Maurice Braverman

area, where Braverman opened a grocery store Maurice Louis Braverman was born to a Jewish family in Washington, DC, on February 1, 1916. His family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, when he was five years old. They lived above their family's grocery store on Jackson Street in South Baltimore. {{cite news In 1933, he received a BA from City College of New York (CCNY). He opened a grocery store in East Baltimore. In 1938, he started law school at the Baltimore School of Law; he drove taxi cabs to help pay tuition. In 1941, he received his law degree. (During law school, study of the Sacco & Vanzetti case aroused "civil libertarian feelings.") A 1935 map of Baltimore City records Maurice L. Braverman as a resident of "3817 Lewin Ave., Baltimore, MD District 5, Ward 28." {{cite web {{cite web {{cite book ==Career==

(1912), where Braverman had his law office Braverman was in civil service in several positions from 1939 to 1940. He worked in a post office in Baltimore for a few months. He worked in the U.S. War Department for a few months, and worked in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Hiss Case (1950) On August 26, 1948, Braverman appeared as counsel for Mr. and Mrs. William Rosen, involved in the sale of a Ford automobile once belonging to Alger Hiss during House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings that were following the allegations of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. On July 11, 1951, Mary Stalcup Markward, an FBI undercover agent in the Communist Party, testified. (After consulting earlier in the year with HUAC, the Party heard and expelled her in February 1951. ==Personal and death==

Braverman married Jeanette Block, with whom he had two daughters (one died in 1991); they divorced. In 1981, he married Myrna Lapides (who also had a daughter from a previous marriage). In 1985, they moved to Israel. In 2000, they returned to Maryland and lived in Elkton. Braverman also had a granddaughter. Braverman attributed his arrest and conviction to his calling FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover a "fag" on a tapped telephone line. From at least 1953 through 1972, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Attorney General noted the existence of a "Maurice Braverman Defense Committee." By 1972, the Government had concluded that "Pursuant to section 12(i) of Executive Order 10450 as amended by Executive Order No. 11605, issued July 2, 1971, 36 P.R. 12831, the Attorney General, by counsel, petitions this Board for a determination that the Maurice Braverman Defense Committee has ceased to exist... The last known address of the above-named organization was Box 2616, Arlington Station, Baltimore 15, MD". {{cite web {{cite web {{cite web In the 1970s, Braverman became associated with the East Bank Havurah. {{cite news Braverman died age 86 of pneumonia in Elkton, Maryland, on March 25, 2002. Myrna Lapides Braverman, a longtime philatelist, died on August 16, 2013. {{cite news {{cite news (At present, there is no known relationship between Maurice Braverman and Harry Braverman (1920–1976), a Marxist economist based in New York City.) ==Legacy==

Communist Party of Maryland (on stamp of USSR in 1971) spoke to the Party's Maryland chapter. In 1991, the Baltimore Sun ran an article that assessed the state of the Communist Party of Maryland at that time: Baltimore's Communist Party traces it origins to a strike against the B&O Railroad in 1877... In the 1930s, Baltimore was designated by national party leaders as District 4 and was made up of about 20 "cells"... The party focused its recruiting on companies with many blue-collar workers... Often, national leaders such as Earl Browder and William Z. Foster were guest speakers. The party held rallies... and fielded candidates in local elections... After World War II... most of Baltimore's communists went underground. They maintained low-profile headquarters, successively, on Eutaw Street, Franklin Street and in the 200 block Liberty Street... The communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early '50s were not among the city's shining hours. In 1949, complying with laws requiring loyalty oaths and federal acts that effectively outlawed the party, city, state and federal authorities began to arrest known communists and to sentence them to jail, often for minor or fabricated crimes. Among those who served time were Maurice Braverman, the party's lawyer; Leroy H. Wood, its treasurer and George A. Meyers, a long-time local and national party leader. In 1952, Meyers spent 30 days in jail for refusing to name others in the party. One Evening Sun headline of the time: "FBI Informer Calls Meyers Key State Red." What was left of the membership lacked the resources to carry on. Postwar prosperity and ideological differences with Soviet communism proved too much for Baltimore's communists, and the local party all but disappeared...1970s, and winning restatement in Maryland (1974) and federal courts (1975). ==See also==

• Library of Congress – photo of Maurice Braverman with client Harold L. Round before HUAC (1951) • The Washington Post photo of Maurice Braverman (1974) • UW Oshkosh Today – Harold L. Round (2008) • Braverman v. Bar Association of Baltimore