Andor D. Skotnes, The Black Freedom Movement and the Worker's Movement in Baltimore, 1930-1939, Rutger's PhD, 1991,
Image No: 332
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Andor D. Skotnes, The Black Freedom Movement and the Worker's Movement in Baltimore, 1930-1939, Rutger's PhD, 1991,
Image No: 332
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332 To further aid Baltimore Youth in its efforts for increased opportunities of employment, the Forum on March 27,1934 opened an office at 1623 Druid Hill Avenue (which building has been donated through the generosity of one of the Forum sponsors) to provide an employment service for trained young people. (The generous sponsor in question was Lillie Jackson.) And, most important of all, the Forum's weekly Friday night meetings continued to function as "town hall meetings" for the Black community.5** In terms of protest activities, as illustrated in chapter 7, the Forum continued to play a key part of the leadership of the Buy Where You Can Work movement as the temporary injunction against picketing was fought in the courts and through mass agitation. In this struggle, though, the Forum's leadership was somewhat eclipsed by that of Lillie Jackson, who chaired the Citizens Committee that increasingly directed this campaign, and of some of her older allies. Apart from the struggle against the injunction, the Forum deepened its alliance with the Baltimore Urban League, and developed ties to the national Urban League, when it participated in the exhaustive survey of the Baltimore Black community sponsored by the league and directed by Ira De A. Reid. The survey was a major event in the Black community, followed closely by the Afro and by the major white newspapers alike; its results were published to much acclaim in early 1935 under the title The Negro Community of Baltimore. To help gather data for the survey, the Forum sponsored and conducted a Court of Social Justice (a Forum publication dubbed this "A Mock Trial") during which 30 African Americans testified before a panel of seven judges to the problems they and the Baltimore Black community faced.59 But the Forum's major political activity in 1934 was its continuing work in the ami-lynching struggle. The main thrust of the Forum's activity in this struggle campaigning for state and federal anti-lynching legislation, both in conjunction with the Maryland Ami-Lynching Federation and on its own. The campaign for federal