472

CHAPTER 14
Conclusion

To write the obvious, Baltimore in 1940 was a vastly different place from
Baltimore in 1930. Along with the country as a whole, the city and its metropolitan
area had suffered and survived a devastating depression. Thanks to the war in
Europe and Asia, recovery was Anally at hand, and Baltimore's industrial sector
was beginning to expand at an unprecedented rate. And with this recovery,
thousands of people - mostly Southern and rural in origin, and in large part
African American — again began pouring into Baltimore, transforming the area's
demographic profile and severely burdening its housing, social services, and
infrastructure.

The 1930s had resulted in political change as well. Nationally, the Great
Depression had precipitated a restructuring of government presided over, with
well-known zigs and zags, by the New Deal. The New Deal and the Depression
stimulated political restructuring in Baltimore, too, but governmental reform in this
city was severely limited. However, politics, in the larger sense of the word, had
been transformed by the social movements that grew in this locale during the
decade. As we have seen, by the decade's end both the Baltimore Black freedom
movement and the Baltimore workers' movement were important social forces that
had made important gains. Moreover, although in the previous few years the two
movements had developed largely on separate trajectories, the instances of
cooperation and the intersections that did occur between the two in this period
were portentious. Given these instances, and the history of close relationships
between key segments of the two movements in the earlier 1930s, the potential in
1940 for greater convergence between the two movements was great.

After 1941, World War II brought new suffering to the working-class and