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program, and elected a state-wide leadership, with Baltimore's Enolia Pettigen
McMillan as president and LJllie Jackson as first vice-president. And again it bears
mentioning: four of six state leaders elected were women.
Hence, by the end of the decade, the NAACP in Baltimore and Maryland
looked very different from the same organization at mid-decade when, according to
Ira De A. Re id there were only 100 members. In one way, though, it changed little:
its membership was almost entirely Black. Some whites were involved, but not
many. Of the $2,134 collected in dues in the 1935 membership drive, $200 came
from whites; at the 1936 national NAACP conference, the Baltimore youth
delegation publicly highlighted the fact that it contained a few whites. These,
though, were the exceptions that proved the rule, and there is no evidence that
white membership for the rest of the decade and well into the 1940s was anything
but infinitesimal. The NAACP may have been an integrationalist organization in
philosophy, but its Baltimore branch was almost entirely African American in social
. . 10
composition/0
• ••
What was the program and practice of the renovated Baltimore NAACP?
In essence, the branch adopted the strategic perspective and plan proposed by
Charles Houston: to "sue Jim Crow out of Baltimore." Indeed, Maryland remained
Houston's "legal laboratory" throughout the 1930s and well into the 1940s, even
after he left the national NAACP staff. At the same time, the branch adopted
much of the traditional agenda of the Baltimore Black freedom movement as it had
been promoted by the Afro and other community institutions over the years. There
was tension — although not necessarily conflict — between the national perspective
and the local agenda, just as there was a tension between litigation and mass
organizing as strategic principles. The Baltimore branch worked these tensions out
in different ways in the different campaigns and activities that it undertook.
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