RELIEF, REPEAL, NEW DEAL
ON THE BRINK OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, the Baltimore Association of Commerce saw only a golden glow in the city’s future. It predicted that the local population would pass one million by 1930 and boasted of the city’s attractiveness as a site for manufacturing. The experience of the 1920s no doubt sustained the association’s confidence. Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, Lever Brothers, American Sugar, Glenn L. Martin, and McCormick Spice had all opened new plants in the city. Bethlehem Steel embarked on a $100 million expansion of its mill in Sparrows Point. Between 1920 and 1926, Baltimore rose from seventh to third most active port in the nation. Its construction industry produced about 6,000 homes a year.1
Mayor Broening shared the business community’s confidence. Months after the stock market crash, he breathed boosterism at a conference he had called for 100 executives representing “the cream of Baltimore industry.” If there were a depression, he told them, it would be brief, and Baltimore had little to fear. The Association of Commerce sought to spread this sentiment. It distributed 250,000 copies of a pamphlet titled “197 Reasons Why You Should Enthuse over Baltimore.”2
Just as Baltimore discovered reasons to “enthuse,” the Great Depression banished enthusiasm. By March 1930, the state commissioner of labor and statistics reported that between 13,000 and 15,500 usually employed Baltimoreans were out of work. The city’s situation was not so dire as that in other parts of the country. Job losses in manufacturing and among unskilled workers were offset by gains in the construction trades, but a decline in new construction contracts suggested that harder times lay ahead. In May, Broening appointed the Commission on Employment Stabilization to consider ways of dealing with the problem.3
Private charities—the Family Welfare Association, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and Associated Jewish Charities—met the leading edge of the crisis while the city’s business leaders continued to minimize its magnitude. The Baltimore Police Department had also transformed itself into a relief agency, providing food, clothing, and shelter to households unable to provide for themselves. By the end of 1930, the Baltimore Association of Commerce recognized the urgency of the situation and followed its enthusiastic pamphlet with a circular on emergency employment. The association also prodded Baltimore’s government to preserve and generate jobs, and in 1931, when local unemployment was estimated at 19 percent, the association took the lead in organizing the Citizens Emergency Relief Committee. Mayor Broening was one of its members.4
The committee’s objective was to raise $300,000 to replenish the funds of private charities and the police department. Mayor Broening pledged $50,000 on behalf of the municipality, but private contributions lagged. W. Frank Roberts, chairman of the relief committee and president of the Association of Commerce, attributed the disappointing response “to the feeling . . . on the part of a great many people that the City should take care of most of this emergency relief through the tax rate.” Mayor Broening agreed that the “tendency today seems to be toward paternalism. Business with its ailments and individuals with their problems are turning to Government for a solution.”5
Frank Roberts turned to Governor Albert Ritchie for a state contribution to Baltimore’s relief fund. Ritchie declared himself willing to help in any way he could, but proved no help at all. He pointed out that if Baltimore received state aid, Maryland’s 23 counties would expect to receive assistance as well, and Ritchie was clearly unwilling to invite such requests.6
Mayor Broening had run out of time and money. Acknowledging that the city had not done enough to reduce unemployment, he announced that he would not run for reelection. One of Baltimore’s few clear accomplishments under his administration was the congressional designation of Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem in 1931.7
RETURN OF THE DEMOCRATS
Howard Jackson made a startling comeback. A coalition of district leaders backed him for a second shot at the mayor’s office. He had held the job before, after all, and now he was sober. His political rival, William Curran, joined other Democrats in a “frenzied hunt” for some other candidate. But no plausible alternative emerged, and the anti-Jackson politicians fell to fighting among themselves. One by one, they announced their support for Jackson. He faced no opposition in the Democratic primary and only token competition in the general election.8
Curran’s political prospects seemed dim. His candidate for council president was defeated, and most of those he backed for city council were beaten too. His friends would get no patronage appointments in the Jackson administration. His only remaining allies were in the city’s delegation in Annapolis and on Baltimore’s Democratic committee.9
Mayor Jackson shrewdly maneuvered to solidify his influence. Instead of dictating patronage appointments in the city’s judicial system, for example, he deferred to the city council in choosing clerks, bailiffs, and criers. For two months the hopelessly factionalized council debated inconclusively, and then it willingly surrendered the patronage decisions to Jackson. By deferring to the mayor, the council seemed to recognize him as the boss of Baltimore, the leader to whom Democrats turned for resolution of their many squabbles.10
But the boss seemed reluctant to put his political influence to work. Jackson insisted that support of the city’s unemployed was not a municipal responsibility. It was a job for private charities. His initial response to the economic crisis was to reduce the salaries of city employees and the size of the municipal budget. Jackson and his Commission on Governmental Economy and Efficiency embraced retrenchment to secure Baltimore’s favorable bond rating. Early in 1932, however, the private Family Welfare Association announced that it had reached the limit of its resources. Mayor Jackson expressed doubt at first that the agency had exhausted its funds, but he was convinced when the association closed its offices and stopped accepting cases. In response, Jackson arranged an appropriation of $50,000 to support the unemployed, acknowledging that the sum would last no more than a few weeks. By the time the money was exhausted, Jackson had requested and received emergency powers from the city council. He borrowed $3 million to sustain the unemployed through the end of 1932 and announced that the city’s 1933 budget would require an increase in the property tax rate for unemployment relief. At public meetings, the Taxpayers’ War Council shouted down his proposal. Jackson next hinted that a city sales tax might enable Baltimore to meet its relief expenditures, but gained little support for the proposal. The economy and efficiency commission announced that the city would have to cut its current expenditures for the remaining months of 1932 by 11 percent or face a deficit. Governor Ritchie seemed to offer Jackson a way out of his dilemma. The governor promised to urge the 1933 session of the state legislature to authorize a bond issue that would cover Baltimore’s current and future relief expenditures.11
Ritchie’s presidential prospects overshadowed the Democratic primaries in the spring of 1932. The hope that a Marylander might reach the White House muted intraparty strife. But Ritchie’s presidential boom fizzled, and then he reneged on his pledge to see that Baltimore was reimbursed for its relief expenditures, suggesting instead that the city achieve greater economy in its own expenditures. Mayor Jackson followed up on the governor’s suggestion by eliminating almost all relief expenditures from the city’s 1933 budget, deliberately steering the city toward crisis. Ritchie backtracked, and the General Assembly grudgingly approved his request for a $12 million bond issue to offset relief expenditures in Baltimore.12
Jackson had called the governor’s bluff, and next went after his job. The mayor began by using patronage to consolidate Baltimore’s fluidly factionalized Democratic organization—even if it meant giving jobs to William Curran’s allies. The new union of Baltimore Democrats was sufficiently influential to dictate the choice of the Speaker at the 1933 session of the house of delegates. Back in Baltimore, after the session ended, the coalition achieved consensus on patronage appointments in the people’s court and the office of the register of wills. The first hint of discord was Governor Ritchie’s appointment of Curran’s Fourth District leader, James H. “Jack” Pollack, to the State Athletic Commission. Pollack’s earlier career as a prizefighter presumably qualified him for the job, but his extensive police record made the appointment both questionable and controversial. Ritchie conceded that Pollack “used to be quite a bad boy once”—a “bad boy” phase that included a charge of murder. But the governor claimed that Pollack’s marriage and family responsibilities had transformed him into a solid citizen. Ritchie’s appointment of a Curranite triggered speculation that he was trying to entice the Curran faction to desert Mayor Jackson. Curran’s delighted response only strengthened that impression.13
MAYOR VS. NEW DEAL
While Mayor Jackson prepared to make his bid for state leadership, he was also trying to accommodate national policy. Creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in mid-1933 made federal authority a fiscal presence in local politics. The FERA was to spread half a billion dollars in federal funds among state and local relief agencies. Jackson’s emergency relief committee would not qualify for grants because it was not a fully public agency. Jackson had discussed the need for a welfare department during his 1931 campaign, but as late as 1933, he opposed the city’s entry into the relief field because he feared that once a relief agency became a part of municipal government, it would “cling there as a budgetary barnacle most difficult to scrape off when normal business conditions are restored.” Instead, he appointed leaders of private charities and business executives from the Baltimore Association of Commerce’s emergency relief committee to a Baltimore Emergency Relief Commission, and then shifted most of the private charities’ caseworkers to the public payroll. Federal field observers were not deceived by his repackaging of the organization, and they filed unfavorable reports about the city’s unsystematic and inequitable relief practices, noting in particular discrimination against African Americans. Jackson finally relented and announced plans for a new welfare department in January 1934. It was the only way to qualify for federal funds.14
The director of the new agency was Judge Thomas Waxter, a member of Baltimore’s social elite with an extensive record of service in charitable causes, including free legal representation of the poor. He remained welfare director for 20 years, and his prominence gave the agency an autonomy and freedom from political interference that it might not have enjoyed with a less prestigious leader.15
Jackson supported some federal initiatives more readily than the social welfare policies. On March 22, 1933, President Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act allowing the sale of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2 percent. On the same day, Jackson sent a bill to Annapolis legalizing 3.2 percent beer in Baltimore. His constituents were eager to abandon Prohibition. In October, 94.3 percent of them voted for repeal. Not a single one of the city’s 471 precincts produced a majority in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment.16 It was one of the few issues on which Baltimore fell into line with the Roosevelt administration.
Clashes with federal authorities were far more common. The city’s relations with the Civil Works Administration were even more troubled than those with the FERA. The work program’s implementation was marred by graft. The president of the Maryland Democratic Club was sentenced to two years in prison for accepting bribes in return for CWA jobs.17 The CWA offered unusual attractions for urban patronage brokers, though it had been designed to address the views of social workers—most notably, FERA director Harry Hopkins. The social workers argued that work relief was preferable to welfare checks, but the jobs should not be demeaning. CWA jobs paid locally prevailing wages, and applicants did not have to prove poverty to qualify for them. But the CWA was an emergency measure to carry Americans through the hard winter of 1933–34. It was replaced by more traditional work relief programs such as the Works Progress Administration, which required proof of poverty, and although WPA workers were paid prevailing wages, the program capped their weekly work well below 40 hours.18
Mayor Jackson exhibited a “studied ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward every jobs program created by the New Deal.” In 1935, the mayor pronounced the new Social Security Act “the most asinine thing I have ever read in my life.” Jackson’s reaction to the federal public housing program in 1937 was almost as negative, and he resisted creation of a city housing authority until pressured do so by a prestigious citizens’ committee.19
Governor Ritchie, like Mayor Jackson, was hostile to federal intervention and reluctant to acknowledge that government should bear significant responsibility for unemployment relief. As the dimensions of the Depression unfolded, Ritchie called on the business community “to recognize that the problem belongs to it and not the state.”20
Jackson’s decision to challenge Ritchie’s bid for a fifth term as governor in 1934 had little if anything to do with disagreements about public policy. Nor was William Curran moved by considerations of policy when he endorsed Ritchie over Jackson. Both were hostile to the New Deal, as were most Democratic politicians in Maryland. Ritchie defeated Jackson in the Democratic primary, then lost the general election. The victory of Harry W. Nice finally gave Maryland a New Deal governor—a Republican. Nice campaigned on “A New Deal and a Square Deal for All,” and a band played “Happy Days Are Here Again” as he accepted his party’s nomination.21
DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY
Howard Jackson and William Curran were left to fight it out with one another for control of the city. The balance of power shifted between them as the city’s district leaders deserted Curran for Jackson and then redefected. One of the Curranites who switched to Jackson in the 1935 mayoral election explained his move as a step toward political order: “We have had too many political leaders. I think Howard Jackson will be able to bring everybody together now and unite the party.”22 It was a vain hope.
During the presidential campaign of 1936, Baltimore boasted two Roosevelt campaign headquarters: one was Curran’s; the other, Jackson’s. Curran had moved first by organizing the Maryland for Roosevelt League, calling attention to the strained relationships between Mayor Jackson and the New Deal. Jackson then launched his own campaign for FDR, to validate his questionable New Deal credentials.23
Jackson soon regained the initiative and launched his second drive to become governor. His prospects looked good. The city’s Democratic committee deserted Curran and collaborated with Jackson in a “purge” of ward executives. But Mayor Jackson had exhausted his political resources. He had already distributed what there was of city patronage, and there were more claimants than he could satisfy, perhaps because the Depression had created a widespread hunger for jobs. There were also the purged ward executives to contend with. They drifted toward Curran, who still controlled the city’s legislative delegation in Annapolis. Jackson’s second bid for the governorship, if successful, would yield enough jobs to solve his problems. But Herbert R. O’Conor, a proven vote-getter as Baltimore state’s attorney and Maryland attorney general, emerged as a Democratic alternative to Jackson. Curran announced that O’Conor could defeat Jackson in all six legislative districts of Baltimore. The state’s Democratic politicians converged behind his candidate.24 Since Curran had no gubernatorial ambitions of his own, he could choose to back the most promising candidate for the office. Jackson, who wanted very much to be governor, was stuck with himself.
The consequences of the 1938 gubernatorial election revealed, once again, the fractured character of politics in Baltimore. O’Conor, with Curran’s backing, won both primary and general elections. At the same time, however, Curran lost control of the city’s delegation in Annapolis to Jackson allies. But Jackson gained little. His supposed partisans in the General Assembly wanted to cooperate with the popular new governor, not only because he was popular, but because he controlled state patronage. They found it expedient, therefore, to accommodate “Willie” Curran, O’Conor’s principal political sponsor in Baltimore. Though they had been elected with Mayor Jackson’s endorsement, the city’s representatives chose a Curran ally to chair the city delegation. Another became Speaker of the house. Baltimore’s Democratic committee, whose members had defected to Mayor Jackson, now redefected to nominate a slate of Curran men to serve on the city’s board of election supervisors.25
In a party organization where factional loyalties changed so readily, no alignment was likely to last. Howard Jackson was back in charge in time for the mayoral election of 1939. Jack Pollack, powerful and independent boss of West Baltimore’s Fourth District, shifted his organization from Curran to Jackson; other district leaders followed his lead. Jackson outpolled Curran’s mayoral candidate in 26 of the city’s 28 wards, and Jackson’s candidates for city council won all but 3 of its 18 seats. In the general election, Jackson ran against a popular Republican, Theodore McKeldin, who had served as secretary to Mayor Broening. Though Jackson defeated McKeldin, the outcome suggested that his popular support was declining. His total vote was about 5,000 less than in 1935.26
The resistance of Baltimore politicians to New Deal policies was not unusual. State and local politicians across the country reacted much as Ritchie, Jackson, and Curran had. What distinguished Baltimore was the disjointed factionalism of its Democratic Party. In other cities, the coming of the New Deal provided the resources that political bosses used to build or strengthen powerful organizations. In Chicago, after the death of Mayor Anton Cermak, the Kelly-Nash machine imposed order and centralization in city politics. In Kansas City, Thomas Pendergast flourished even though Franklin Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to unseat him; he fell only when he was convicted in 1939 for failing to pay income tax on a bribe. In Memphis, boss Edward Crump and his Democratic organization thrived under the New Deal. At the same time, Joseph Guffey was building a Democratic machine in Pittsburgh, converting the town from a Republican to a Democratic stronghold, while in New York, Fiorello La Guardia, with the support of FDR, built a reform coalition that transformed his city.27
By comparison, Baltimore seemed politically disabled—unable to gather itself together. What distinguished the city’s politics, according to Edwin Rothman, was “the lack of binding ties of loyalty between city leaders and district leaders.” Baltimore had always been short on political patronage, and the supply diminished after introduction of the civil service system. No political leader controlled sufficient political capital to build a unified political machine.28 State patronage may also have contributed to the city’s political fragmentation. As long as Howard Jackson hungered for the governorship, incumbent governors were likely to direct state patronage to his local political rival, William Curran.
RACIAL REALIGNMENT
Before the New Deal, the Democratic Party, lacking a Lincoln and burdened by its Confederate heritage, had limited leverage among Baltimore’s African American voters. Patronage and favors attracted a minority of black Baltimoreans to the Democrats. The party focused its resources on keeping black Republicans away from the polls on election day. By the 1930s, however, Baltimore’s African American voters were abandoning the party of Lincoln for the party of FDR. The newly converted black Democrats enlarged the party’s constituency but also threatened its unity. A party that hoped to accommodate both African Americans and white voters with racist inclinations could be fractured if race became a political issue.
Race may have been much on the minds of Baltimoreans, but they were generally wary of discussing it in public. In the era of slavery, the town’s social and political elites were divided on the subject and generally avoided the issue. Prominent Baltimoreans supported the African colonization movement because it offered something to both sides of the slavery controversy and exported the race issue back to Africa. The Know-Nothings struggled to sidestep the issue of slavery in an effort to maintain the Union. Even Baltimore’s residential segregation ordinance of 1910 was justified as a way to avoid the frictions that might make race a matter of public contention. But as African American voters transferred their loyalties to the Democratic Party in the 1930s, the avoidance of racial politics became not just a matter of preserving domestic tranquility but an essential condition for preserving the city’s majority party. Even Franklin Roosevelt had to tread carefully around the issue of race to avoid antagonizing southern Democrats.29 In Baltimore, where black and white populations were more nearly equal than in the nation at large, the perils to the party were even greater.
The organizational and institutional depth of the black community helped the Democrats sidestep the race issue. If Baltimore’s African Americans had arrived in a giant wave of migrants from the South, uprooted from home communities and disconnected from one another, they would have had only their race in common, and appeals to race would have been the principal means to mobilize them as voters. But Baltimore was home to the largest population of free black people half a century before the Emancipation Proclamation. They had the freedom and the numbers to sustain a dense network of community institutions decades before the Civil War. The many-stranded connections that tied black Baltimoreans together through churches, schools, fraternal groups, labor organizations, and social clubs enabled leaders to draw them to the polls through direct or indirect acquaintanceship rather than appeals to racial solidarity. “Unlike African American communities in other cities, especially to the North,” observes Andor Skotnes, “Baltimore’s Black community was never largely a transplant from distant rural areas, and even the Great Migration failed to demographically disrupt its processes of community- and culture-building.”30
Black political aspirants in West Baltimore formed the Citizens Democratic Club, whose principal role was to round up black votes for white candidates. In East Baltimore, Clarence “Du” Burns was doing the same for the all-white Bohemian Democratic Club. His efforts won him a job as a locker room attendant at a black high school gym. A trio of like-minded black politicians approached Howard Jackson with an offer to mobilize black voters behind his gubernatorial campaign if he would grant them city jobs. Race was not an issue for these pragmatic African Americans. According to Verda Welcome, a member of the Citizens Democratic Club and the first black woman elected to the state legislature, race was not mentioned explicitly in electoral politics until the 1970s.31
The ability to mobilize African American voters without making appeals to race enabled black politicians to form alliances with white politicians and deliver black votes to white candidates. The most notable beneficiary of such an alliance was Jack Pollack, the white political boss of West Baltimore’s Fourth District, who controlled judges, state legislators, and city council members. Baltimore’s “bad boy” continued get white candidates elected long after his district’s electoral majority had become African American. His chief lieutenant was Loyall Randolph, a black hotel and tavern owner who escorted white candidates through West Baltimore’s African American neighborhoods, distributed the patronage that came his way, and helped local merchants cope with zoning or liquor license problems.32
Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Mitchell, Jr., both grew up in Pollack’s district. They graduated together from Frederick Douglass High School (known then as the Colored High School), and by the time they returned to Baltimore from Lincoln University in Philadelphia, Pollack was in full command. Unlike other politically ambitious members of West Baltimore’s black community, they did not join Pollack’s Citizens Democratic Club. Mitchell and Marshall both became members of the City-Wide Young People’s Forum, an organization affiliated with the local branch of the NAACP. It could attract as many as 2,000 young African Americans to its Friday evening meetings. Juanita Jackson, a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate, started the forum in 1931. The group met at the Sharp Street Methodist Church, but moved to Bethel AME when the pastor at Sharp Street thought the organization had become too radical. Mitchell joined in 1932, soon became vice-president, the forum’s premier orator and debater, and, later, Juanita Jackson’s husband.33
Marshall and Mitchell would become leading actors in the forum’s most ambitious offensive against racial discrimination. In 1933, Prophet Kiowa Costonie, a visiting religious exotic and black activist from New York, encouraged Juanita Jackson to organize a campaign against retailers in black neighborhoods who refused to hire African American workers. The Buy Where You Can Work campaign was initially aimed at the A&P and another supermarket chain, the American Sanitary Company (ASCO), both of which refused to employ black workers. The Young People’s Forum coordinated a boycott with the support of at least 40 black churches. Five hundred adherents of the forum took turns picketing the markets, and many of their elders participated as well. A&P agreed to hire three black clerks and promised more. But a few weeks later, the chain fired several black employees as “inefficient.” The community reaction was seismic, and by December 1933, A&P had hired 32 black clerks and promised jobs for two black managers.34
The Buy Where You Can Work movement next targeted three locally owned stores on one block of Pennsylvania Avenue, the principal shopping and entertainment thoroughfare for West Baltimore’s black community. Not long after the picketing began at this new location, the demonstrators encountered trouble. Counterdemonstrators appeared in support of the store owners. Another contingent of picketers, allegedly Communists, showed up with signs demanding that the stores hire only black employees. The store owners got a temporary injunction to end all picketing.35
Trouble also emerged within the Buy Where You Can Work campaign. Black churches were divided on the extension of the boycott, and Prophet Costonie became a polarizing figure who contributed to contention within the coalition supporting the protest. Costonie announced that he had “a list of names of persons who were traitors” to the boycott, adding that “the Ark is about to leave, and I am going to give all backsliders a last chance to get on.” The pose alienated Clarence Mitchell, now a reporter for the Afro-American. No conspiracy of African American traitors, he argued, was responsible for the situation of black Baltimore. The real enemy was a racist social and political system. Thurgood Marshall presided over a meeting between Costonie’s supporters and black ministers who were trying to reach consensus on the boycott. The attempt at conciliation dissolved into a free-for-all. Some of the clergy were indignant about Costonie’s conflation of faith healing and fundraising. The prophet’s advocates allegedly set off stink bombs to disrupt the assembly. The divisions then spread jaggedly beyond the meeting itself as charges of treason spread among the churches and clergy for and against the boycott.36
The movement soon suffered another setback. In May 1934, the Pennsylvania Avenue merchants returned to court to get a permanent injunction against the boycott movement. The judge held that since the pickets were not employees of the stores where they demonstrated, their protest was not covered by the Norris–La Guardia Act. The advocates of the boycott fought the injunction to Maryland’s highest court, where they lost again.37
The boycott, however, was not a failure. It had won jobs for some African Americans. More important, perhaps, it stirred a new energy in black Baltimore’s fight against discrimination. Earlier struggles had been defensive reactions to residential segregation and disenfranchisement. This time, black Baltimore took the offensive against racial discrimination. The Buy Where You Can Work campaign, as Larry Gibson points out, “became a milestone and a turning point in political activism for Baltimore’s black community. For the first time, the community undertook a proactive protest.”38 Boycotts and demonstrations, however, would not serve as the principal vehicles for protest.
LITIGATION AND LOBBYING
For Thurgood Marshall, little more than a year out of Howard University School of Law, the obvious alternative to demonstrations was litigation. Filing suit against discrimination circumvented the organizational difficulties of mass protests—difficulties that Marshall had confronted personally in the Buy Where You Can Work campaign. Litigation did not depend on maintaining a consensus among Baltimore’s African Americans. It did not require mass mobilization. It required only a lawyer and someone to pay court costs and attorney’s fees.
Marshall’s first venture in civil rights litigation sought to reopen the University of Maryland School of Law to African Americans. His client was Donald Murray, a member of the Young People’s Forum and a graduate of Amherst. He had applied to the law school and, like every black applicant since 1889, had been rejected. In anticipation of the lawsuit, the Maryland General Assembly approved a bill that would pay tuition for black students to attend graduate and professional schools outside the state.39
Marshall argued that requiring black students to earn their degrees outside Maryland was inherently discriminatory, and he prevailed at trial and on appeal. But his case was not simply his own. It was part of a strategy designed by Charles Hamilton Houston, one of Marshall’s teachers in law school and an attorney for the NAACP. Houston sought to demonstrate that the “separate but equal” formula was a fiction—that segregated facilities for blacks were inherently inferior. Houston was Marshall’s associate counsel in the Murray case. Marshall also relied on Carl Murphy, publisher and president of the Baltimore Afro-American. Murphy was a member of the NAACP’s national board of directors and a leader in the organization’s Baltimore branch. He was also an early advocate of Houston’s litigation strategy.40
Thurgood Marshall moved from his first successful suit against Jim Crow to a series of others aimed at equalizing salaries for black and white teachers in one Maryland county after another, cases that also served as rallying points in the organization of NAACP branches across the state. His next case, Williams v. Zimmerman, carried far-reaching implications for the NAACP strategy of contesting racial discrimination in schools, foreshadowing Brown v. Board of Education. It was the first of the civil rights cases in Maryland that Marshall lost.
The defendant was the principal of an all-white Baltimore County high school. The county had no high schools for black students, and that was why the NAACP filed suit on behalf of student Margaret Williams. The county had required her to take a test after she completed the seventh grade. If she passed, the county would pay her tuition at a black high school in Baltimore City. Margaret had not passed the test, though she had successfully completed the seventh grade. Marshall argued that the test was a transparent attempt by Baltimore County to deny Margaret equal access to a high school education, and he sued for her admission to a white high school. But, on the advice of NAACP counsel Charles Houston, he claimed that his real purpose was to get Baltimore County to open a black high school. The NAACP lawyers were concerned that a flat demand for school integration would carry them too far ahead of the courts. In the end, they got neither integration nor a black high school. The Maryland Court of Appeals argued that the remedy Marshall should have requested was abolition of the test or creation of a fair test for tuition. Reflecting on the result, Marshall noted that “for the first time, a court has admitted that some inequalities are inevitable in a separate school system. It is significant and valuable to have a court recognize and state the mere existence of a separate system, in itself, imparts inequalities.”41
Carl Murphy’s newspaper rallied its readers behind Marshall’s efforts, and the publisher provided more tangible support. Marshall’s embryonic practice left him time to litigate on behalf of the local NAACP, but he earned little from private clients. Murphy hired him to handle the Afro’s legal work. The editor also backed the Young People’s Forum, while reviving the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, which had dwindled to no more than 100 members. The branch president was Lillie Carroll Jackson, Juanita Jackson’s mother. Thurgood Marshall’s victory in the Murray case increased the NAACP branch’s visibility and membership. A lynching on the Eastern Shore triggered outrage and yielded more members. Clarence Mitchell, Jr., like Marshall, relied on the Afro-American. He was one of its columnists, and he served simultaneously as publicity director of the NAACP branch. His task was not just to give visibility to the reinvigorated organization but to hold together the coalition of groups that backed the branch. Baltimore’s NAACP was not a free-standing organization. As David Terry points out, “Though an examination of the rank-and-file of the city’s ‘active’ black citizens would reveal various organizational and institutional backgrounds, that which can be characterized as a core leadership displayed a penchant for multiple affiliations, with the common denominator being the NAACP.” All of the branch’s ventures were “multi-organizational undertakings.”42 Constant negotiations held the coalitions together, and that was part of Mitchell’s job.
While Marshall was preparing the Murray case, Mitchell ran for the state legislature, his first and only venture in elective politics. Neither of the major parties appealed to him. To Mitchell, it seemed, “the Democrats are a lot of high pressure artists, who will tolerate gambling dens, drinking dives, and houses of prostitution, but refuse to support anything that means uplift and justice.” But the Republicans were not much better—“a bunch of shilly-shallying reprobates who need to undergo a complete metamorphosis.” Mitchell ran as a socialist and got 1,700 votes—far less than he needed to win, but a respectable showing for a socialist.43
Having tested the limits of mass protest and electoral politics, Mitchell the negotiator and Marshall the litigator would carry their work beyond Baltimore. Marshall served as lead attorney for the NAACP. Mitchell became the NAACP’s chief lobbyist in Washington. Baltimore contributed two vital leaders to the national struggle for racial equality. They were not architects of protest or masters of oratory like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. The operating styles that made Mitchell and Marshall figures of national importance seem to have originated as responses to the distinctive racial politics of Baltimore. Backed by a wave of protest, Marshall’s litigation would lead to Brown v. Board of Education; Mitchell’s negotiation and lobbying would aid the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Lillie Carroll Jackson. Mother and daughter served as presidents of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. They stand in front of Freedom House, once the headquarters of the local NAACP.