A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore connects the struggles and successes of American radicals, civil rights activists, and unionists in the 1930s. Author Andor Skotnes, professor of history at the Sage Colleges, examines Baltimore as a microcosm of those struggles nationwide and further disaggregates it into myriad reform-minded organizations, committees, and splinter groups. The book’s front matter includes a list of about eighty abbreviations, which sets the tone. This is a dense book, and it can be hard to keep all the abbreviations straight, but following Skotnes down this intricate rabbit hole is rewarding. The book has much to teach about the history of labor, African Americans, radical movements, and the “turbulent years” of the 1930s in general.

Baltimore is an ideal subject for this study. It began the decade as the nation’s seventh-largest city, heavily industrialized and with a long history of labor strife. As elsewhere, worker rebellion in Baltimore was dormant, but not dead. Baltimore was a border city in a border state, with unique demographics that put it right in the middle of Northern and Southern cities: it was considerably “blacker” (18 percent African American) than any big Northern city and more “ethnic” (29 percent white immigrants and children of immigrants) than any big Southern city. Although Baltimore resembled a Northern industrial city in many respects and African Americans enjoyed greater rights than elsewhere in the South, Jim Crow was still a reality in Baltimore neighborhoods, workplaces, and public accommodations. Thurgood Marshall tellingly said it was “way up South.”

The book is divided into three main sections, each with four chapters. The first, “Emergences, 1930–1934,” looks at some glimmers of activism in the depth of the Depression, namely the City-Wide Young People’s Forum among African Americans, the Communist Party’s inroads in Baltimore, the radical Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, and the People’s Unemployment League. The dawn of the New Deal and economic recovery in 1933–1934 offer some lift to these efforts, although Skotnes seems to downplay those factors. The next section, “Transitions, 1933–1936,” looks at radical-led labor uprisings in Baltimore and at two key efforts in the African-American freedom movement: an anti-lynching campaign and the “Buy Where You Can Work” boycott of stores that did not hire blacks. The final section, “Risings, 1936–1941,” deals with the massive gains of the labor and black freedom movements in Baltimore in that period. The two were closely related, as the opening up of Baltimore’s formerly segregated unions to African Americans strengthened their numbers and progressive union demands for a desegregated work force made the union struggle part of the civil rights struggle. Although Skotnes finds considerable overlap among the radical, freedom, and union movements, the individual chapters tend to be devoted to individual movements.

I found the book most compelling in its account of the black freedom movement in Baltimore. Even though most American historians of the 1930s can probably give a broad outline of the decade’s labor history and can offer a hypothesis of why radical socialism failed to catch on in the United States, the history of the civil rights movement between the wars is a blank slate for many of us. Baltimore had a vibrant black freedom movement throughout the decade. Although the city’s NAACP chapter was moribund in the early 1930s, the city had one of the nation’s leading black-owned newspapers, The Afro-American, as well as the remarkable City-Wide Young People’s Forum, a black youth movement founded in 1931 by Juanita Jackson and her sister Virginia. Forum activism included both a push to open city government jobs to blacks and promotion of anti-lynching efforts. The Forum’s weekly Friday Night Community Meetings became legendary—educational and cultural events that brought in famous speakers such as W. E. B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune and drew as many as 2,000 people. Although the Forum was openly integrationist and had some white benefactors, it was a mostly black institution, based in black churches and with a focus on racial justice. White Communists, although avowedly antiracist, failed to gain a foothold in the Forum, largely because of the Communist Party’s hostility to religion.

The book recounts an important but relatively unheralded victory by the freedom movement in desegregating the University of Maryland Law School in 1935. The case was led by Charles Houston of the national NAACP, with assistance from Forum member Thurgood Marshall, who himself had earlier been denied admission to the state’s law school. Their victory established a key precedent for Brown v. Board of Education and helped bring the Forum into an energized Baltimore NAACP, under the leadership of Lillie Jackson (Juanita and Virginia’s mother). By the early 1940s, Baltimore had the nation’s second-largest NAACP chapter.

This book is part of the Radical Perspectives series of Radical History Review, and, true to that designation, it offers both a history of radical movements of that era and a radical perspective that gives more credit than usual to socialists and communists for the reform accomplishments of the 1930s. Credit is something of a zero-sum game, which may be why Skotnes has few positive words for Franklin D. Roosevelt, while scoring the “pro-business bias” of the National Industrial Recovery Act and reducing the Second New Deal to a belated attempt by FDR “to shore up his popular base” to win re-election by supporting reformist and relief legislation, as if he had done the opposite in the first two years of his presidency. Likewise, the discussion of union ferment and gains in the mid-1930s has little on John L. Lewis, although it notes that the various left-led unions in Baltimore tended to affiliate with Lewis’s CIO. Then again, this book is not meant to be a comprehensive history of Depression-era reforms, and its readers will almost surely have already read standard accounts that emphasize Roosevelt and Lewis. What this book does is fill in some crucial gaps in this history, by emphasizing the radical, local activism that helped provide pressure for those and later reforms.