As a border city Baltimore made an ideal arena to push for
change during the civil rights movement. It was a city in which all
forms of segregation and racism appeared vulnerable to attack by
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's
methods. If successful in Baltimore, the rest of the nation might
follow with progressive and integrationist reforms. The Baltimore
branch of the NAACP was one of the first chapters in the nation and
was the largest branch in the nation by 1946. The branch undertook
various forms of civil rights activity from 1914 through the 1940s
that later were mainstays of the 1960s movement. Nonviolent
protest, youth activism, economic boycotts, marches on state
capitols, campaigns for voter registration, and pursuit of
anti-lynching cases all had test runs. Remarkably, Baltimore's
NAACP had the same branch president for thirty-five years starting
in 1935, a woman, Lillie M. Jackson. Her work highlights gender
issues and the social and political transitions among the changing
civil rights groups. In "Borders of Equality," Lee Sartain
evaluates her leadership amid challenges from radicalized youth
groups and the Black Power Movement. Baltimore was an urban
industrial center that shared many characteristics with the North,
and African Americans could vote there. The city absorbed a large
number of black economic migrants from the South, and it exhibited
racial patterns that made it more familiar to Southerners. It was
one of the first places to begin desegregating its schools in
September 1954 after the "Brown" decision, and one of the first to
indicate to the nation that race was not simply a problem for the
Deep South. Baltimore's history and geography make it a perfect
case study to examine the NAACP and various phases of the civil
rights struggle in the twentieth century
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