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Black lawyers, ministers, doctors, social workers, academicians, and librarians all
served on these boards in the BUL's first decade. The character of the Black
membership of the BUL boards indicates how rapidly the organization became
deeply rooted on the elite levels of the Black community and suggests the resources
it had on hand to build coalitions.
However, both BUL boards also included large numbers of whites, many of
whom were prominent and affluent. Leading white academics, religious figures,
and professionals, joined several well-known commercial and industrial capitalists
on these boards. Some of the white board members were quite radical, such as
Socialist Broadus Mitchell of Johns Hopkins University or philanthropist A.E.O.
Munsell, who was later identified with the Communist Party. But others were
socially and politically quite moderate. The white president of the executive board.
Judge Joseph Ulman, was emblematic of this moderation. In 1926 Judge Ulman
decided against a case brought by the Black freedom movement for the
equalization of Black and white teachers' pay, and in 1930 he told an Urban League
gathering that, in his opinion, white merchants had the legal right to discriminate
against Black customers.
Given the significant participation of elite whites, some with relatively
moderate racial politics, on the boards of the BUL, the question occurs whether the
BUL should really be considered an institution of the Black community or the
Black freedom movement at all. Weight is added to this question by the fact that
the BUL's funds came almost entirely from the Baltimore Community Fund,
perhaps the most established white social philanthropy in the city. The reality was,
though, that the staff (which was Black) and its most active allies (most, though not
all, of whom were Black, and some of whom were on the BUL boards) were at the
center of gravity of the organization, and they worked with a good deal of
autonomy. Furthermore, the programmatic framework within which the staff and
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