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every year). The brief historical portrait of the Forum that was included in the
program booklet for the last Friday meeting of the season listed no new activities or
accomplishments after 1937. However, the 1941 booklet did make one final claim

that put the Forum in some perspective: "It is estimated that during the ten years of

*7n
its activity the Forum has had an estimated total attendance of 330,000 persons/17

Eleanor Burrell, who became the Forum's youngest member when she
joined in 1933, recalled a key factor in the Forum's demise in a recent interview:

Burrell:  By 1941, in comparison with 1933, the young people of the Forum
could no longer be called young people. We had acquired certain positions
in life and what not. And we couldn't recruit young people in the Forum,
because ~ well its just like in a church, it's the young people that you have to
keep working to take your place as you grow older.

Interviewer: But you were unable to recruit another generation of young
people?

Burrell: In the final analysts that is what happened. The things that the City
Wide Young People's Forum did interested many young people during the
'30s, when we were in these building years. But as we grew older, we didn't
find young people who were interested. We couldn't get the children to see
the value of what we were talking about. We could not continue because the
values and the ideas of the youth were not the same. They had changed. By
'41, those of us in the City-Wide Young People's Forum were practically
doing the same things as the NAACP. It was just a (Joublc effort. So we
merged.  We were the NAACP youth division then.71

It is not surprising that the Forum ultimately dissolved into the NAACP
youth movement. It is surprising that this did not occur until 1941. After all, from
mid-1936, the Forum was being reincarnated around the U.S. in the new chapters
and branches of the NAACP youth movement that Juanita Jackson was building for
the national office. Given that the Forum was the major inspiration for this
movement, that its founder, Juanita Jackson, was the national organizer for the
movement, and that Jackson was frequently back in Baltimore helping with
membership drives and special events for the local NAACP, one would have
thought that the Forum would have rapidly been displaced by NAACP youth