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over the way the Urban League's role in the social worker struggle was reported:
the League got the whole credit from the major press when it only deserved part of
it. These tensions represented more than differences of narrow organizational
interest. They expressed continuing contradictions between generations of the
freedom movement, and between fundamentally different kinds of organizations:
one a local mass organization with a broad base in the Black community, the other
a branch of a national organization with a small paid Black staff and large advisory
and executive boards that included many prominent whites.
These relatively minor problems aside the protests the Forum initiated in
March 1933- the experience gained, the victory in the case of the social workers,
and the successful alliance with the reactivating Urban League- represented an
important evolution, even maturation for the Forum. But even before the first new
Black social workers were hired, the Forum was involved in what became the
watershed struggle of Baltimore Black freedom movement in the early 1930s, the
"Buy Where You Can Work" boycott movement. And before the boycott campaign
reached its height, the lynching of George Armwood in Princess Ann on the
Eastern Shore and the execution of Euel Lee completely transformed the mood of
significant sectors of the Baltimore Black community.
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