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Interviewer: Was the governing body or board of directors ever at serious
odds with Mrs. Jackson over any policy or goal?
McMillan: No. I think what happened was that those of us who tended to
be at odds stopped going to board meetings.
Interviewer: Was this recent or in the beginning, the forties and fifties?
McMillan: Oh, way back. Well, in the middle period. I was active on the
board for a number of years, and then, I finally decided that I would just not
attend board meetings. A lot of folks decided the same thing, because you
were a bad fellow if your disagreed. And I felt that the benefits that the
NAACP had to offer were more important than any particular issue. So I
worked in the membership campaigns right straight through, but I stopped
going to board meetings.
While Lillie Jackson's leadership drew on pre-1930 Baltimore traditions, the
legacy of the Forum period, and the evolving national movement, it was — in its
tremendous strengths and also its weaknesses - sui generis. Lillie Jackson was
unquestionably one of the great Black freedom leaders of the pre-1960 era.
However, it is hard not to feel that something was lost under her leadership in the
abandonment of the more secularistic and socialist-tinged politics of the Forum
(which, of course, were also religiously grounded), and of the more ragged
democracy of the youth movement of the early 1930s. Nonetheless, the
resurrection and ascension of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, which was
indisputably a great advance for the Baltimore freedom movement, is impossible to
conceive of without Lillie Jackson's guiding hand.
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