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movement, the Euel Lee defense campaign, began in late 1931, several months
after the sister's return. Besides, the CP's outspoken hostility to religion mitigated
much of the organization's attraction to the Jackson sisters, and to middle-class
Black youth like them.
It thus became clear to the Jackson sisters that something new was needed.
"So," Juanita Jackson Mitchell (formerly Juanita Jackson) later recalled, "we
organized a group of young people, both high school and college graduates who
couldn't get jobs either. We started meeting at the Sharp Street Methodist Church
and we called it the City-Wide Young People's Forum." The idea behind the City-
Wide Young People's Forum, Virginia Jackson Kiah (formerly Virginia Jackson)
later remembered, was originally hers, inspired by the Methodist Church-sponsored
Epworth League Institute at Morgan College she attended after she returned to
Baltimore during the summer of 1931. Virginia Jackson was a graduate of
Philadelphia Museum and School of Art and an aspiring artist. As she put it years
later, "I didn't have the training" to lead the Forum. "My sister had, and after we got
started on this Forum, it was my sister, who was much better equipped than I, who
carried it on successfully." Virginia's sister Juanita, a graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania in education, became the first president and principal leader of the
Forum during its first four, crucial years/
Despite the fact that the City-Wide Young People's Forum is virtually
forgotten today, its importance to the Black freedom movement in Baltimore and
even in the U.S. was great. The Forum, as it was known to its followers, organized
a Black youth movement in depression-ridden Baltimore that engaged in a
remarkably wide variety of activities, affecting progressively larger portions of
Baltimore's African-American community. Like the local Communist Party, the
Forum was one of the new, innovative, locally-oriented organizational forms that
emerged in the early years of the Depression in Baltimore to challenge the
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