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its allies worked, while agreed to by the boards and at least tolerated by the
Community Fund, did in fact reflect real needs and grievances of the Black
community. Of course, the integrationalist and reformist approach of the BUL and
the national Urban League was relatively moderate in context of the debates within
the national Black freedom movement of the era, and this approach was also well
within the left Progressive consensus shared by the whites and Blacks involved.
However, there were serious contradictions within this consensus in the BUL that,
while largely latent in the 1920s, would be of some importance to the trajectory of
the BUL in the 1930s.45
If the status of the BUL in the Baltimore Black freedom movement seemed
somewhat ambiguous, there were no such ambiguities about the Baltimore branch
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Founded in 1912, the Baltimore NAACP was the leading freedom movement
organization active in the political-juridical arena. While the local NAACP, like
the BUL, was reformist, nominally integrationalist, and a product of the Progressive
era, unlike the BUL it was in origin and membership overwhelmingly if not entirely
Black, and, as a membership organization (albeit with membership largely limited
to a small number from the middle class), it relied on volunteers from the
community, not a paid staff, to implement its program. Moreover, the Baltimore
NAACP was the lineal descendent to and the bearer of a tradition of African
American struggle in Baltimore that extended back into the 19th century.
In 1885, the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty was organized, with
Frederick Douglass as the speaker at its founding meeting. From its founding to
the turn of the century, the Brotherhood was at the center of the Baltimore
freedom movement, and its social composition, concerns, and methods
foreshadowed those of the NAACP. Using both court action and mass pressure,
sometimes over protracted periods, this organization led a series of campaigns that
overturned "Black Laws," admitted Black lawyers to the bar, and opened Black
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