|
Baltimore. This was East Baltimore. The family moved when I was about
two or three years old to what was then a developing area. It might have
been, let's say, the equivalent of the Bronx in the 1920s or maybe even
somewhat earlier in New York. Well, this was in a section of Northwest
Baltimore just off North Avenue. These were rowhouses. They were
absolutely identical. These rowhouses had front porches. The ones in really
downtown Baltimore simply had a stoop that led right into the house.
There used to be a lot of street vending. I still remember some of the
calls. In certain trades the hucksters tended to be Jews. The people who
would go around selling fish for example, the fish mongers, who sold fish
from trucks — the fish were always iced down ~ those were Jews. The ice
men in the neighborhood — there were several brothers, their name was
Stern — they were Jewish. They were the envy of my life: they had muscles
that bulged. This was an overwhelming Jewish neighborhood, very much
contained. There were some people, not very many, who went house to
house in the neighborhood selling live chickens. Of course, the chickens had
to be ritually slaughtered. There was a man-the ritual slaughterer, called a
Shochet, who used to go around the neighborhood, and he would say the
right words and slaughter the chickens in the right way.
My father was a charter member of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers Union and always was some kind of local union officer-chairman
of the shop committee, bargaining committee, local union president, things
of that kind. I was pretty close to my father. I used to go to meetings
occasionally with him. Since English was not his native language and came
hard to him, I used to help him do certain kinds of administrative chores
from the time I was a little kid. He would put the dues stamps in the
membership books of the local union, and I would arrange them in
alphabetical order for him. I used to go down to the shop and see him and
his friends.
Southern-style racial oppression and Northern-like working-class immigrant
community: taken together, these memories of Juanita Jackson Mitchell ai.ti
Sigmund Diamond testify that Baltimore in the 1920s and 1930s was a mixture of
North and South. Located 50 miles below the Mason-Dixon line, Baltimore was
still, in these years, the preeminent border city of the preeminent border state - the
proverbial "middle ground."-' Even today observers love to discuss the contrasting
Southern and Northern features of this city. But sixty years ago the mixture of
these features was much greater and much more important for the course of the
social struggle in that city than it is today.
The following is a study of social struggle in the border city of Baltimore
|
