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established a remarkable and somewhat unique tradition of women's leadership,
and a kind of implicit feminism, in the freedom movement.
This implicit feminism had its limits, as Juanita Jackson Mitchell later
pointed out. She told how she left her post on the national staff of the NAACP to
many Clarence Mitcheli and to travel with him to his new job as Urban League
executive secretary in St. Paul because, as she put it, "women left to marry" in those
days, "it was a different conception." But such limitations aside, it is important to
emphasize that the tradition of Black women's leadership and participation in the
freedom movement in Baltimore has no parallel in the region's other social or
radical movements during the era.82
LJllie Jackson herself had a great deal to do with the tradition of women's
leadership in the Baltimore freedom movement, which brings us to the last facet of
the Baltimore NAACP branch to be examined: that of its overall leadership. The
key to understanding the branch's leadership is that, in Lillie Jackson, the
Baltimore freedom movement found its first truly charismatic leader since the late-
nineteenth century. LJllie Jackson was a person of great religious commitment and
enormous energy, and from 1935 almost to her death she threw herself into
NAACP work. For her, the freedom movement was both a political and a religious
imperative, a "holy crusade," and the NAACP was "freedom's army." Participation
in the struggle was a transcendent duty. As Juanita Jackson Mitchell recalled:
As my mother said 'God helps those who help themselves.' She had another
saying 'if you sit down on God you just sit, so let us help God through the
NAACP.'*3
And the struggle was a way of life, as she taught through the slogans she
coined, such as, "Every day a voter registration day, every day a membership day in
the NAACP." She became a leader of tremendous moral authority, with
remarkable abilities to mobilize others. She could be intimidating, but she was also
loved; she widely known as "Ma Jackson" and "Miss Lillie."
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