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People's Forum created the climate for the revival of the NAACP." What, in
particular, happened to the Forum?"'
For a period after the re-establishment of the Baltimore NAACP, the
Forum maintained itself as a center of activity, albeit one closely allied to the
NAACP. For example, the Forum claimed primary responsibility for gathering the
5,000 signatures on the 1937 petition to the governor demanding Black police, and
the Forum continued to organize compelling Friday night meetings such as the one
on Naziism and Jews that spawned so much debate. However, after 1937, the
importance of the Forum declined; it continued to function, to again quote Juanita
Jackson Mitchell, "but politely so." The center of gravity rapidly shifted toward the
NAACP. Some former Forum activists immersed themselves in the local NAACP
branch; others, as we have seen, left town for other pursuits; others still, under the
leadership of Juanita Jackson's successor, Forum president Howard Cornish,
ro
worked to maintain the Forum as best they could.
By early 1938, the Forum seems to have been in a state of near collapse, for
the Afro editorialized that:
We would like to see the City-Wide Young People's Forum incorporate as a
permanent agency, resume its civic program, keep its platform open to all
schools of thought, and begin a permanent endowment fund to insure its life
and activities.
This was not to be. The Forum continued for several more years, but on
lower and lower levels of activity. During its heyday in the early 1930s, the Forum
held mass educational meetings literally every Friday from October to April — some
29 or 30 meetings a year. During the 1938-39 season, there were only 15 Friday
meetings, during the 1939-40 season and the final 1940-41 season there were only
13 each. Whereas once the speakers for the Friday night meetings came from far
and wide and included some of the leading Black and white thinkers of the day, in
later years speakers came increasingly from Baltimore and were less often of
national stature (although Charles Houston, for one, continued to appear almost
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