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were in the course or not. It was a famous event.
I remember something else he did one Saturday, with the cooperation
of some of the students. We piled into automobiles, and we went to the
Green Spring Valley to watch a fox hunt. We saw the gentlemen in their red
coats going "tantivy, tantivy" through their horns, and we saw them take off
and chase foxes.
Then a week or so later he took us to one of these absolutely
appalling Black slums in Baltimore — I think this was on Green Street -
where the houses were so small that if you stood on the sidewalk in front of
them and extended your arms horizontally, you reached from one end of the
house to the other. These were row houses. They were just hovels, absolute
hovels. Obviously his point was the juxtaposition of the fox hunt to the
His well-know efforts to educate his white students on the contradictions of racist
society undoubtedly strengthened his contacts with Black community leaders.
The younger Socialists who organized PUL, especially those based at
Hopkins, shared Mitchell's anti-racism and desire for direct involvement in the
Black freedom struggle. Therefore, when Edward Lewis came to town in 1931 to
assume the post of executive director of the Baltimore Urban League and to
resuscitate that near-moribund organization, he became close not only to Broadus
Mitchell, but also Frank Trager and his circle. Trager and Lewis spoke as a team at
the City- Wide Young People's Forum and co-authored articles in the Afro, and
Trager apparently became godfather to Ed and Mary Lewis* daughter. Lewis
himself became an active supporter of the PUL and provided an additional entry
for PUL into the Black community. Among other things, Lewis sponsored the first
organizing meeting for a PUL local in the Black community at the northwest
YMCA in February 1933, spoke regularly on PUL platforms, and became a major
promoter of the PUL through articles in the Afro."
Therefore, through the contacts built by a handful of Socialists, and
reinforced by the SP relationship to the white Progressive community, the PUL was
able to gain access to key networks in the Black community and thus to organize
thousands of Black unemployed workers. It gained the cooperation of Black
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