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organizations had tended to fairly narrowly-based and elitist.
Of course, other NAACP branches across the country were also becoming
larger and more mass-based throughout these years, although very few grew as
rapidly or as large as Baltimore's. Nevertheless, local factors had much to do with
the renovated NAACP's mass character. The Baltimore branch clearly carried on
the mass-oriented traditions of the Forum; it also borrowed some of the Forum's
specific techniques, such as the mass educational meetings. The NAACP branch
did not, however, attempt to mobilize its base for protest actions such as petitioning
or picketing as frequently as the Forum had done earlier. This may have been due
to the importance of litigation as a tactic to the branch — and the branch did use the
strategy of mounting mass actions in conjunction with court cases as the ILD and
Forum had for the Euel Lee case, or as the Buy Where You Can Work campaign
did during its fight against the temporary injunction. However, it would be wrong
to assume that the Baltimore NAACP was progressively shrinking away from mass
protest actions, for in the 1940s, when police brutality, housing, and voter
registration became chief concerns, mass mobilizations by the branch became more
frequent.
If the local NAACP of the late 1930s was developing a truly mass-based
character, what was its evolving class character? Again, the numbers of members
alone indicate that it had a cross-class base that must have included many from the
Black working class. Membership reports in The Crisis certainly indicated that this
was the case. Anecdotal evidence also supports the notion that many workers
joined and supported the local NAACP in these years. Juanita Jackson Mitchell
remembered domestic workers with "run over shoes" coming into the office with
their membership fee of $1. She also remembered soliciting membership among
Black longshoremen on the docks, and that Black longshore leaders like Jefferson
Davis "taught the men to contribute to the NAACP." In fact, at some point in the
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