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around the local Socialist and Communist parties. The culmination of this
convergence was the 1934 election campaign, where the possibility of a radicalized,
interracial leadership core was raised.

This convergence was only one trend in the groundswell of the transition
period, however. Another trend that tended to undermine the convergence was the
increasingly national rhythm of the social struggle, and the increasingly national
linkages of local organizations. This nationalizing trend was manifested openly in
the growing ties in the Black freedom movement between the local movement and
the national movement centered by the NAACP, and in the creation of the
Workers' Alliance by the joint action of the PUL and kindred unemployed
organizations around the country. The nationalizing trend was also manifested
more subtly in the shift of the Communist Party away from the mass-organizational
forms that it initiated in the late 1920s and the early 1930s (which, no matter how
national in organizational framework, had much local autonomy and character),
toward the larger, more mainstream mass organizations. And it was manifested in
the increasing reinvigoration of the local branches of a wide variety of national
organizations that had previously been all but stymied by the Depression.

The transition in Baltimore's social movements in 1934-35 were, therefore,
both reflective of national developments and uniquely local. The outcome of these
transitions shaped the social struggle that was to begin a secular escalation in 1936.