The Urban League

Abstract

White and Black progressives established the National Urban League (NUL) in October 1911 to meet the growing social service needs of inner-city African Americans. Under the leadership of the league’s first executive secretary, George Edmund Haynes, the NUL established its core mission and tactical posture while developing league affiliates in cities across the country. Urban League staff committed themselves to building alliances across racial and class lines to promote Black economic advancement and ensure that African Americans had access to adequate housing and health care. These services became all the more imperative as hundreds of thousands of rural Black southerners made their way to cities during the Great Migration. Urban Leaguers welcomed migrant newcomers, helped them find lodging and employment, provided vocational training courses, sponsored programs to improve health and hygiene, and performed a variety of other functions that collectively provided a social safety system in Black neighborhoods. While retaining the league’s core social service mission, Urban Leaguers broadened their civil rights goals over time as new possibilities emerged. During the mid-1930s, as the Congress of Industrial Organizations formed with the goal of unionizing all industrial workers, regardless of race or ethnicity, the league developed workers’ councils across the nation to facilitate the entry of Black workers into the labor movement. Urban Leaguers joined the March on Washington Movement during World War II to protest discriminatory hiring practices at industrial firms with defense contracts. Later, the league served as one of the “big five” civil rights organizations orchestrating the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Through these eras and up to the early 21st century, the Urban League has retained its original commitment to expanding economic opportunities for Black Americans and improving health and wellness in inner-city neighborhoods.