A New Deal for All?: Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore

Radical Perspectives

by Andor Skotnes

In A New Deal for All? Andor Skotnes examines the interrelationships between the Black freedom movement and the workers' movement in Baltimore and Maryland during the Great Depression and the early years of the Second World War. Adding to the growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights struggle, he argues that such "border state" movements helped resuscitate and transform the national freedom and labor struggles. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, the freedom and workers' movements had to rebuild themselves, often in new forms. In the early 1930s, deepening commitments to antiracism led Communists and Socialists in Baltimore to launch racially integrated initiatives for workers' rights, the unemployed, and social justice. An organization of radicalized African American youth, the City-Wide Young People's Forum, emerged in the Black community and became involved in mass educational, anti-lynching, and Buy Where You Can Work campaigns, often in multiracial alliances with other progressives. During the later 1930s, the movements of Baltimore merged into new and renewed national organizations, especially the CIO and the NAACP, and built mass regional struggles. While this collaboration declined after the war, Skotnes shows that the earlier cooperative efforts greatly shaped national freedom campaigns to come—including the Civil Rights movement.

Andor Skotnes is Professor of History at the Sage Colleges. He is a coeditor of Migration and Identity.

"Andor Skotnes' argument—that the labor and freedom movements in Baltimore were connected in interesting and complex ways during the critical period under discussion—is intellectually sound and quite innovative. Well researched and cogently argued, A New Deal for All? details and analyzes the political relationships between these two movements with enormous skill. Skotnes demonstrates that it was the most radical elements of the workers' movement who pressed a principled antiracist agenda, thereby creating a wedge into the pervasive racism of the time."—Linda Shopes, coeditor of The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History

"In this creative account, Andor Skotnes convincingly places Baltimore in the 'long Civil Rights movement' as he deftly unravels the complex connections between race and class in an urban setting. His original use of oral history enriches his narrative and enhances our understanding of the compelling struggles for freedom and justice in the 1930s."—Jo Ann E. Argersinger, author of Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899–1939

Genres: History

392 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2012

Reviews

[David Lucander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent overview of 1930s Baltimore, but too many details for an average reader. Skotnes is a historian's historian, and I like that kind of stuff. Reminds me a lot of Rosemary Fuerer's book on St. Louis, very similar dynamics happening in both cities at that time. Lillie Jackson is neat! She gets a much more complimentary depiction here than in Ransby's Ella Baker biography.