348

excluded large portions of the African American neighborhoods of the city.
Mitchell was the first Black to run for office in that district. Nevertheless, his
campaign focused heavily on demands for ami-lynching legislation and equal rights.
The Forum established a Civic Committee, with Forum vice-president Elmer
Henderson as chairman and Mrs. Josiah Diggs, a prominent older community
leader, as treasurer. With a core of twenty-five or so Forum members, the Civic
Committee campaigned intensively door-to-door, on the streets, and from the back
of a truck at street corners. The committee used the Mitchell campaign to run a
voter registration drive, and seven-hundred new voters were registered. Money for
the campaign was raised completely through individual donations to the Civic
Committee. The Afro announced and publicized Clarence Mitchell's campaign
and, in the last issue prior to the election, endorsed him and gubernatorial
candidate Broadus Mitchell.

In the end Broadus Mitchell received 6,787 votes for governor, significantly
more (though not "double," as he remembered in 1971) than Socialist gubernatorial
candidates received in earlier such contests. And Clarence Mitchell received over
1,700 votes in his race. Both candidates and their respective supporters were
pleased. On the face of it, something truly significant and promising had occurred.
The militant Black youth of the Forum and the largely youthful militant wing of the
Baltimore SP both been involved in an explicitly socialist electoral campaign with a
program and an overall ideological framework that both supported. Moreover,
they had worked together within the framework of a radical political party. The
fact that members of both groupings became heavily involved in the campaign, and
the fact that each sought to mobilize its considerable mass base for the campaign
(remember: the PUL was probably the largest mass organization in Baltimore and
was linked to a series of institutions and communities in white labor and liberal
circles; the Forum was the leadership center of the Black freedom movement), only
heightened the promise. In late 1934, there appeared to be in Baltimore the