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CHAPTER 6
The City-Wide Young People's Forum, 1931-33
In the summer of 1931, Juanita and Virginia Jackson returned to their home
in northwest Baltimore's Black community after graduating from colleges in
Philadelphia. The sisters found themselves in a dismal situation. Unemployment
in the Black community was massive; Blacks were about 18% of the population and
about a third of the unemployed. The small employment gains in semi-skilled and
skilled areas that Blacks had made in the twenties - in, for example, industrial
employment — had largely been reversed. Jobs for college-educated Blacks were
nearly impossible to find. In sharp contrast to their experiences in Philadelphia,
the Jackson sisters not only found that Baltimore's system of segregation and sharp
racial discrimination was still in place, but that it had rigidified under the impact of
economic crisis. Baltimore was, as one of the sisters recalled later, a "nasty,
demeaning place for Blacks."1
The Jackson sisters resolved to do something about the their plight and that
of their peers. Unfortunately, the traditional organizations of local Black social
action — the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, the Baltimore Urban League, and
the Women's Cooperative Civic League — continued in the period of low activity
that had preceded Crash and deepened afterwards. These organizations were
incapable of embracing the kind of youthful activism the sisters had in mind. The
Afro-American continued to crusade editorially for civil and social rights, but it was
a newspaper, not an organization. The Baltimore unit of the Communist Party had
been stirring things up since early 1930 and was increasingly involving itself in
aggressive anti-racist organizing, but its main activity at the time was multi-ethnic
unemployed work among the most marginalized strata of the working class across
the city. The party's real focus on the Black community and the freedom
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