which the Forum's social activism had the most impact, and in
which it became increasingly involved over the years, was the overtly political
struggle for social justice. Initially, the Forum's activities in this arena consisted
largely of supporting and joining efforts led by other forces. The Forum's
involvement in the campaign to save Euel Lee, led by the ILD and the Communist
Party, was far deeper than simply raising the $73.60. Waves of mass mobilization
and, in particular, petition signing were integral to this campaign, and the Forum
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