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Despite the fact that integrated party-sponsored socials in segregated
Baltimore defied dominant community mores, they resulted in little controversy
before 1933 (although, according to a Communist spokesperson, the police did raid
an interracial dance in a private home two years earlier). Then on Sunday, January
8,1933, the Workers International Relief, a Communist Party-initiated
organization, sponsored a dance at the Polish American Hall in East Baltimore.
Held in a white, predominately Polish neighborhood, four blocks from the Fells
Point waterfront and close to the racially mixed Old town area, the dance attracted
about three hundred Blacks and whites. About an hour before the dance ended a
crowd of local whites began to gather, numbering nearly 200 by the time the
dancers began to leave. Around midnight, a white woman walked out of the door
beside a Black man, and a white youth walked up and slapped her. A melee
ensued. When the police finally arrived they arrested five of the dance-goers. One
of the arrested, an African American man named Roosevelt Coleman, was initially
accused of stabbing one of the white attackers, a Polish youth named Edward
Kleckzowski; the charges were later dropped when Kleckzowski failed to identify
Coleman, No one in the crowd outside the dance was arrested.

The Baltimore Communist Party did not believe that the attack on the dance
was spontaneous. Paul Cline, a CP organizer, told the press that during a dance at
the Polish American Hall on the previous New Year's Eve, just a week before, a
group of whites had entered the hall and ordered an end to interracial dancing, only
to be expelled by those in attendance. Cline argued that local business interests, to
defend the "prejudiced and jim-crow" character of the area, had systematically
incited local white youth, telling them that the Black men were the white women's
lovers, and plying them with whisky. Cline also believed there was police collusion
in the attack, pointing out that it took an exceptionally long time for the police to
arrive, that the police did nothing to protect the dance-goers, and that Captain