197

meeting, for their efforts. ^

The greatest number of the Forum's programs, more than one-third during
its first years, focused explicitly on the African American community, its culture, its
history, its current situation. Implicitly, these programs were concerned with
constructing a strong Black ethnic identity, a process referred to today as
community "empowerment." Many of these programs concentrated on the Black
freedom movement itself: developments in racial consciousness, Black labor and
radicalism, the history of the NAACP, strategy for attacking discrimination in
education, Black candidates for office, the Black press. Others dealt with current
issues facing the Baltimore African American community such as lynching,
migration from the Southern countryside, discrimination in relief. Still others took
up diverse topics such as African origins of Black Americans, the "New Negro," or
the nature of Black business. And a number of the Forum's programs discussed
African American art, music, and literature. *

The list of speakers who dealt with such subjects was impressive: by 1935,
the Forum had been addressed by W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles
Houston (who returned almost yearly throughout the 1930s), Walter White,
William Pickens, Mary White Ovington, Roy Wilkins, the poet Sterling Brown (a
favorite, who was repeatedly asked to return). Franklin E. Frazier, George
Schulyer, Joel E. Spingarn, Ralph Bunche, and William Hastie--in short a large
section of the national Black intelligentsia and of the leadership (including some
whites) of the national civil rights movement.  The Forum as popular university
drew heavily on the intellectual resources of the Black university, especially, as
Juanita Jackson Mitchell has stated, on Howard University in nearby Washington,
D.C., as well as on other Black colleges and universities. And, as the above names
indicate, the Forum drew heavily on the leading circles of the NAACP, although
the Forum had no formal or informal relationship to that organization~at least in