49

Zionism, the Socialist Bund, the Workmen's Circle) and middle and upper class-
based urban Progressivism; this wing of the community contained some of the city's
most liberal and prominent intellectuals and some of its most militant and radical
proletarians. 1"

Hence, of all the European ethnic communities in Baltimore on the eve of
the Depression, only the Jewish community was capable of generating a significant
community-based, mass social movement. This social movement primarily took the
form of certain trade unions, particularly in Baltimore's important garment
industry. Trade unions, of course, are prototypical class, not ethnic organizations,
and even the largely Jewish Baltimore garment unions included workers of other
national backgrounds. These facts however do not negate the powerful role that
Jewish culture played in formation of the Baltimore/ Amalgamated Clothing
Workers union (ACW) in particular, or the reality that many of the locals cf this
union were functionally Jewish community institutions. Moreover, the ACW was
able to draw on and unite segments of the Jewish community beyond its working
class base, and it developed unique features not normally associated with trade
unions of the period which bore the marks of Jewish community tradition, as will be
shown below.*'

Baltimore's largest ethnic community, its African American community,
numbered some 142,106 persons in 1930 and was situated on the other side of the
color bar from the European ethnic communities. The Black community was the
only substantial community of people of color in Baltimore, for the 1930 census
listed only 644 people in its category of "other races."

Predictably, African Americans were the most systematically marginalized
and oppressed ethnicity in the city. Only the Black community was subjected to
anything like the separation and subordination inscribed in Baltimore's highly rigid,