A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore by Andor Skotnes
本书以巴尔的摩为缩影，考察1930年代美国激进分子、民权活动家和工会成员的斗争与成就，揭示了劳工、非裔美国人和激进运动的历史，适合研究大萧条时期社会运动的学者阅读。
Reviewed by: A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore by Andor Skotnes Ranjit S. Dighe Andor Skotnes. A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. xv + 318 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-535911, $26.95 (paper). 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 [End Page 475] 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...