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be understood just by looking at the numbers of people they organized or led.
Many of their neighborhood-based activities mobilized only dozens; many of their
city-wide activities, moved only hundreds. Even their few quantitatively large
actions, involving on the order of thousands, pale in comparison to, say, strikes and
demonstrations in the later 1930s. And compared to cities like New York or
Detroit, where communists were involved regularly with mobilizations of thousands
and tens of thousands, the accomplishments of Baltimore's party seem meager.
The relatively modest numbers that responded to the calls of the Baltimore CP
probably explains why historians of Baltimore have given so little attention to the
party. However, the importance of the party's actions in Baltimore have to be
sought in the qualitative difference they made by opening space for struggle among
the unemployed, in the trade-union movement, in the Black freedom movement,
and in the broader political culture; by the foundations their actions laid for later
struggles; and by the possibilities that they raised — not all of which were
subsequently realized.

The Unemployed

There was a relief office that gave out public assistance to persons in need.
The country was just beginning to recognize that as an official responsibility,
and the people in charge of it were usually not very sensitive or
compassionate. Needless to say, you always had some kind of trouble there,
with disagreements and people being turned down and things of that sort.
That was a favorite place for Communist orators, and they would always
show up there haranguing these people. Usually there would be policemen
around.

Clarence Mitchell, Black Activist in Baltimore in
the Early 1930s14

Throughout the United States, the Communist Party focused its attention in
the early 1930s on unemployed workers. In Baltimore the unemployed struggle
became the CP's main area of mass practice for more than two years following the