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ministers, who, as in the case of ministers in white communities, were crucial in
realizing its neighborhood based organizing strategy, and to receive regular
publicity in the columns of the Afro. And by 1934, Elizabeth T. Meyer, a white
PUL activist, was the league's official liaison to the City-\V.'de Young People's
Forum, and by 1935 Frank Trager was listed among the organizations sponsors. In
Ed Lewis' own words, The history of this group of black and white workers in a
Southern city is unique."^
The network of contacts and influence that the Socialist Party in Baltimore
had in sections of the working class, among middle and upper-class social liberals,
and in the Black community was the infrastructure on which the PUL was built.
However, all the contacts in the world would have yielded very little if the program
of the PUL did not speak to the perceived needs of the unemployed, if its activities
did not engaged them, and its leadership was not effective in organizing them. Pan
of the strength of the PUL program was that it spoke at once to a range of needs,
from immediate relief, to jobs, to housing, to long term social insurance. Moreover,
it offered a range of possible actions unemployed people could take to remedy their
situation, from asking for emergency food or for advocacy help with relief agencies,
to working on self-help projects, to passing petitions, to joining protest actions.
Given the presence of PUL in their immediate neighborhoods, the fact it was
legitimized by known community or union leaders, and the spectrum of
opportunities it offered to improve their lot, the unemployed responded in large
numbers. And once they responded PUL had an organizational structure to absorb
them effectively.
PUL's structure was both centralized and decentralized. Neighborhood
locals were organized with a minimum of ten persons. Each local met frequently
(weekly, as a rule, but this was somewhat flexible), elected its own officers, decided
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