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maintained the rhetorical of the Third Period "united front from below" tactic
which essentially encouraged broad united fronts as long as less radical workers
were willing to abandon the "misleaders" of their organization. Nevertheless, this
rhetoric aside, the MWIU nationally as well as locally in Baltimore, was
increasingly interested in coalition with non-TUUL trade-union forces, even if this
coalition included the local level of leadership. A number of historians have noted
that there was an evolution away from the more sectarian aspects of the Third
Period line and toward certain features of the ensuing Popular Front as early as
1933: the collaboration between the Baltimore MWIU and I LA longshoreman, and
the national MWIU response to it, was clearly a step in that evolution. ^

Overall, 1933 had been a good year for the MWIU in Baltimore for, in
addition to its greatly expanded onboard organizing, its Baltimore local and the
affiliated Waterfront Unemployed Council (WUC) increasingly began to diversify
their activities with actions around seamen's relief issues. Meetings were frequently
held on the waterfront, often at the MWIU union hall (Bailey recalled that,
"Baltimore had a beautiful hall, a big storefront hall that held maybe a hundred
guys... and they would have meetings every week"). These meetings included both
union meetings and broadly political meetings that addressed questions such as the
Scottsboro Boys, Tom Mooney, and solidarity with workers struggles nationally and
internationally wer*» addressed. By late 1933 the Communist Party, through its
leadership of the MWIU, had established a secure base in Baltimore's maritime
working class. And at the end of 1933, as we shall see in chapter 9 above, the
seamen of Baltimore were ready to take their struggle to a qualitatively higher
level.46

Tlie Black Freedom Struggle

In its unemployed work, its trade-union work, its cultural work, and its
educational work in the early 1930s, the Communist Party in Baltimore opposed