194

Like Hughes, Donald Gaines Murray and Elmer Henderson came from the
more elite levels of the Black community. Murray, who came out of the Forum to
be the litigant in a crucial NAACP test case in 1935, was the grandson of a famous
African Methodist Episcopal bishop. Like many of their peers, Murray's family
wanted him to get the best possible education, and, after a year at Lincoln, he went
on to graduate at overwhelmingly white Amherst College. Elmer Henderson, Jr.,
was the son of the director of Colored Schools in Baltimore. At Douglass High
School he became widely known for his talent for oratory and his victories in the
oratorical contests; he put these talents to use for many years as vice president of
the Forum/-*

Some Forum activists came from the lower end of the community middle
stratum. Evelyn Burrell (then Evelyn Smith), for example, was probably the
youngest person to ever join the Forum when she became active in 1933 at the age
of 14, and brought to the organization a background markedly different from that
of the others sketched. Her mother returned home after separating from her father
when Smith was 6 months old, and she was brought up by her grandparents. Her
grandmother, mother, and sisters were domestic workers; her grandfather was a
porter. Nonetheless her background contained important similarities to that of the
others. Her family was deeply religious and emphasized education; while a
member of the Forum, she completed her high school education at Douglass High
and graduated from Morgan College. Rather than being an anomaly, Burrell
indicates the proximity of the upper strata of the working class in the Baltimore
Black community to that of its middle class. (Burrell went on to be a long-time
community organizer and a member of the Baltimore Community Relations

"7fi
Commission.)''0

For a youth organization, built locally from the grassroots up, the Forum had
a rather developed organizational structure and division of responsibility — one that
was amalgamated, no doubt, from elements of Black church, college, and