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Avenue, they had these stalls, and they wouldn't hire us, except for cleaning
up and just menial work."17
The problem was compounded by the fact that Black-owned stores in the Black
community were vastly outnumbered by white-owned stores. The Afro found in
1931 that Black-owned clothing stores were outnumbered seven to one, shoe-
menders two to one, confectioners five to one, grocery stores thirteen to one, and
eating establishments two to one; there were no Black-owned hardware stores.
And as Ira De A. Reid pointed out in his 1934 study, "Baltimore, the fourth largest
center of Negro population in the United States, ranked ninth in the number of
retail stores under Negro proprietorship."***
Moreover, the idea of boycotting white-owned stores to obtain Black jobs
was not unknown in Baltimore. Despite the weakness of Black nationalism in
Baltimore and despite the controversy surrounding the tactic in the national
mainstream of the Black freedom movement, job boycotting of white stores had
been advocated in this city for sometime by well-known elements in the freedom
movement. Even the Urban League, at its annual meeting in 1930, had made the
boycott of white businesses that refused to hire Blacks one of its major strategic
plans for the year. Not surprisingly, the Urban League was unwilling to picket, and
its campaign went nowhere. In frustration, the Afro editorialized under the
headline "Don't Spend Your Money Where You Can't Work" in January 1931 that
the community ought to "prod its Urban League and affiliated agencies into a
campaign to have these neighborhood stores employ colored girls and boys as
clerks, deliverymen, and managers." Nine months later the Afro was more militant:
We are supporting a Woman's Civic League, a Baltimore Branch of the
Urban League and a Baltimore branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. They cannot justify their existence if
Baltimore taxpayers must continue to spend money where they cannot
work.
Consequently, because of the boycott tactic had been sanctioned by the local Urban
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