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degree to which the political discourse of the NAACP was saturated with the
imagery of Black Protestantism.^1
Thirdly, the NAACP was an important organizational base for the Black
electoral activists. Harry S. Cummings, Warner T. McGuinn, Walter Emerson, and
William Fitzgerald — all of whom served on the city council at various points
between 1915 and 1930 - and George McMechen, who ran unsuccessfully in 1915,
were affiliated with the NAACP. In fact, the NAACP was probably more of an
institutional home for these figures than the Republican Party was. As historian
Suzanne Ellery Green has shown, Black city council members constantly aniculated
the political demands of the Black freedom movement inside the council chambers,
and constantly introduced, supported, or opposed legislation in concert with those
demands. From the time of its founding, the NAACP, not the Republican Party,
raised those demands on the outside. Of course, the Republican clubs in the
electoral districts with large Black constituencies were important to Black
politicians, but these clubs had rather narrow electoral purposes; even in times
when Republicans dominated municipal or state government, the white party
bosses channeled little patronage through the Black ward clubs. And while some
Black electoral figures participated in white-dominated Republican party bodies,
the overall Republican Party in Baltimore and Maryland was far from friendly to
Black interests. In fact, through the 1920s, relations between the overall
Republican Party and Baltimore's Black community deteriorated, and some Black
electoral figures showed increasing ambivalence toward their party. Thus, by the
last half of the 20s, in the electoral arena as well as the litigational one, the NAACP
was the real organizational center of Black politics in Baltimore.^2
If the NAACP was the most important political organization in the
community, another institution, the Afro American newspaper, was at the center of
the community's political culture. This is not to say that Afro was simply a journal
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