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late 1930s or early 1940s, International Longshoreman's Association local 878 took
out a $500 organizational life membership in the NAACP. Mitchell later recalled
that a meeting was held at Sharp Street Methodist church to mark the event, and
that thereafter more Black labor leaders and activists joined. Additionally, Lee
Lewis, who came from a working-class family and who worked in the shipyards of
Baltimore, recalled that members of his family joined NAACP and that his mother
became friendly with the Jacksons. ^
Hence, the local NAACP seems to have followed LJllie Jackson's advice, as
conveyed by her daughter Juanita's oral history testimony: "She kept preaching
about the masses-the NAACP has got to get away from just the classes, the
teachers and doctors and lawyers; we've got to have the masses." Like the
formation of a mass organization, the growth of a working-class base to the
Baltimore NAACP was a break with local tradition, but was very much in line with
what was happening elsewhere (such as Detroit), and with the experiences and
impulses of the Forum. '^
However, having a working-class base did not make the Baltimore branch a
working-class organization. Indications are that its leaders — especially its top
leaders - were almost invariably from petty bourgeois or bourgeois backgrounds.
Moreover, the program and activities of the Baltimore branch during the late
1930s, while not being in contradiction to working-class interests, did not
specifically and directly speak to those interests. As we will see, other Black
freedom organizations, including the Urban League, the local chapter of the
National Negro Congress, and even the Afro, were far more consistently focused on
more immediately proletarian concerns, especially economic concerns. Indeed, for
the NAACP, the big economic issue during the late 1930s was equalizing teachers
salaries, and teachers were hardly in the mainstream of the Black working class.
The branch did take up issues that were of concern to and in the interest of
the whole of the Black community in Baltimore, but as it tended to view the world
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