A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore by Andor Skotnes (review)

The cover photo of Andor Skotnes’s A New Deal for All pictures eleven Baltimore participants in the December 1931 Communist-organized Hunger March on Washington, DC. The group is racially mixed – five African Americans and six whites. Generally, the whites are in front, the Blacks in back. While most of the whites clench their right fists in the red salute, the African Americans are less engaged; a woman coyly peeks from behind one of the whites, two men are turned away from the camera in conversation, another is eating. The author never discusses this image of impassive, disconnected African Americans upstaged by motivated white radicals. But the image seems to contradict the author’s thesis that “a powerful mass-based Black freedom movement” emerged in Baltimore during the Depression alongside a dynamic industrial workers’ movement in which the two “interconnected and overdetermined each other.” (4) A New Deal tells the story of two movements – one multi-class and African American, the other working-class and interracial – that converged then drifted apart. It is the alternating telling of these two stories that provides both the book’s strength and its weakness.

Skotnes begins by addressing the question “Why Baltimore?” He argues that as “a ‘border’ city and a ‘border’ state,” Baltimore and Maryland constituted an “‘in-betweenness’ (that) catalyzed a rich variety of struggles around both race and class.”(5) This middle ground status is illustrated by cultural, demographic, and economic factors. Firmly anchored within the industrial northeast, Baltimore remained “a profoundly Jim Crow town.” (13) Opposition to segregation emanated from many African American organizations, including union locals, women’s groups, the local chapters of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), and the influential Afro-American newspaper. Skotnes challenges the historic assertion of E. Franklin Frazier that a “black bourgeoisie” led resistance to segregation. Rather, he argues, a “social bloc” spanning class interests asserted the political goals of African Americans. (40) In addition, many working-class whites, usually members of immigrant-dominated industrial unions, actively opposed white supremacy. It was out of this constituency that Baltimore’s earliest Communists and socialists emerged.

Establishing this context, the author then examines early responses to the Depression in Baltimore, including the activities of a reinvigourated Communist Party (cp) and the appearance of the City-Wide Young People’s Forum. He credits the cp with being the most consistently and aggressively anti-racist organization of the era, quoting prominent contemporary non-Communist African American leaders in making this point, most notably Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American, (63) and Charles Houston, dean of Law at Howard University. (198–199) Under the slogan “Black and White, Unite and Fight,” the cp organized workers at the neighbourhood level into unemployed councils and at the worksite into industrial unions. All Communists had a duty to participate in all struggles against racism. (48)

In contrast to the cp, the Forum was “homegrown, unique, and completely African American.” (70) Rooted in Baltimore’s Black middle class, it raised the political consciousness of young Blacks by hosting public speaker meetings. Prominent speakers included Mary McLeod Bethune, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois. An early recruit to the Forum was a young Thurgood Marshall. In late 1932, the Forum moved from a purely educational orientation to an activist one following an engagement by Bernard Ades of the International Labor Defence (ild), a Communist legal organization. At the time the ild was campaigning to free Euel Lee, a Maryland African American charged with the murder of a white couple and their two teenage daughters. Following Ades’ address, the Forum joined the campaign and remained politically active afterwards.

Skotnes then explores how, throughout the early and mid-1930s, the labour and civil rights movements increasingly cooperated. The lynching of George Armwood, an African American from Maryland’s eastern shore, catalyzed this trend. Police had arrested Armwood for assaulting...