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Eben Miller, Andor Skotnes. A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1548–1549, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1548a
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A New Deal for All? explores the rise and consolidation of both the labor movement and the black freedom struggle in Baltimore during the Great Depression. With a title that echoes Harvard Sitkoff's classic, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (1978), this book locates the roots of the post–World War II movement for black equality in the radical ferment of the 1930s. Doing so, it contributes to the body of scholarship illuminating the early years of the “long civil rights movement” by investigating how the industrial and segregated conditions of Depression-era Baltimore affected the area's movements for workers' and African American rights that eventually coalesced under the aegis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
A New Deal for All? is organized both chronologically and thematically, with roughly equal treatment given to the local labor and civil rights movements. Several chapters are devoted, respectively, to the efforts of Baltimore's communists and socialists, who, energized by the economic calamity of the Great Depression, sought to galvanize the city's proletariat. Attention is devoted, too, to the garment, maritime, and steel industries. The chapters on the labor movement in Baltimore culminate with an assessment of the impact of the CIO, which emphasized organizing black workers. Likewise, several chapters detail the endeavors of a number of leading figures and organizations in the local black freedom struggle. A handful stand out, among them Carl Murphy, editor of the Baltimore Afro-American; Lillie Jackson, president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP during the latter half of the 1930s; and the City-Wide Young People's Forum, a sui generis civil rights group that eventually provided a model for the national NAACP's Youth Councils. By the end of the 1930s the regional black freedom movement was largely influenced by the Baltimore NAACP, one of the largest branches in the nation at the end of the Great Depression. Among the book's distinctions is its use of oral history, and the interviews Andor Skotnes conducted especially enliven descriptions of the people and events that comprised the Baltimore freedom movement.
