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building a base among Blacks in the industrial working class. Historian Raymond
Wolters quotes Houston as writing to Walter White that, "Personally ... Juanita...
is swell. But frankly what bothers me about your own set-up, and personal thinking,
is it is too white collar. What you need now is some strength on the industrial side;
and frankly, you don't get it with Juanita.   1

The further evidence of the coming eclipse of the Forum in Jackson's
appointment to the national office was, of course, the fact that its most important
leader was leaving town. So, as it turned out, was Clarence Mitchell, whose
influence in the Forum was second only to Jackson's, and who was, due to his A fro
column and reporting, the leading young Black writer in Baltimore. Mitchell was
on his way to the graduate program at the Atlanta School of Social Work on an
Urban League fellowship. Finally, it is interesting to note that the immediate task
assigned to Juanita Jackson when she first arrived at the NAACP national office
was to aid Daisy Lampkin of the national staff in coordinating a membership drive
to renovated the Baltimore branch of the NAACP.

The convergence of the Forum youth with the white Socialists of the PUL,
and the subsequent divergence of the two groupings as the national connections of
each strengthened and their respective directions changed, took place before a
backdrop of increasing social struggle in Baltimore, particularly in the workers'
movement and most particularly in the trade-union struggle. Even apart from the
dramatic events that resulted in the Baltimore Seamen's Soviet of 1934 and apart
from PUL's segue into the trade-union movement as it began organizing WPA
workers, workplace struggles were on the rise from late-1933 through 1935.

Historian Jo Anne Argersinger, who has written at length on Baltimore
during the Great Depression, has argued forcefully that the region's labor
movement in this era was deeply conditioned by the policies and practices of the