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architect of the new thrust, was himself no enemy to mass mobilization and mass
participation, and he did not counterpose the activities to his legal strategy. In a
more secondary sense, though, the question has to be answered by saying that
something of the mass democratic, experimental thrust of the early 1930s was lost
in newly found commitment to litigation. In the campaign against the picketing
injunction, the Black freedom movement used mass action almost interchangeably
with litigation in a way that came close to duplicating the ILD's approach. After
the Murray case, the tendency would be for mass action to be much subordinated to
litigation if the latter was involved in a given campaign. Moreover, the premise of
this change was a growing faith in the legal system that undermined the kind of
radicalism that was growing among the more militant youth of the freedom
movement in 1934.^
The second result of the Murray case for the Baltimore freedom movement
was that it further exacerbated existing organizational contradictions. Older adults
had finally emerged as force in the rejuvenating freedom movement in the later
stages of the Buy Where You Can Work campaign and during the protests over the
lynching of George Armwood. Now many older adults were excited by the Murray
victory and ready to act. Nevertheless, no adequate organizational form had
developed to encompass them. Moreover, the youth leadership of the Forum was,
by 1935, aging; in terms of their life cycles as well as their impulses and identities,
they were hardly youth any longer. With the Murray victory, Carl Murphy and
others redoubled their efforts to resuscitate the local branch of the NAACP.
The third result of the Murray case was the increased orientation of the
most vital elements of the Baltimore freedom movement toward the national
freedom movement, and, ipso facto, the weakening of its local orientation across
social movements in Baltimore. In other words, the 1934 convergence of the
militant Black youth of the Forum with the white PUL-oriented socialist stagnated
as both the PUL-based group and the Forum group became more nationally
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