when I was particularly doubtful and for his support for my theoretical approach.

I also want to thank Deborah White and Jackson Lears for their
participation on my dissertation committee. Their comments and insights went far
beyond what was required for dissertation revision and will be of great help in the
future as this dissertation is reshaped into other forms of scholarship.

While I was researching and writing this dissertation, a large number of
historians enthusiastically offered me their ideas, their advice, and, at times, even
their research. I happily acknowledge my debt in this regard to JoAnne E.
Argersinger, George Callcott, Joshua Freeman, Nelson Lichtenstein, Bruce Nelson,
Mark Reutter, Roy Rosenzweig, Roderick Ryon, Linda Shopes, and Linda
Zeidman. The sense that all of them share, that scholarship should be a
cooperative, not a competitive endeavor, is exemplary.

I also want to offer my thanks to those persons who gave me their time and
their memories during the numerous oral history interviews conducted for this
project. Recent methodological work in oral history has shown that interviewees
are far more than data banks from which primary source material is to be extracted.
Rather, as they construct explanations, during the interview process, of events in
which they earlier participated, they themselves function as historians, in the
essential meaning of the term. My interviewees were indeed historians and
collaborators, who many times suggested interpretations that appear in this
dissertation.

Of all my historian-interviewees I must extend special thanks to Juanita
Jackson Mitchell. As an important leader in, and keen observer of the Baltimore
and national Black freedom movements from 1930, Mrs. Mitchell's words and ideas
appear frequently in the following pages. I am immensely grateful to her for the
time and energy she spent with me explaining the past; and I am immensely grateful
to have had the opportunity to get to know a great woman and a hero of the
freedom struggle.