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Adams: Yes. So we raised the funds, and we employed Dallas Nicholas who
was a prominent black lawyer here at the time. So Dallas Nicholas and his
associates took the case, and we brought in Charles Houston for the case.
The case was tried in federal court.
The suit to desegregate Baltimore's municipal golf courses was finally filed
in June 1942, after Adams and his fellow golfers had first successfully pressured the
city into opening up all four of its courses to Blacks, only to see this victory reversed
when a wave of white backlash hit. The suit was filed in the name of D. Arnett
Murphy by Dallas Nicholas and veteran freedom movement attorney Robert P.
McGuinn; Juanita Jackson Mitchell, like Willie Adams, remembers that the golfers
raised the funds, but she recalled that the NAACP supplied the attorneys. The suit
was a classic Charles Houston-style petition for a writ of mandamus, based on the
14th Amendment, and the plaintiffs won in a jury trial in the court of Judge Eugene
O'Dunne who earlier presided over Donald Murray v. University of Maryland. This
decision, however was overturned on appeal, and the golf struggle continued
intermittently, progress coming in small steps (in 1943, for example, the Cairo 11
Park course got grass greens) before complete desegregation came in the 1950s.
Whatever the subsequent course of this struggle, the episode in the early 1940s
showed that activism was spreading up as well as down the social ladder in the
African American community, and that even the wealthiest sections of the Black
community were willing to follow the example of the NAACP in asserting their
rights, to use NAACP-style tactics, and to turn to the NAACP to be their advocate.
It also showed that the Baltimore NAACP, in functioning as community tribune,
was not unsympathetic to the grievances the most elite sectors of the community,
but had its main priorities elsewhere.
Another anti-segregation struggle that sheds light on the resurgent NAACP
and its movement was the long fight against Jim Crow in Baltimore's downtown
department stores. Complaints over racial discrimination in these stores, of course,
had occurred repeatedly in the freedom movement before 1935, but the protracted
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