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strengthened in 1924 when Murphy endorsed and supported the Progressive Party's
presidential candidate, Robert LaFollette; Mitchell and Elisabeth Oilman led
LaFollette's campaign effort in Maryland.^

After the Baltimore Urban League's formation, Broadus Mitchell was not a
distant white supporter, but was intimately involved, along with its Black executive
director, R. Maurice Moss, in its various campaigns through the late 1920s. The
most notable of these was the struggle to renovate the "Lung Block," the most
depressed section of the Northwestern Black ghetto that got its name from its
astronomically high tuberculosis rate. This was a major campaign, carried on in
close alliance with the Afro, which had first published stories on the Lung Block as
early as 1914, and other leading forces in the Black community. By the time the
Lung Block was finally razed and replaced with a playground and park between
1930 and 1932, Broadus Mitchell was probably the best known white in the African
American community. It is therefore not surprising that Mitchell was an early
speaker at the City-Wide Young People's Forum, and was one of the few whites
who repeatedly attended and supported the Forum.-^

Broadus Mitchell was also involved in educating the white community -
especially that segment of the white community that he met as students at Hopkins
— to issues of race and class in Baltimore. He believed in what is now sometimes
called "hands on" education. Sigmund Diamond, a student of Mitchell's in the mid-
1930s, recalled in a recent interview:

Every year for years, Broadus would try to take his students to the
Lyric Theater to the Bachelor's Cotillion. I don't know if you are familiar
with it. The Bachelors' Cotillion was the big coming out party for the
debutantes of Baltimore and the state of Maryland and environs. If you
came out at the Bachelors' Cotillion it meant that you were in the social
swing of things. Broadus would always write to the board of governors of the
Bachelors' Cotillion asking for permission to take his class to see what a
cotillion looked like. And every year, of course, he would be rejected. The
next morning Broadus at his first class would give a lecture on the Bachelors'
Cotillion, and students from all over the campus would come whether they