336
University of Baltimore. The chairman of the Baltimore Committee was none
other than Frank Trager of Johns Hopkins, PUL, the SP, and the Maryland Anti-
Lynching Federation. Six months later, on November 10, an Interracial Peace
Parade was held in Baltimore with one thousand young people marching. The
Forum provided a float named The Unknown Soldier." As Juanita Jackson
Mitchell remembered the float, it was "white tomb, and here was this Black man
with his hands lifted - he was the unknown soldier." Some fifty Forum members
participated.66
The second indication of the Forum's political-ideological broadening was
the election campaign the Forum ran for Clarence Mitchell as Socialist Party
candidate for state legislature in the 1934 elections. The fact of Mitchell's Socialist
Party candidacy makes explicit what has only been implicit so far in this account of
the Forum's development: from at least the period of the protests of the lynching of
George Armwood, a political convergence was occurring between the African
American youth of the Forum, and the white, often youthful Socialists involved with
the PUL. Joint work in the Maryland Ami-Lynching Federation, including the
delegation to the Wagner-Costigan hearings was a major step in this process of
convergence; common participation in the interracial peace movement was
another. Moreover the PUL-based Socialists broadened their own activity in the
Black freedom movement in mid-1934 by finally involving themselves in the last
stages of the Buy Where You Can Work campaign.
As related above, after Judge Albert S J. Owens made the injunction against
picketing Pennsylvania Avenue stores permanent on May 24,1934, the Black
community responded with a new round of protests. When, in the context of these
protests, a white radical submitted a scathing criticism of the permanent injunction
to the Afro, urging that the injunction be appealed not only in the name of the
boycott movement but in the name of the working class as well, it was not Bernard
|