A New Deal for All?

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 World War II. Adding to the growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights struggle, he argues that these "border state" movements helped resuscitate and transform the national freedom and labor struggles. In the wake of the Crash of 1929, the freedom and workers' movements had to rebuild themselves, often in new forms. In the early 30s, both the Communists and Socialists in Baltimore, with their deepening commitments to antiracism, launched a number of racially-integrated unemployed, workers control, and social justice initiatives. And 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 30s, 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, including the Civil Rights movement, to come.

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