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issue directly affected communities outside of the city of Baltimore - in fact, it only
directly concerned communities outside the city because salaries had been
equalized in the city in the late 1920s. However, unlike the Williams case, the
Baltimore branch did not act, organizationally speaking, alone in the teachers'
salary struggle, but in alliance with the Maryland State Colored Teachers
Association. Also unlike the Williams case, the salary equalization campaign
resulted in major victories that strengthened the NAACP and the Black freedom
movement locally and nationally.

By state law, the minimum salaries for Black teachers in Maryland were
slightly more than half of those for whites. These were, of course, only minimum
salaries, and local schools systems were free to pay teachers at higher rates.
However, in reality, white teachers were more often paid above minimum than
Black teachers, putting the latter at an even greater disadvantage than the law
mandated. By 1935, the Maryland State Colored Teachers' Association had been
lobbying the state legislature for some years to change this law. Enolia McMillan
(then Enolia Pettigen), who became president of this association while serving as
principal at Pomonkey High School in Charles County, Maryland, later
remembered that the Association worked

very hard on this matter of unequal pay and unequal school terms. We had
bills before the Legislature every year, but they, for some reason, never got
passed. They would be postponed until the end of the session. I remember
one year they couldn't even find the bill, and the session closed without any
action. So we decided that there was only one thing left for us to do, and
that was to take our case to court. ^*

The Teachers' Association campaign against unequal salaries was stalled
when, in 1935, Enolia Pettigen came to Baltimore, she was immediately contacted
by Carl Murphy and asked to join the effort to re-establish the local NAACP. She
threw herself into that effort, serving as the head of the Women's Division of the
1935 membership drive. Shortly thereafter, the reorganized branch decided to join