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bringing the national NAACP convention to Baltimore in 1935 partly as a means to
stimulate local organization. This, however, proved impossible, and local efforts
again seemed to stall.^
Finally in 1935, after the victory over the University of Maryland in the
Donald Murray case - with the prestige of the national NAACP at a local high and
the demand for a effective Baltimore branch growing rapidly - another re-
organization attempt was planned. Rev. CY. Trigg announced his imminent
resignation. The key problem of new leadership was solved when Carl Murphy
asked Lillie Jackson to preside over the reorganization process. She accepted. Her
daughter, Juanita Jackson (who was about to leave for her new position as special
assistant to the Walter White in the national NAACP office) was dispatched to the
national convention to convince the organization to locate its 1936 convention in
Baltimore. She was successful. A Baltimore mass membership campaign was
scheduled for October, to be directed by the national office's Daisy Lampkin and
the newest national staffer, Juanita Jackson.**
A key problem for the Baltimore branch throughout the early 1930s was the
weakness of its leadership. As early as 1931, NAACP secretary wrote Walter White
that in Baltimore The trouble is those who can won't give the necessary time to
leading" the process of rebuilding the branch. Four years later, there was, on the
face of it, no certainty that Lillie Jackson was one of "those who can." Langston
Hughes later referred to Jackson as "a Baltimore lady... small in stature, but a
dynamo." However, in 1935, at 46 years of age, her tenure in the freedom
movement had been relatively brief, and she was not at all an obvious choice for
NAACP branch president. Prior to 1931, her enormous energies had been invested
in her family, in her real estate business, and in the Sharp Street Methodist Church,
and she had not directly been involved in the freedom movement.
Then, because of her daughters' roles in founding and leading the City-Wide
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