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pressing issues around racial justice, other SP candidates appear to have place far
less emphasis on demands for Black freedom. Such autonomy between the
Clarence Mitchel) effort and the efforts on behalf of other candidacies in the
overall SP campaign did little to forge greater interracial unity among the Black
and white radicals involved, and it is hard not to conclude that a real opportunity
was missed. To gain perspective on this, a bit of speculations in order. For
whatever other problems might have arisen, if someone of the stature of Clarence
Mitchell had been running under the Communist banner, and if a group as
important as the young Black militants of the Forum was willing to immerse itself
in a Communist Party electoral campaign, it is inconceivable that the Communist
Party would have paid so little attention to this candidacy or this group, or allowed
them to be so marginalized within its overall campaign effort.
The autonomy of the Forum's campaign for Clarence Mitchell within the SP
election campaign points to a deeper problem: the Socialist Party itself. The
Baltimore SP's great strength was it ability to maintain ties with a range of more or
less progressive forces. The underlying weakness here is that these forces (with the
exception of the PUL) were, like the Baltimore SP itself, almost entirely white; in
addition they were fairly disparate politically. The de facto segregation of the SP
movement and its somewhat scattered political character, coupled with the
weakness in the theory and ideology of the SP around the questions of racism and
the rights of the African American people, strongly suggests that the Black youth of
the Forum would have had a hard time becoming more deeply organizationally
involved with this organization. Deeper common organizational involvement was,
though, necessary for the convergence of the militant Socialists and the Forum to
have taken a step forward after the election campaign. Continued participation in
coalition efforts like the Maryland Ami-Lynching Federation was not enough, for
this was a single-issue effort. What was needed was some common form that
expressed unity around a series of local, national, and even international issues
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