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would always have two or three, what he called stool-pigeons ejected from
meetings by strong-arm methods while gushing females and presumedly red-
blooded men were awe struck at the daring of the prophet. "
And Juanita Jackson Mitchell recalled another dimension of the split with
Costonie:
[Costonie] and my mother matched up, except when he got to fooling around
with the girls. The women got him run out of Baltimore. The real downfall
of Costonie was when the preachers turned against him, because they had so
many complaints about how fast and loose he was with young women—old
and young— and the parents were complaining.
When Costonie left Baltimore, to the surprise of the Forum leadership, several
Forum women went with him. °
There was, however, another, more decisive issue: Costonie disagreed with
the direction the movement was taking. He believed that the money being raised
for the appeal could be better spent setting up Black businesses. Evidently he had
little support for this idea, for even the Opportunity Makers' Club, the organization
thai he had created to train young men to take the jobs opened up by boycotts,
rebelled and decided to donate its money to the appeal fund.
Only Ralph Matthews, playwright and Afro columnist, publicly agreed with
Costonie. After Costonie left town, Matthews lashed out at the ingratitude of the
"old Baltimoreans" who he felt had allowed Costonie to take all the risks of building
the movement, then took it over when it was successful and kicked the Prophet out.
But while Matthews was a lone voice, there was at least some truth to what he
4Q
wrote.
Costonie's nationalistic outlook had coincided with certain traditional
aspirations of Baltimore's freedom movement, and was compatible with the
inclinations of its most active elements (especially the youth of the Forum) in mid-
1933. By mid-1934, when, in pan large due to his activities, the movement had
broadened and was able to draw on a wider range of its traditions, his outlook
became less compatible. Moreover, the broadened movement, deeply based in the
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