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Suit must be filed to compel the State to give colored children a
school term equal with white children.
Suit must be filed to compel the State and the counties to provide
equality in school buildings and equipment.
Suit must be filed to compel the State to provide equal transportation
facilities for colored children living long distances from rural schools.
And, finally suit must be filed to compel the State and the counties to
give colored teachers equal salaries with white teachers.
Incidentally, as Carl Murphy of the Afro well knew at the time of this editorial, the
latter was already in progress. As Juanita Jackson Mitchell put it years later,
"Charles Houston taught us that we could sue Jim Crow out of Maryland with the
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14th Amendment equal protection clause. °
From a social-activist point of view, the turn toward litigation as a central
tactic after the Murray victory might be somewhat troubling. The main thing that
distinguished the campaigns in the Baltimore Black community led by the Forum
between 1931 and 1934 - and which also distinguished the Communist-ILD
campaigns — from many of the early movements in African American Baltimore
was that these campaigns depended on mass education, mass agitation, and mass
mobilization. While the Murray case paid attention to mass education and some to
mass agitation, it lacked mass mobilization (except to pack the court room in
Sunday clothes). It is therefore fair to ask if the renewed interest in litigation in the
wake of the Murray case threaten to diminish the mass character of the re-
emerging Black freedom movement, and substitute instead the elitism of legal
technicians?
The primary answer to this, as we shall see below, is no. The emphasis on
litigation reappeared in a movement already dedicated to mass mobilization, and
the Black freedom movement in Baltimore through the late 1930s and beyond
proved that both were possible simultaneously. Moreover, Charles Houston, the
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