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Cough McDaniels and including the Forum's Evelyn Travers (later known as
Evelyn Burrell), soap-boxed on crowded street corners and from the back of a
borrowed truck. Announcements and speeches about the membership drive were
made from Sunday pulpits. The Afro's Ralph Matthews produced a radio
presentation of his play on the Ossian Sweet case to be broadcast over the local
CBS-affiliated radio station; the broadcast of the play was, however, canceled at the
last minute because that station feared it would upset the Maryland Ku Klux Klan.
On October 10, as a wrap-up to the 10-day campaign a parade and Victory
Mass Meeting were held. The parade included an African American company of
the Maryland National Guard, the bugle corps of a Black American Legion Post,
the marching clubs of the Knights of Pythias and the F.E.W. Harper Temple of the
Elks, and a young people's group. And the several hundred people who attended
the Victory Mass Meeting finally got to hear a presentation of Ralph Matthews
banned radio play, read from behind a partition through loudspeakers.
The membership drive was considered an enormous success. Approximately
two thousand people joined the local NAACP branch and $2,314 in membership
fees were raised. According to the NAACP's national organ, The Crisis:
All groups, all classes, all types of people were reached in the membership
solicitation. Trades and labor groups, fraternal groups, social, civic and
educational organizations, churches, businesses, institutions - all were
solicited in this drive.11
After the drive, the leadership of the newly revitalized branch was chosen. Li Hie
Jackson was unanimously elected president. The new branch officers reflected a
range of prominent older-adult community leaders, from elder movement veteran
Robert P. McGuinn, to Gough McDaniels who had worked with the ILD, to
community leader Sarah Diggs, who had emerged as a key leader in the Buy Where
You Can Work Campaign. Youth was conspicuously absent from the NAACP
leadership group (although Thurgood Marshall and W.A.C. Hughes would both
operate as branch legal counsel, a non-leadership position); in the evolving division
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