199

connection with white Quakers undoubtedly reflected the Jackson sisters
Philadelphia experience as well as the presence of a small group of progressive
Quakers in Baltimore.)^

Finally, there was a potpourri of issues taken up at the meetings that the
Forum's organizers felt needed to be addressed to achieve general community
education. Radicalism was a live issue, and both Communists (Bernard Ades, Euel
Lee's lawyer, national party leader William Patterson, and Angelo Herndon) and
Socialists (Baltimore party leaders Broadus Mitchell and Frank Trager) spoke.
Broad issues of national politics (there was a symposium on the NRA featuring
New Dealer Clark Foreman) and of local politics (there were regular panels of
major and minor party candidates for city and state offices) were dealt with.
Eyewitness accounts of other countries and cultures were included when the
opportunity arose: the travels of one local Forum supporter to the Soviet Union
and of another to Cuba were recounted; a goodwill tour from Haiti discussed "Haiti
and Voodooism." Also there were occasional programs on women's issues, such as
the debate on "Resolved that a Woman's Place is in the Home," with Morgan
College mathematics professor and Forum vice president Howard Cornish taking
the negative and Miss Frances Williams from the national office of the YWCA the
positive. The Forum prided itself on the range of topics opinions that it presented,
and it occasionally included some fairly conservative presentations, as when
Baltimore Judge T. Bayard Williams advocated forceful return of Black immigrants
from Southern rural areas.   Furthermore, the Forum believed in not shrinking
from controversy: Clark Foreman was invited as a speaker during the period when
his appointment as a white to the position of National Advisor on the Economic
Status of the Negro in the Franklin Roosevelt administration was still provoking
protest in Black movement circles.

The educational process at the Friday night meetings was not a passive one.