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"the organization now comprises a membership of five hundred young people
representing thirty-six churches and nine denominations."  At this time, the active
core of the organization, those most involved in its leadership and its many events,
was estimated by one Forum veteran to be a highly dedicated group of about fifty.
Not surprisingly, the Forum drew both its core and its general membership from
the youth of Baltimore's multi-class Black middle stratum, the sons and daughters
of small property holders, professionals, and relatively skilled workers - that
stratum referred to above as the "power bloc" of the community. A glance at the
backgrounds of the most important Forum activists, and comparing these to the
background of the Jackson sisters, can provide a sense of this stratum and of its
internal variations.

Clarence Mitchell, Jr. (who later married Juanita Jackson and went on to
have an illustrious career as a national NAACP leader) joined the Forum in 1932
and rose rapidly to became its leading Vice President. Mitchell was the Baltimore-
born son of deeply religious Episcopalian family with Maryland roots going back
many generations. Mitchell's family was poorer than the families of many who got
involved in the City-Wide Young People's Forum, illustrating the economic
precariousness of a large section of the middle stratum. His father was a musician,
who often had to work at service-sector proletarian jobs, like that of waiter, to get
by. Mitchell himself was employed in working-class jobs after school as he grew up
in a bakery, at a soda fountain, as an elevator operator; he even worked for a
period in a factory. Mitchell later remembered that the electricity was turned off in
the family home on occasion because they had no money to pay the bills and that
the bank foreclosed on their mortgage during the Depression. Both Mitchell's
father and his mother were involved in fraternal organizations; his father was a
Mason, his mother a member of the Women's Lodge of the Masons. Education
was crucial to Mitchell and his family, and he was a graduate of Baltimore's
Frederick Douglass High School, then valedictorian of his class at predominantly