'Buy where you can work': boycotting for jobs in African-American Baltimore, 1933-1934.

In early June 1933, the Baltimore Afro-American reported that the Prophet Kiowa Costonie, the "New Messiah" to his followers, had come to town:

Discovered here about four weeks ago when tall stories of miraculous healings and divine cures drifted to the Afro-American, the writer investigated and found the healer besieged by hundreds in the basement of Shiloh Baptist Church where, amid demonstrations of religious frenzy, the man whom thousands were following from church to church made cripples walk, deaf hear, blind see simply by the laying on of his long tapering hands.(1)

"Thousands . . . following from church to church" may have been an overestimate, but the Prophet Costonie was obviously a man of great religious charisma. At twenty-eight years of age, he was also a man of style, often described as "suave" and "immaculately dressed." He was, as Juanita Jackson Mitchell, then a youth leader in Baltimore's reviving Black freedom movement, later recalled

. . . a handsome man. He said his mother was Indian. He had these beautiful eyes that were a bit slanted. And he put a beautiful turban, with gold in it on his head.(2)

But there was more to Costonie than religious fervor and personal attractiveness. Again in Juanita Jackson Mitchell's words, he "had this racial advancement emphasis." Indeed, within a few months of his first appearance in Baltimore, Costonie initiated a racial advancement campaign to force white-owned stores in the African-American community to hire African-American workers. Between September 1933 and June 1934, this campaign, the "Buy Where You Can Work Movement," mobilized large sections of Baltimore's Black community to direct action for the first time.

Over fifteen years ago, historians August Meier and Elliot Rudwick argued that the Depression decade was a "watershed" for the freedom movement, an unprecedented eruption of direct action "not equaled or surpassed until the late 1950s and 1960s." It is, in fact, possible to go further and argue that the origins of the modern Civil Rights lie in the Depression years. But, despite the enormous scholarly outpouring on the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and the 1960s, comparatively little interest has been shown in the precursors of the 1930s.(3)

In Baltimore, the 1930s decade was indeed a watershed for the freedom movement. At the beginning of that decade the movement was all but moribund. By the beginning of the next decade Baltimore had a powerful mass movement, led by the second largest branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the country, and the process that would lead directly to and culminate in the mass actions of the 1960s was well underway. The jobs campaign, the Buy Where You Can Work Movement of 1933-1934 led by the Prophet Costonie, was a key moment in the movement's regeneration.

The importance of the Buy Where You Can Work Campaign should not be surprising. To quote Meier and Rudwick again, jobs campaigns, which occurred in over 35 cities across the U.S. during the Depression, were "the earliest and most widespread . . . the most important and sustained of the black direct-action demonstrations during the 1930s." Freedom movement intellectuals of the time agreed that they were important. "No 'race' activism," remarked sociologist Ira De A. Reid in 1940, "has excited more interest among the Negro population than that of the boycott." And Ralph Bunche wrote that, "Never before have Negroes had so much experience with picket lines." But of all the major freedom movement activities of the 1930s, these boycotts are probably the least studied.(4)

The Baltimore jobs boycott of 1933-1934 is also interesting because it exemplifies the way that the local freedom movement rebuilt itself by drawing deeply on locally-based Black community institutions, ideologies, and resources. Certainly "outside" forces--post-Garvey Black nationalism, Communist and Socialist radicalism, national freedom movement organizations--had real impact on the regeneration process. But the local African-American community was the key. Recent scholarship has suggested that the modern Civil Rights Movement was originally catalyzed in the 1940s (not the 1930s) by the new industrial union movement led by Congress of Industrial Organizations. This may be the case in locales where the post-Crash freedom movement emerged at the end of the decade, but it was emphatically not the case in Baltimore. By the time the CIO was a force in this highly industrialized city, the new Black freedom movement was already maturing, and, although a close (if contradictory) collaboration with labor ensued during the war years, the freedom movement was by no means thereby remade in labor's image. Historians Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein recently contrasted the new freedom movement of the 1960s with their view of the movement of the 1940s by remarking "the key institutions of the new movement were not the trade unions (as in the 1940s), but the black church and independent protest organizations." Their contrast simply does not work if Baltimore in the 1930s or the 1940s is the reference point.(5)

This article, then, will consider the story of one boycott movement in one metropolitan area in the depths of the Great Depression and will, hopefully, contribute to our understanding of the character of the African-American jobs boycott movements of the 1930s, of the role locally-based Black political culture played in spawning a new freedom movement in that era, and of the roots of the modern Civil Rights Movement locally and nationally. The Baltimore Buy Where You Can Work Campaign unfolded in three phases: the initial experiments with boycotting in September and October 1933; the broadening of the boycott movement into a mass direct action campaign from October to mid-December; the transformation of the movement after an injunction stopped the picketlines on December 15. The key to the first phase of the story is the enigmatic Prophet Kiowa Costonie, for he won the campaign's first victories almost single-handedly, then founded the coalition that mounted a dramatic direct action campaign. For a short period, Costonie became the most popular and powerful leader in the Baltimore Black community, and, even though his role as paramount leader was short-lived, his legacy was long lasting.

I. Catalyzing the Boycott

When the Prophet Kiowa Costonie first appeared in Baltimore, he seemed to be just another mystical, charismatic revivalist, although, as it soon became clear, an unusually successful one. While Baltimore had nowhere near as many, to use Claude McKay's terms, "cultists" or "occultists" as, say, Harlem or Chicago, it had its share. In an interview decades later, Eleanor Burrell, who was fourteen when Costonie appeared in Baltimore, recalled that mystics and revivalists were common in the African-American community of that city during the early Depression:

Baltimore was known as a sucker town. All these prophets and all of these holy-rolly or whatever you call them, they would come here and get rich. They had the ability and faith to heal people. And people really believed all of this, you know. There were loads of them. They had tents all over Baltimore city.(6)

Clarence Mitchell, destined to become the NAACP's top national lobbyist in the 1950s through 1970s, was in 1933 a 22-year old writer for the Baltimore Afro-American; he periodically derided "our many religious fanatics," such as "the New Christ," Robert Peeks, who wandered around displaying what he claimed to be stigmata in the palms of his hands. Moreover, in mid-1933, Father Divine had established a "kingdom" in Baltimore and was preaching to hundreds at the New Albert Auditorium, and, later that year, Prophet John Means was on trial for taking children into his cult.(7)

It quickly became evident, though, that the Prophet Costonie was different. First, Costonie's revivalism, unlike that of other mystical figures, did not alienate him from the religious establishment of African-American Baltimore. In fact, he cultivated relationships with preachers in the community and did not attempt to set up a religious institution of his own to rival existing churches. As a result, during his first weeks in Baltimore he worked freely out of some of the most important Baptist churches in community at the very time the Baltimore Baptist Minister's Conference was publicly lambasting "self-styled messiahs." Of course, economic motives entered the picture, for the Depression had cut deeply into church revenues, and revivals were an increasingly popular method of remedying financial distress. But if some local ministers and lay people were suspicious of Costonie's preaching and healing from the time of his arrival, many clearly were not.(8)

Secondly, Costonie differed from other mystics in that, despite his phenomenal ability to move the faithful, he often displayed an unusual modesty about his religious powers. This humility made him more acceptable to those Christians and secularists who were distrustful of extreme evangelical fervor. As Clarence Mitchell wrote in an Afro-American column, "his common sense really is above the average. He doesn't pretend to be divine or superhuman and frankly admits that he has his limitations." Costonie repeatedly stated that he had no idea as to the source of his faith-healing ability. He even reportedly stated that "his power to heal the sick by touch is merely used as an attraction to draw crowds so he can promulgate his ideas of racial betterment."(9)

Finally, Costonie was different from other Baltimore-based spiritualists because of his interest in ethnic consciousness and politics. At his revival meetings in May and June 1933, he championed a "new racial consciousness," advocated the development of Black enterprises built on Black patronage as the path to progress, opposed the color bar in municipal jobs, and called on his audiences to "unseat your underworld political leaders" because "Baltimore has to be shaken to its foundations." Costonie was emphatically not an integrationist; he even proclaimed that "I think segregation is a benefit." Rather, he was one of a variety of spiritually-oriented figures across the country associated with post-Marcus Garvey Black nationalism--figures who, unlike Garvey himself, came to focus their energies on social protest.(10)

Costonie's ideological profile--with its mixture of mysticism, off-handed secularity, politics, and nationalism--was reflected in the exotic and adventure-filled life story he told. He was also known as Tony Green, a name he said he received on vaudeville some seven years earlier. His real name, he insisted, was Kiowa Costonie, the name given to him by his Indian mother, who had been a well-known faith healer in Utah. Orphaned at four, he suffered three failed, abusive adoptions and, at ten years old, struck out on the road alone. Becoming a "happy-go-lucky" wanderer, he worked on ships and railroads throughout the U.S., Canada, England, the Caribbean, and Latin America.(11)

It was through his travels that he discovered the realities of racial oppression. Costonie was appalled at the conditions of African Americans in the South, and, in his words, "I was disgusted with my own people" for not resisting their oppression. Disgust aside, he began to "dream that if a man had enough courage, he really could do something for his people." Also, during these travels, at the age of 14 years, he discovered his faith-healing abilities inadvertently when he cured a sick shipmate. Thrilled by this discovery, he began to experiment with it as a hobby.(12)

Soon after, according to his account, Costonie began to involve himself in politics. He became a political leader in Boston and the vice-president of the Massachusetts State League of Colored Political Clubs, he claimed, when he was still too young to vote. Simultaneously, an interest in business and entertainment was aroused, and he opened a recreation parlor and speculated in real estate, quickly losing all his money. Later, after moving to New York, he invested in a show called "A Manhattan Cocktail," which failed in two weeks, after which he toured with veterans of the Ziegfield Follies in a production called "Hot Chops."(13)

When his touring landed him in Washington, D.C., Costonie decided to settle for a while, and he resumed work on the railroads, engaging in some faith-healing on the side. During 1928, he again involved himself in electoral politics and rose, he told the Afro-American, to an important position in the Herbert Hoover presidential campaign, receiving in return a patronage job and entrance to the highest circles of African-American society in the capital. After a whirlwind romance, he married Emma Stewart, the daughter of an "aristocratic" Black family in 1929. However, given his humble background (something he frequently stressed), he could not adjust to the "continual rounds of gay festivities" of society life, while his wife could not adjust to his faith-healing and to his old and continuing friendship with an actress. In 1931, Costonie left Emma Stewart and began his travels again, for the first time devoting his full energies to faith healing. Some two years later he showed up in Baltimore.(14)

In the weeks after he first appeared in Baltimore, there is no record that Costonie, despite his nationalistic political rhetoric, initiated any activities beyond his revivals. Then, in mid-June 1933 he moved to Philadelphia, where he had a following among the faithful and contacts in the African-American clerical establishment. He did not stay in Philadelphia long, possibly because of the competition of what the Afro-American called an unending "stream" of faith healers through that city. Sometime in late summer, he resumed his revivals in Baltimore, but this time his activities went beyond preaching and took an increasingly political and activist turn.(15)

Not long after his return to Baltimore, Costonie declared that one of his "ideals . . . is to teach the Negro to vote. The ballot is the greatest weapon they have." He followed up this declaration with a voter registration campaign based in Perkins Baptist Church where he was preaching. Reportedly, he provided his own funds to transport carload after carload of voters, on one occasion in a caravan of 10 autos, to the courthouse downtown to declare their intention to vote. When critics charged that his campaign was designed to augment the Republican vote, he reacted angrily, contending that "the masses of Baltimore" have no "faith in our supposed political leaders" and told politicians of both parties to stay away. Applauded for his efforts, he minimized the effect of his campaign, saying he had only registered 200 people by early October. Nonetheless, he stimulated others to action, including several clergymen and the Fourth District Republican Club, who began their own registration drives.(16)

There was a special urgency to voter registration in Black Baltimore in 1933. Since Reconstruction, the community had always had at least one African-American representative on the city council until 1932, when redistricting seriously diluted Black voting strength. In response, the Afro-American, long the ideological center and chief carrier of the traditional agenda of Baltimore freedom movement, attempted to organize a campaign for voter registration, with little success. It is little wonder that the Afro-American's publisher, Carl Murphy, who had shown no previous interest in Costonie as a religious figure, now held the Prophet up as a political example:

Costonie, unhampered by the inhibitions, obligations and fears of retribution which cause many of our old residents and leaders to refrain from taking these forward steps, is also entitled to our encouragement and support. May his work continue.(17)

Meanwhile, Costonie began promoting education as the key to the community's future, even proposing to teach "old people how to read and write." The project he launched, however, focused on school children, by one account, 13- and 14-year olds. At Perkins Square and Bethlehem Baptist churches, he organized free classes designed to strengthen basic academic skills and to teach African-American history. He enrolled, in short order, some 330 students. Again, Costonie caught the eye of the Afro-American and kindred forces who had long promoted education.(18)

Then, in late September 1932, in the midst of his other activities, Costonie and a committee of three investigated the employment practices of white-owned stores on Pennsylvania Avenue, the commercial heart of the Northwest Baltimore Black community. Finding an overwhelmingly white sales force, Costonie demanded that these stores begin hiring African Americans immediately, or face a community boycott. With this action, Costonie initiated what became the Buy Where You Can Work Movement.(19)

The conditions in the Black community in Baltimore were definitely ripe for a call to boycott. Unemployment was rampant in the community, and the two areas of greatest employment gains for African Americans in the 1920s--large industry and the "white collar" sector--saw the greatest job declines. Black youth, including those with high school and college diplomas, were out of work. Jim Crow hiring by white-owned stores in the African-American community was all the more damaging because there were relatively few Black-owned stores. The Afro-American found in 1931 that Black-owned clothing stores in the community were outnumbered by white-owned stores seven to one, shoe-menders two to one, confectioners five to one, grocery stores thirteen to one, and eating establishments two to one; there were no Black-owned hardware stores. As sociologist Ira De A. Reid pointed out in his 1934 study, the position of Black business in Baltimore was comparatively weak: "Baltimore, the fourth largest center of Negro population in the United States, ranked ninth in the number of retail stores under Negro proprietorship."(20)

Moreover, by 1933 jobs boycotting of white-owned stores in Black communities to force the hiring of Blacks was a well know tactic. The Chicago boycott of 1929 and 1930 was the most famous at the time, but there had also been smaller campaigns in Toledo (1930, 1932), Cleveland (1931), Detroit (1932), and New York (1932). Only a few weeks before Costonie's canvass of Pennsylvania Avenue stores, the New Negro Alliance (NNA) of Washington, D.C., began the first of its long string of boycotts. News of the increasing numbers of jobs boycotts in the national arena had reached and spread in the Baltimore community. (In fact one oral history interviewee stated Costonie may have been directly inspired by the Washington, D.C., boycott.)(21)

Additionally, the call for jobs boycotting had recently been raised in Baltimore. The local Urban League, at its annual meeting in 1930, had made it a major strategic plan for the year. The Urban League, however, was unwilling to picket, and, like much of the traditional freedom movement, was in decline. Its campaign went nowhere. In frustration over the Urban League's inaction, the Afro-American, again playing the role of tribune of the community, proclaimed in a January 1931 editorial entitled, "Don't Spend Your Money Where You Can't Work" that the community ought to "prod its Urban League and affiliated agencies into a campaign to have these neighborhood stores employ colored girls and boys as clerks, deliverymen, and managers." Nine months later the Afro-American was more militant:

We are supporting a Women's Civic League, a Baltimore Branch of the Urban League and a Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They cannot justify their existence if Baltimore taxpayers must continue to spend money where they cannot work.

Nearly two years later, in an editorial on August 12, 1933, on the eve of Costonie's campaign, the Afro-American again advocated boycotting and picketing, this time against businesses that fired Blacks and hired whites at the higher NRA-mandated wages.(22)

Once again, when Costonie threatened the Pennsylvania Avenue merchants with a boycott, his actions corresponded with part of the Afro-American's de facto program. Initially, though, a boycott appeared unnecessary, for Costonie's first demands for Black jobs in white stores seemed to yield some quick victories. Two five and dime stores--Tommy Tucker and Goodman's--and Max Meyers Shoe Store agreed to hire Black clerks. Shortly thereafter Howard Cleaners and Dyers proclaimed that it planned to open a new branch on Pennsylvania Avenue with a Black manager and all-Black staff, and the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Stores (the A&P markets), which had been the object of Black boycotts elsewhere, declared that it hired a Black college graduate as a clerk.(23)

Shoe store owner Max Meyers even appeared at a mass meeting at Perkins Square Baptist Church where Costonie announced these victories. Before 450 people Meyers made (as the Afro-American put it), "a speech of thanks for being permitted to have an opportunity to accept." Costonie reported to the meeting that other white merchants were noncommittal and that they had until October 15 to hire Black employees or face a picket line. He announced that upcoming meetings with managers of the A&P and the American Stores Company (ASCO) had been arranged that "will reveal the attitude of these companies." He then thanked his supporters, including "Shiloh Baptist Church and several local ministers who were urging their congregations to back him up," and, characteristically, he ended the meeting with faith healing. By October 7, both ASCO and, with a bit more hesitancy, A&P agreed to start hiring Black male clerks sent to them by Costonie. In response, the Prophet carefully screened and recruited a group of young men who became known as the Opportunity Makers Club. Shortly after, Costonie triumphantly told a meeting of AME preachers that his next campaign would target the remaining white-owned stores on Pennsylvania Avenue, involving some 600 jobs.(24)

By this time, Costonie had built a small alliance to support his efforts, including the Monumental and the Pride of Baltimore lodges of Elks, the Knights of Pythias (who were also actively recruiting other fraternal organizations) and, surprisingly, the Challenger and Baltimore auto clubs. This was, however, a rudimentary coalition, one that would have been hard pressed to pull off the kind of boycott Costonie threatened. Nevertheless, without (as far as the record shows) demonstrations or picket lines; without a broad united front or a real mass organization; with only a committee of three assistants, the prestige he brought from his large politicized revival meetings, his base in the churches, and the increasing support he was receiving from the Afro-American, Costonie gave the fledgling Buy Where You Can Work Movement real momentum. This momentum was threatened, however, in mid-October, when the Northwest Baltimore A&P markets charged that its new Black clerks were "inefficient," fired some if not all of them, and hired white clerks. Furthermore, it became increasingly clear that most small businessmen on Pennsylvania Avenue were, by and large, not honoring their pledges to hire African Americans.(25)

II. Direct Action

Although traditional organizations like the NAACP remained dormant, by the time Costonie appeared in Baltimore, the local freedom movement had started showing signs of new life--but in non-traditional forms. The local, multi-racial Communist Party (CP) branch had successfully engaged significant sections of the African-American community with its unemployment and anti-eviction activities, with its inter-racial dances, and especially with its two-year effort to defend Euel Lee, an elderly Black man accused of murder on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The People's Unemployed League (PUL), organized in early 1933 by a handful of younger white militants in the Baltimore Socialist Party under the slogan "Black and White, Unite and Fight," was expanding its membership by thousands every month; by April 1933 some twenty-five percent of its members were African American, and as many as ten of its locals were in the Black community.(26)

But the most important force in the reviving freedom movement, and the one destined to be Costonie's key ally, was (to quote W. E. B. DuBois) "an unusual organization" by the unlikely name of the City-Wide Young People's Forum. The Forum, as it was called by its members, was launched in late 1931 by a small grouping of young Black college and high school graduates, most of whom were religiously-oriented. Initially its main activity was an effort at community education that very quickly, became a big success. By mid-1933 its Friday night meetings were regularly drawing 2,000 people, young and old, from the community to hear well-known local or national speakers. Additionally, the Forum was involved in social activism, and it had, for example, worked with CP forces on the Euel Lee Defense campaign. By the time of Costonie's appearance, the Forum's activism had greatly increased, and it had initiated its own campaign to secure Black librarians, Black social workers, and more jobs for Blacks in the public schools. In the words of Ira De A. Reid, "There is no doubt that the [Forum] is the most aggressive social organization in the city." The leadership and core membership of the Forum were educated youth, and many of them were unemployed, so the dearth of "white-collar" jobs and the indignities of the color bar in employment were deeply felt. Interestingly, the Forum executive committee had previously, in spring 1933, discussed the possibility of a jobs boycott campaign against white businesses in the community but shelved the idea because of limited energies.(27)

Sometime in mid-October, about the time A&P was replacing its few Black employees with white ones, Costonie finally met the young activists of the City-Wide Young People's Forum. As Maceo Howard, then a vice president of the Forum, remembered years later, he was having his hair cut when the barber introduced him to the man in the next chair who was interested in getting "some civil rights action going." Howard got Costonie in touch with other Forum activists. As Juanita Jackson Mitchell, then president of the Forum, later recalled:

When I first saw him, and he proposed this boycott, he was at Perkins Square Baptist Church. He came to us and asked us to support it. We had him speak at the Forum. He said why not go after the A&P stores, so we said fine. When we said we'll start with the one down here at the comer across from our house, he said "Oh no, Miss Jackson, we can strike all the A&P stores in the whole northwest section." It was his idea, he took the initiative, he brought us the plan. He had the vision. We voted to support the boycott, and with it we took all the preachers we had and the Afro-everything. We supported him, we were on the picket lines, we furnished the bodies and everything. He never had any big organization. It was our army of freedom fighters that was the bodies for his program really. And we supported him 100 percent.(28)

The alliance between Costonie and the Forum ushered in the second--the direct-action--phase of the Buy Where You Can Work Movement. However, before this alliance could really get functioning, two shocking events, one right after the other, intervened. On October 18, George Armwood, a young African-American man who was charged with attacking an elderly white woman, was taken from jail and brutally lynched by a white mob in Princess Anne, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. A little more than a week later, on October 27, Euel Lee, who had been the focus of the two-year-long, CP-led defense campaign mentioned above, was executed. These traumatic events triggered widespread expressions of anger and protest from the Black community that continued for several weeks.(29)

The response to the deaths of Armwood and Lee temporarily diverted some attention from Costonie's jobs campaign. In the longer term, though, it laid the foundations for the greatly broadened and more militant boycott movement follow. The anti-lynching protests seldom took the form of demonstrations, parades, or other forms of direct action (except for those led by Communist Party-related forces), preferring petition drives and delegations to the governor's office. But there were a series of mass meetings, some reportedly as large as 1,500 people, that served to mobilize and prepare the community for possible direct action--direct action that came not as a part of anti-lynching activities, but with the jobs boycott that followed. The anti-lynching protests also sparked new life into the local NAACP, Urban League, Housewives League, and other traditional groupings, to the benefit of Costonie's ensuing campaign.(30)

In early November 1933, as the anti-lynching protests began to ebb, a much broadened coalition, centered now in the Forum and including the local chapter of the Housewives League, was assembled around the slogan Buy Where You Can Work. While Costonie continued to be the undisputed leader of the movement, a Citizens Committee, including representatives from different allied groups, was formed as a steering committee. In a circular dated November 2, 1933, issued under the authority of the Citizens Committee and Costonie, the newly organized coalition upped the ante by demanding that all stores in Black neighborhoods employ entirely Black staffs immediately, that Black managers be hired by January 1, and that all the white clerks recently hired be fired. If these demands were not met, the committee would step up its actions with mass picket lines. At a Forum-sponsored meeting to kick off this--the second--phase of the jobs campaign, A. C. MacNeal of the Chicago Whip, a leader of the pioneering Chicago boycott movement, spoke, urging those present to "create jobs for Negro youth by militantly organizing and using your buying power." Meanwhile, the A&P stonewalled. In response, Prophet Costonie called for 2,000 people to pledge not to shop at A&P. On November 18 the picket lines went up.(31)

When the call went out to boycott A&P and to support the November 18 picket line, the community was ready as never before. According to Evelyn Burrell's later testimony, she and her friend Elva, then twelve-year old school girls, responded so enthusiastically that they began picketing alone, one day early, only to be led home by a policeman they knew. After her mother and grandmother came home,

. . . we were greatly chastised, and reprimanded, and said not to go back.

But the next morning the boys were there. And, honey child, we couldn't wait for the next morning! We were there too! We were there too!

As I say, that was on November 18. On Tuesday, November 21, the stores were practically closed down, because, believe it or not, we had young people going from door to door, acquainting people. We had trucks and loudspeakers going all around the neighborhood. People really were not going in the stores. Consequently the stores were hurting. I mean hurting.(32)

The community mobilization shook the corporate structure of A&P. The eastern regional director of the A&P chain, William Scrimger, was dispatched to Baltimore and met with the Citizens Committee at the Sharp Street Methodist Church. Scrimger offered a compromise, was rebuffed, then surrendered, promising to hire 21 Black clerks within 2 weeks, to continue hiring Blacks until "every boy is colored," and to have three Black managers in place by March 1, 1934. (The promise was kept and by April 1934 the A&P had at least 38 African-American employees, including two assistant managers.)(33)

At the meeting called to announce the victory, Prophet Costonie "declared that 4,200 persons had been behind him in the effort along with the heads of many organizations." And the movement had had its first successful experience with mass direct action. Commenting on the capitulation of A&P, Juanita Jackson Mitchell later recalled, "That liberated the people. It gave them a sense of power. It was a tremendous victory. The churches too. And then we were ready to go on to Pennsylvania Avenue."(34)

The focus on Pennsylvania Avenue was a single block--the 1700 block--to maximize the effect of the threatened picket line. The Citizen's Committee met with the targeted store owners and got little satisfaction. Aaron Samuelson, owner of Tommy Tuckers and several other stores, reportedly responded to the threat of a boycott by declaring, "You couldn't pay these Negroes to stay out of my store." The picketing began at noon on Friday, December 8, as the Christmas shopping season was moving into full swing. Ralph Matthews, in a characteristically colorful report to the Afro-American, described the scene as the picketing continued through the following Tuesday:

With gloveless fingers, cold and numb, faces bleached and blistered by the cutting winds, feet frost-bitten through none-to-sturdy shoes, and clothes that to the zero weather were but a mockery, 200 boys and girls went into the fourth day of their boycott march . . . Back and forth they marched, huddled together in little groups to ward off the cold. Sometimes in pairs--sweethearts perhaps--locked arm in arm; sometimes dwindling to only a score as the ranks are thinned to recoup from the cold and get a bite to eat--and suddenly the mass swells again. Marching slowly, silently, back and forth, as a policeman stationed along the way utters a gruff "keep moving."(35)

Picketing started at 9 a.m., with one-hour picketing shifts, and ended when the stores closed well after dark. At times, as many as 18 police were assigned to oversee the demonstration, and each weekday, when students got out of a nearby school, the picketline swelled. There was, however, more to the boycott than the picket line. There were at least two food stations and three physicians, aided by "several drug stores" to provide support and comfort to the demonstrators. Several Black-owned restaurants served the pickets with hot drinks, and local residents spontaneously offered nourishment or a place to rest. Thousands of handbills and circulars were distributed in the surrounding community, picketing and boycotting were publicized in the Afro-American, and mass boycott meetings were held in the Cosmopolitan Community Church. In Juanita Jackson's words, "it became a kind of religion: don't buy were you can't work."(36)

White merchants located throughout the Black community, represented by the Northwest Businessmen's Association, attempted to put forth a unified front to the Pennsylvania Avenue boycott. Nonetheless, business fell drastically; merchant Aaron Samuelson later admitted a 60% drop in business at Tommy Tucker's during the weekend after the picketing started. By the middle of the following week, business on the 1700 block, as an investigating judge later put it, "practically disappeared," and strains in the white merchant's united front began to appear. Some merchants made false claims of hiring Black employees, only to be confronted and exposed. Others may have in fact hired a small minority of Black workers, which, however, did not satisfy the picketers. A&P (whose store on the 1700 block was not being picketed) was reportedly asked to join arms with the Businessmen's Association, but declined.(37)

Although there were some indications that the merchants might be willing to negotiate seriously, the situation grew increasingly tense. Costonie claimed he had received threats on his life and rumors circulated that gunmen "had been imported from New York to 'wipe out' the Prophet." Five young male activists began to operate as his bodyguards. Frustration mounting, picketers occasionally became more aggressive in engaging store owners and prospective shoppers, and some store entrances were blocked. One store owner charged that boycott leaders Kiowa Costonie, Lillie Jackson, and Elvira Bond had threatened him physically. Max Meyers of Meyers Shoes had Jacob Baggett (who protested that he was just a shopper) arrested for causing a disturbance; the Forum raised the bail, Forum attorney W. A. C. Hughes defended Baggett, and the court dismissed charges. Several light-skinned activists, apparently acting on their own initiative, impersonated white business people and crashed a Merchant's Association meeting. While three of the infiltrators were discovered and angrily evicted, a fourth managed to stay for the duration and to report the proceedings to the boycott leadership.(38)

Finally, some merchants mobilized counter-picketers, the picket lines were harassed, and violent incidents occurred. Evelyn Burrell later remembered one such incident involving a gang of thugs from the "sporting world" led by a woman named Salina, who was "rough and strong as any man you could name." At the time, Burrell was on the picket line with Vivian Marshall, known as Buster, wife of Forum activist Thurgood Marshall:

Buster and I were walking down the street. Well Buster looked like she was white. So one of Salina's henchmen busted her head. She had to have some four or five stitches put in her head. A couple of the pickets were actually knifed. And of course you know the policemen were there. Well the picket line was broken up as a result of Salina's activities.(39)

However, not all of the contention that arose during the Pennsylvania Avenue campaign occurred between the community and store owners. Divisions within the community and within the movement itself emerged. An internal contradiction developed because adult community leaders of all types were being forced to choose sides. Many sided with the boycott and some emerged in the leadership circles of the struggle: for example, Reverend C. Y. Trigg, pastor of the Metropolitan M.E. Church and head of the local branch of the NAACP, and Josiah Diggs, owner of the Dunbar Theater and officer of the Knights of Pythias, were both on the Citizens Committee and active combatants. Others, like Reverend Beale Elliot--who declared to an Afro-American reporter, "Yes, I'm an Uncle Tom," and who advised "young Tom" and "young Mary" that "you make it by the sweat of your brow and your own effort in life"--moved into stubborn public opposition to the boycott. Still others were caught somewhere in the middle.(40)

Complicating this first internal contradiction was a second that revolved around Costonie himself. About a month previously, prior to the final campaign against the A&P stores, a number of Costonie's supporters among the Baptist clergy broke with him, accusing him of "putting on a program of false faith healing." After the victory over A&P, when Costonie was at the height of his popularity as a political leader, he struck back at his critics saying that he had "a list of names of persons who were traitors" to the cause of freedom and that "the Ark is about to leave, and I am giving all the backsliders a last chance to get on." Whatever the backsliders thought, some of Costonie's allies were not convinced. In his Afro-American column, Clarence Mitchell (who was also a vice president of the Forum) questioned the existence of Costonie's list. Nevertheless, as the campaign approached the one-week point, and as fear of treason within the ranks of the boycotters grew, alleged traitors to the cause including several ministers were publicly denounced--not only by Costonie but also by businessman Josiah Diggs--and suspected "stool-pigeons" were pointed out and interrogated at length during at least one boycott meeting.(41)

On one occasion, the contradiction between Costonie's clerical critics and his supporters threatened to become violent. A meeting was held between the Costonie-organized Opportunity Makers Club, whose spokesperson in the Prophet's absence was lawyer Thurgood Marshall, and an interdenominational group of ministers that were trying to figure out what to do about requests made by boycotters to speak at Sunday services. In the words of the Afro-American, the meeting "nearly precipitated a free-for-all fight" over the accusations by several Baptist ministers that Costonie had sold "healing handkerchiefs." At another point in the meeting, stink bombs were set off with the apparent purpose of disrupting the meeting, allegedly by members of the Opportunity Makers. Amidst threatening chaos, worried clergy asked about rumors that downtown white-owned businesses were about to fire all of their Black employees to retaliate for the boycott; Thurgood Marshall strove to refute these as baseless. Finally, NAACP leader Rev. C. W. Trigg calmed the meeting down, and an ambiguous decision was made "that the ministers would give the movement their wholehearted support," but "they did not . . . approve of the boycott." The degree of contention, however, in the movement should not be exaggerated, for it did not significantly damage the boycott. Nonetheless, the net effect of internal conflict was to weaken Costonie's leadership at the very time that other forces in the Citizen's Committee were growing stronger.(42)

Neither the contention between community and shopkeepers, nor the differences within the movement were, however, to be resolved in the course of the picketing. On Friday, December 15, some three carloads of police pulled up in front of Bethel A.M.E. Church during a City-Wide Young People's Forum meeting. Clarence Mitchell later recalled that he and his compatriots thought that they were going to be arrested, and a rumor subsequently swept the community that they had been taken to jail. Instead the purpose of this intimidating show of police force was to serve Costonie, as the boycott leader, with a temporary injunction ordering an immediate cessation of picketing. In the short term, the police did not succeed. Reverend W. H. Baker, pastor of the church, stood in the doorway and ordered the police to leave. Stymied for a moment, the police gave chase when a young man in Costonie's coat left through the front door. In the ensuing confusion, Costonie, who had been speaking to the crowd inside, sneaked out the back and went into hiding. The police were evidently humiliated by the whole incident, and "roundly denounced colored people in general when they got back to the station house."(43)

The picketlines went up again the next morning, and the Forum leadership protested the police disruption of their meeting. But faced with arrest and a minimum of $1000 bond for release, the boycott leadership decided it had no choice but to comply with the injunction, and the Pennsylvania Avenue picketing was called off little more than a week after it began. The direct action phase of the Buy Where You Can Work movement was over.(44)

III. After the Injunction

The December 16 injunction broke the momentum of the boycott struggle at a time when hopes were high that the movement was unstoppable, and that segregated employment was about to be swept from Baltimore's Black neighborhoods. There was some demoralization, but the boycott movement was by no means destroyed. Rather, it was transformed. The wording of the temporary injunction implied that all boycott agitation against the stores on the 1700 block was prohibited, not just picketing. But a partly organized, partly spontaneous campaign, using word of mouth and telephone networks, supplemented by the letters and editorial columns of the Afro-American (and on one occasion by some stink bombs), continued boycott activity on a somewhat lower level. The City-Wide Young People's Forum clearly had faith that more and more clerical jobs would be opened to Black youth, for it mounted a successful petition campaign for a "training course in salesmanship" at the evening school of Frederick Douglass High; 85 young people enrolled when the class started in February.(45)

These activities notwithstanding, a significant shift of focus took place from boycotting to litigation, as the official priority of the boycott movement became overturning the temporary injunction in court. The freedom movement in Baltimore had a long history, dating from the late nineteenth century, of taking battles into the courts. In recent years, though, the only really important civil rights litigation in the Baltimore area had been the defense of Euel Lee, led by the CP. The legal fight against the injunction, therefore, drew on a long-established tradition, but also learned from the more recent Euel Lee defense strategy. In a manner that echoed the practice of the Communist Party far more than its predecessors in the mainstream of the Baltimore Black freedom movement, the post-injunction jobs movement supplemented litigation with mass meetings and even demonstrations. Repeatedly, starting with the trial of Jacob Baggett before the injunction was served, the movement packed court proceedings with supporters who, though disciplined and proper, made their views known, sometimes to the apparent discomfort of movement lawyers.(46)

Another shift in the post-injunction movement was its relationship to the national Black freedom movement. Like the Baltimore-based protests over the lynching of George Armwood, the Buy Where You Can Work Movement attracted the attention of the national leadership of the NAACP. As a result, the national NAACP lawyers met and had limited consultations with the anti-injunction movements' lawyers, Forum legal advisor W. A. C. Hughes and his law partner, longtime Baltimore civil rights lawyer, Walter T. McGuinn. Behind the scenes, however, a more profound process was developing: Walter White, NAACP executive director, began corresponding with the Forum's President, Juanita Jackson, about resuscitating the Baltimore NAACP branch. On December 7, one day before the beginning of the Pennsylvania Avenue picketing, the NAACP Boosters, as Jackson and her circle chose to call themselves, met and 67 new NAACP members resulted, including many Forum activists, Forum adult advisors, figures from the boycott movement, and the Prophet Costonie himself. The relationship between the Forum leadership and the national NAACP office continued to deepen through early 1934.(47)

Boycott activists expected the temporary injunction to be quickly overruled and picketing to resume. However the litigation dragged on for months, with postponement following postponement. First presiding judge Stump, then Walter McGuinn, then store owner Aaron Samuelson became ill, each for several weeks. Then Judge Stump died. The case was passed back to Judge Owens (who issued the injunction in the first place). He set the hearing for March 23, postponed it a week, then postponed it until April 13. In the interim, the level of popular interest began to wane, and elements of the freedom movement became involved in other activities. Attorney W. A. C. Hughes, reflecting the boycott leadership's uneasiness, publicly complained about the last postponement.(48)

Finally, on May 24, 1934, the hearing ended and the judge rendered his decision. The main legal issue involved was whether the Buy Where You Can Work picketing was an economic dispute like a workers' strike, and thus legal under the recently passed Norris-LaGuardia Act, or whether it was a racial dispute. The movement lawyers claimed the former, the merchants' lawyers claimed the latter. In addition, the merchants' lawyers argued that the picketers had used force and intimidation. The movement's lawyers denied these charges. The judge agreed with the merchants that the pickets had used illegal coercion and made the injunction permanent. He went on to lecture the defendants before a court house packed with their supporters, calling them "colored persons of the highest types, well educated and essentially religious," reigning astonishment that they "could have been misled into believing that any cause . . . could justify their action," stating that the police should have arrested the pickets for disorderly conduct, and asserting that they were guilty of "criminal conspiracy." In response, the movement reignited.(49)

To build public support and to raise money for an appeal, the Citizens Committee held a series of three "monster mass meetings" during the month of June 1934, with attendance in the thousands. Hundreds of placards and thousands of handbills were distributed, and an extensive fundraising and educational drive was carried out on the streets, in churches, in fraternal organizations, through community organizations, and in local social clubs such as the Lucky Strike Pleasure Club and Maxine's Whist Club. Moderate pastors reportedly spoke out like raging militants. The regenerating Urban League and the still-stumbling local NAACP joined the City-Wide Young People's Forum in making financial donations, and the NAACP voted to become a co-litigant with the Citizens Committee. Significantly, the Forum's Juanita Jackson made an appeal directly to the national NAACP's Walter White for support from the financially-strapped national NAACP and received a pledge of a contribution of $100 for every $400 raised locally. Over $1,500, a very large sum for the depression-bound Black community, was raised in less than a month.(50)

The evolution of the boycott movement from its origins as a localized, largely spontaneous grouping of youth and church-goers led by a charismatic individual to a broad, multi-generational movement embracing many different types of community organizations was complete. Indeed, the change went even further, for in the months following the injunction, the Prophet Costonie was increasingly distanced from the leadership of the movement as authority was progressively transferred in the Community Committee presided over by Lillie Jackson, mother of Juanita and advisor to the Forum. Shortly after the injunction was made permanent, Costonie disappeared from Baltimore.(51)

Tensions between Costonie and the forces grouped around Lillie Jackson had grown for some time. Earlier concerns about "fake faith-healing" were combined with newer concerns about how Costonie supported himself, and increasingly some in leadership wanted to keep him away from the fundraising, fearing he would use the money for his own purposes. Doubts about the adequacy of Costonie's overall leadership emerged. A few days after the picketing ended, the Young Negroes Progressive League, an organization that had previously sponsored Costonie meetings, held a forum to discuss, "Is Prophet K. Costonie a False Messiah?" As police patrolled outside, Costonie, who was in hiding, made a surprise appearance and joined the debate over his leadership.(52)

Some activists got tired of what they considered the Prophet's political theatrics. Clarence Mitchell wrote in his Afro-American column on July 7, 1934 that he had long thought Costonie

had something up his sleeve, and most of it was cheap melodrama which involved bodyguards and harrowing tales of threats the prophet had received from various merchants. . . . He could tell his audiences how squad cars were following him, and that people were plotting against his life. He would always have two or three, what he called stool-pigeons ejected from meetings by strong-arm methods while gushing females and presumedly red-blooded men were awe struck at the daring of the prophet.(53)

And Juanita Jackson Mitchell, decades later, recalled another dimension of the split with Costonie:

[Costonie] and my mother matched up, except when he got to fooling around with the girls. The women got him run out of Baltimore. The real downfall of Costonie was when the preachers turned against him, because they had so many complaints about how fast and loose he was with young women--old and young--and the parents were complaining.(54)

To the surprise of the Forum leadership, when Costonie left Baltimore, several Forum women, including the sister of one of the Forum's leaders, went with him.(55)

There was, however, another, more programmatic issue: Costonie disagreed with the direction the movement was taking. He believed that the money being raised for the appeal could be better spent setting up Black businesses. Evidently he had little support for this idea, for even the Opportunity Makers' Club, the organization that he had created to train young men to take the jobs opened up by boycotts, rebelled and decided to donate its money to the appeal fund.(56)

Costonie had his defenders, as was reflected in the Afro-American letters column, but among the community's leading intellectual and political figures, only Ralph Matthews, playwright and Afro-American columnist, publicly agreed with Costonie. After Costonie left town, Matthews lashed out at the ingratitude of the "old Baltimoreans" who, he felt, allowed Costonie to take all the risks of building the movement, then took it over when it was successful and kicked the Prophet out.(57)

The controversies surrounding Costonie's departure throw light on some important transformations of the Baltimore boycott movement. Initially, in mid-1933 Costonie was able to catalyze the jobs campaign because his mystical, nationalistic outlook connected him to a social base in churches and among disaffected youth, while at the same time it coincided with certain traditional aspirations of Baltimore's freedom movement. By mid-1934, when, in large part due to his efforts, support for boycott and anti-injunction activities had broadened and included far more moderate forces, his outlook became less compatible with the movement as a whole. Indeed, as his lonely advocacy of raising money to finance Black business rather than anti-injunction litigation indicated, as the movement's base widened and as its connection to the national NAACP strengthened, imminent differences between Costonie's more thorough-going nationalism and the resurgent integrationist traditions among the more militant movement leadership sharpened. Also, by 1934 the broadened movement was ever more deeply based in the churches and in church-related groupings of the local Black community, and these forces were increasingly less tolerant of new revelations of Costonie's divergent moral practices.

Controversy over Costonie's conduct with women should not be understood simply as a moral or religious issue, however, but as a women's issue as well. Indeed this controversy points to some features of gender relations in the boycott movement. From the start of the alliance between Costonie and the Forum, some tension developed over the role of women in the movement. As Juanita Jackson Mitchell later pointed out, Costonie "had 80 young men he was training to take the jobs they won, but the Forum was working for women as well as men." Subsequently, during the Pennsylvania Avenue campaign, the demand was specifically for jobs for "salesgirls." Not surprisingly, the Forum was characterized both by a large contingent of women in its leadership (in 1934, 10 of 15 executive board members, and 8 of 11 heads of standing committees were female) and a conscious effort to speak to women's issues in its educational programming.(58)

Moreover, it is clear that as the movement developed, Black women played an increasingly important role. For example, the two most important leaders of the movement beside Costonie--indeed, who ultimately eclipsed Costonie--were the mother-daughter team of Lillie and Juanita Jackson. Also, the organization most often mentioned along with the Forum as a key coalition participant (and along with the Forum, the only organizations named in the injunctions) was the Baltimore Housewives' League, with its reported membership of 2,000 Black women. A list of Citizens' Committee members in early December, reveals 25% female participation on that body, and of the 26 individuals specifically named in the injunction against picketing, 18 were women.(59)

All of this suggests that Costonie's "womanizing" was probably as much an affront to what might be called an implicit feminism, sometimes clothed in religious ideology, as it was to religious ideology proper. This implicit feminism grew as a force in the Baltimore Black freedom movement through the 1930s and 1940s.(60)

The mobilization for funds to appeal the permanent injunction was both the broadest and also the last mass activity of the Baltimore Buy Where You Can Work movement. With the money raised, the Citizen's Committee attorneys filed the appeal and the process continued for another year until, on April 10, 1935, the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court ruling and continued the injunction against picketing (though on a narrower legal basis). By this time, there was no money for further appeals, and the interest of the Baltimore movement had shifted elsewhere. No further litigation in the Baltimore case followed. Ralph Matthews, who bemoaned the treatment Costonie received before he left Baltimore, had warned nearly a year before in the Afro-American that the appeal would come to nothing, and that the movement should have worked to continue the boycott by other means instead. But in fact the boycott was carried on spontaneously to some degree, and the employment practices of many Northwest stores, especially the chain stores, had been substantially desegregated. It would be years before all the stores in Black Baltimore neighborhoods had a staff that accurately reflected the ethnic composition of the surrounding community, but this particular bastion of segregationism had been breached beyond repair.(61)

Interestingly, the New Negro Alliance (NNA) of Washington, D.C., which coordinated its own activities to some degree with the boycott movement in Baltimore, was also served with an injunction against picketing in early 1934. After an appeals court upheld the injunction against the NNA, this organization was able to pursue a further appeal to the Supreme Court under the direction of NAACP attorney Charles Houston and NNA member William Hastie. In 1938, the Supreme Court reversed this injunction, deciding consumer boycott picketing was legal under the Norris-LaGuardia Act, and former participants in the Baltimore boycott movement celebrated this victory as their own.(62)

By 1938, though, the Forum and the Afro-American had successfully led a process to reorganize the Baltimore NAACP as a viable organization under the presidency of Forum advisor Lillie Jackson, who began her 40-year career as Baltimore's most important freedom movement leader during the jobs boycott. By 1938, the growing NAACP branch--which for the first time ever was becoming a truly mass-based organization--was involved in challenging Jim Crow in jobs and education in Baltimore and throughout Maryland. It strategy was two-fold: a legal attack, coordinated with the national NAACP attorneys, Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall (by then well on the road to becoming the nation's leading civil right litigator), accompanied by mass mobilization. Also by 1938, the Forum had bequeathed Juanita Jackson to the national NAACP office, where, drawing on her Forum experience, she had organized the national NAACP Youth Movement. And in 1938, Juanita Jackson married the Forum's former vice president, Clarence Mitchell, who was just beginning his illustrious career in the national freedom movement. Finally, the movement by 1938 had become more complex, with the Urban League actively organizing Black workers in the skilled trades, the Congress of Industrial Organization struggling to find its way in Jim Crow Baltimore as an integrated industrial union movement, and the National Negro Council working to establish a presence. In short, while legal obstacles to jobs boycotting had been removed, the main interests of the Baltimore movement in 1938 were elsewhere.(63)

IV. Final Considerations

Social analysts and historians--both contemporary and more recent--have been greatly concerned with both the class and racial implications of the jobs boycott movements. How does the Baltimore Buy Where You Can Work movement relate to these concerns?

On the question of social class, the general consensus of commentators has been that jobs boycotts were middle-class or "petty-bourgeois" movements in their aims, leadership, and, to a large extent, social base. As Gunnar Myrdal put it, the jobs boycott "runs on a petty middle class racial basis. . . ." The intent of such arguments is often to distinguish boycott movements from (and the meaning of these class categories is far from universal) more working-class movements of the era, most notably labor unions. Clearly the consensus view that the jobs boycotts were petty bourgeois corresponds to some degree to the realities of the Baltimore movement. The core social base and the youth leadership of the campaign were educated and probably expected to become professionals or business people; the adult leadership largely came from the small and medium business and professional ranks. However, biographical information on a scattering of Forum leaders suggests that a significant portion of the youth came from families with at least one wage-laboring, working-class parent. Also, whatever their aspirations, or the "white-collar" aura surrounding the clerical jobs they were fighting for, these jobs can only be understood as working-class service sector positions. Moreover the overwhelming support the boycott received had to be in large part working-class, given the overwhelmingly working-class social composition of the Baltimore African-American community--some 88.3% of those employed in 1930 were in clearly proletarian jobs.(64)

Finally, the common notion that jobs boycotting was, to quote Meier and Rudwick, "imbued with a petit-bourgeois black business philosophy," demands qualification, at least for Baltimore. Although, part of the leadership, including both Costonie and Carl Murphy of the Afro-American, occasionally linked the demand for jobs with desires to expand the African-American-owned business sector, more frequently the campaign was defined as fight against segregation in employment and against the indignities of dealing only with white clerks in a Black neighborhood. It is difficult to understand why either position should be characterized as petty bourgeois; indeed, the latter can easily be seen as a demand for respect by working-class consumers. In fact, one of the outstanding characteristics of jobs boycotts is that they blended labor demands (jobs) with consumer demands, thus combining what are often seen as two separate spheres of popular protest activity.(65)

Although this question deserves more discussion, the argument here is that the class character of the Baltimore boycott (and likely of other boycotts), was a mixture of middle-class elements and working-class elements. After all, a major legacy of the Buy Where You Can Work Movement is that it mobilized a preponderantly working-class community to support mass direct action--centered on picket lines, the foremost tactic of the worker's movement--for virtually the first time. Simple comparisons of working-class Black activism in labor unions and middle-class activism in the community will not do.

It is also important to look at the Baltimore boycott movement in terms of questions of race and ethnicity. One of the greatest fears of contemporary critics of jobs boycotting was that this tactic would deepen the alienation of the white community from the Black community. The specter of white business people uniting and retaliating for a boycott in one neighborhood by firing all of their African-American employees citywide was repeatedly raised. More left-wing commentators were apprehensive that jobs boycotts would isolate Black workers from their natural allies in the white working class. As the above account shows, these fears were not significantly realized in Baltimore. Nevertheless, two facts about racial-ethnic relations and the Baltimore boycott do stand out: 1) few whites were involved in it, and 2) it strained relationships between the Black community and at least some sections of the Baltimore Jewish community.(66)

It must be emphasized that the Baltimore boycott was almost an entirely African-American movement which received little support from whites or from organizations with white memberships. The main exception to this was the interracial Baltimore Communist Party. However, the CP's support was not unequivocal. Like the national CP, the local party was ambivalent about jobs boycotting for fear of dividing Black and white workers. White CP member Bernard Ades, the Euel Lee defense campaign lawyer, spoke at a mass rally during the Pennsylvania Avenue boycott. While extending his solidarity to the boycotters, Ades asked that the white workers in the Pennsylvania Avenue stores not be antagonized. He further proposed that the movement fight for shorter hours at full pay for all workers in the stores, thereby opening jobs for Black clerks without firing any white clerks. The Afro-American reported that "Although the audience applauded, many murmurs could be heard against his proposal." In any case, the Baltimore CP was small, it resources were committed elsewhere, and it played only the most marginal role in the boycott.(67)

Apart from the Communist Party, white involvement was pretty much limited to the young, Socialist Party-affiliated leadership circles of the recently-organized Peoples' Unemployment League, who belatedly offered support after the temporary injunction was made permanent in April 1934. Also there was an unnamed white philanthropist who matched every $1.50 raised by the anti-injunction campaign with a dollar of his own. The dearth of white support for the boycott movement contrasts dramatically to the rather prominent roles played by liberal and progressive whites in the reaction to the Armwood lynching that occurred just as the boycott movement was moving into its direct action phase. This contrast is probably explained by the fear--accentuated by the severity of Jim Crow in Baltimore--by many white liberals of direct action and of anything but the most blandly gradualist tactics.(68)

The other racial-ethnic issue to be raised about the Pennsylvania Avenue phase of the boycott movement is that it did resulted in heightened ethnic conflict between some Black protesters and some members of Baltimore's Jewish community. The simple reason for this is that the great majority of the white small store owners in the Northwest Baltimore Black community were Jewish. Particularly after the victory over the large chain stores, the main target of Buy Where You Can Work movement shifted from white commercial capital (often large commercial capital) to small white Jewish capital. In the stories, columns, and editorials of the Afro-American, the Pennsylvania Avenue store owners were frequently identified as Jews or Hebrews rather than whites (one columnist even wrote of "Jooish" merchants), indicating the notion that their Jewishness was somehow related to their discriminatory behavior. After the Northwest Businessmen's Association stopped the mass picketing with their injunction, a wave of anti-Jewish feeling broke out among movement forces. Speaking of the reaction of boycott activists at the time, Juanita Jackson Mitchell later remarked, "And if those people didn't say something about those Jewish merchants. They were the ones who took us to court and stopped us."(69)

The issue here, as in similar situations, is complicated. The most important point to make is that the Jewish storekeepers in the Black community did practice racial discrimination against African Americans in their employment practices. But their businesses were only concentrated in Northwest Baltimore because they suffered ethnic discrimination as Jews in other areas of the city, and not because they were particularly prone to exploiting and discriminating against African Americans. Nonetheless, this fact was sometimes ignored in the boycott movement. Hence a kind of anti-Semitism recently described by Henry Louis Gates as "common among African-American communities in the 1930s and 1940s, which followed in many ways a familiar pattern of clientelistic hostility toward the neighborhood vendor or landlord" arose during the Baltimore jobs boycott--as it did in jobs boycotts across the country. As a secondary element, difference in religious culture between Christian Blacks and white Jews was an additional aggravation to ethnic relations; of all the delays to the appeal hearing over the temporary injunction, the one that seemed to anger the boycott forces most was when the judge the delayed the trial for Passover. Key elements of the Black freedom movement including Juanita Jackson understood these complications, but any effort that might have been made to oppose the particularly anti-Jewish sentiments in the movement rank-and-file was made more difficult by the fact that as the boycott movement had few white allies, it also had few Jewish allies, even among those progressive Jews who often supported civil rights activities. From this point on, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Black-Jewish ethnic tensions would be a periodically recurring theme as the Black freedom movement advanced.(70)

It makes sense to end this article where it began, with the Prophet Kiowa Costonie. In some ways, his legacy to the Baltimore movement seems small. He was, for example, never able to build a distinct base of support for himself, ideologically or organizationally. Before Costonie's appearance, no Black nationalist tendency of significance existed in Baltimore; even in its international heyday in the mid-1920s, the Garvey movement had been small in this border city. During the Prophet's stay in the city, no real Black nationalist tendency, like the various forms of post-Garvey Black nationalism present in some more Northern cities, emerged in Baltimore. And the disappearance of the Prophet Costonie from Baltimore was, simultaneously, the disappearance from the city Baltimore of explicit Black nationalism as a serious social force until 1960s. Costonie himself evidently left in search of greener ideological fields. As criticism mounted in January 1934, Costonie proclaimed he had invitations to go elsewhere, especially to Philadelphia. Sometime after he left Baltimore, he re-emerged as an activist in New York and in 1935 he was reported to be in Brooklyn organizing a group called the League of the Darker Races of the World.(71)

The Prophet Costonie, the "outsider," nonetheless made a lasting contribution in Baltimore, precisely because he emboldened the community-based freedom movement that was already re-emerging in the early Depression years, helped it broaden its active base by drawing in an ever wider spectrum of existing community forces, and pragmatically encouraged it to use all of its available community-based resources. Costonie also led it to engage in confrontational direct action--something that was not an important tradition within the local movement before he appeared, but that would serve it well in the future. Moreover, while he failed to stimulate an openly nationalist tendency in the freedom movement, he did popularize the demand that only African Americans be employed in businesses in the community. This is an overtly anti-integrationalist demand, one, significantly, that the Afro-American as the de facto carrier of the main traditions of the movement did not support. The Black freedom movement in the United States in the era of legal segregation always faced the dilemma that demands for immediate improvement often accepted and even reinforced segregation, while preferred demands for integration were often unrealizable. Costonie was unwilling to be paralyzed by this dilemma, and it was partly because of him that henceforth the most militant elements of the Baltimore movement, though remaining pro-integration, would not be either. In this sense, he contributed a nationalistic tinge to the movement's political culture that was cultivated even in the officially integrationist, mass-based NAACP-led movement of the late 1930s and the 1940s.(72)

Department of History and Philosophy Troy, NY 12180

ENDNOTES

This article is dedicated to the memory of Juanita Jackson Mitchell, who passed away last year after 61 years of leadership in the freedom struggle in Baltimore and nationally. I want to thank Teresa Meade, Ronald J. Grele, Daniel J. Walkowitz, and, posthumously, Juanita Jackson Mitchell for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also want to thank Russell Sage College for its support through Summer Faculty Grants in 1991 and 1992.

1. Afro-American, 17 June 1933. For testimonials to Costonie's healing powers, see Afro-American, 24 June, 23 September 1933.

2. Interview with Juanita Jackson Mitchell by Andor Skotnes, (session 3) 5 August 1987 (in author's possession); Afro-American, 17 June 1933.

3. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, "The Origins of Nonviolent Direct Action in Afro-American Protest: A Note on Historical Discontinuities," in their Along the Color Line: Explorations in the Black Experience (Urbana, 1976), pp. 379, 314. Some key recent works that do suggestively explore the freedom struggles of the 1930s include Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein. "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement," The Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 763-85; Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia, 1983); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, 1983); Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge, 1979); Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks; the Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: the Depression Decade (New York, 1978); Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930-1945 (Chicago, 1969); Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana, 1985); Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport, CT, 1970); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynchings, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia, 1980).

4. Meier and Rudwick, "Origins of Nonviolent Direct Action," pp. 315-16; Ira De A. Reid, "The Negro in the American Economic System," (Unpublished manuscript, Carnegie-Myrdal Collection, Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture, New York, 1940), p. 161; Bunche quoted in Sitkoff, A New Deal, p. 263. Some jobs boycotts, such as the Harlem Boycott, have been addressed in broader works, others have received passing mention. The main studies that focus on jobs boycotts are: Meier and Rudwick, "Origins of Nonviolent Direct Action"; William Jones, "A History and Appraisal of the Economic Consequences of Negro Trade Boycotts," (Unpublished masters thesis, Atlanta University, 1940); Gary Jerome Hunter, "'Don't Buy from Where You Can't Work': Black Urban Boycott Movements during the Depression" (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1977).

5. Korstad and Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost," p. 811.

6. Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 1940), pp. 73-85;