Founded in New York in 1911 through the consolidation of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York (1906), the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (1910), the National Urban League quickly established itself as the principal agency to serve as a resource for the black, urban population. An interracial organization committed to integration, it relied on tools of negotiation, persuasion, education, and investigation to accomplish its economic and social goals. The League was founded by Mrs. Ruth Standish Baldwin, the widow of a railroad magnate and philanthropist, and Dr. George Edmund Haynes, the first African American to receive a doctorate from Columbia University. The National Urban League was concerned chiefly with gaining jobs for blacks. It placed workers in the private sector, attacked the color line in organized labor, sponsored programs of vocational guidance and job training, and sought for the establishment of governmental policies of equal employment opportunity.
During the Great Depression, the National Urban League lobbied for the inclusion of African Americans in federal relief and recovery programs. It worked to improve urban conditions through boycotts against firms refusing to employ blacks, pressures on schools to expand vocational opportunities, and a drive to admit blacks into previously segregated labor unions. During the 1940s, the league pressed for an end to discrimination in defense industries and for the desegregation of the armed forces.
As much concerned with social welfare as with employment, the Urban League conducted scientific investigations of conditions among urban blacks as a basis for practical reform. It trained the first corps of professional black social workers and placed them in community service positions. It worked for decent housing, recreational facilities, and health and welfare services, and it counseled African Americans new to the cities on behavior, dress, sanitation, health, and homemaking.
In the 1960s the Urban League supplemented its traditional social service approach with a more activist commitment to civil rights. It embraced direct action and community organization and sponsored leadership training and voter-education projects. Though the League's tax-exempt status did not permit protest activities, activists such as A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. used the group's headquarters to help organize massive popular demonstrations in support of the enforcement of civil rights and economic justice, including the March on Washington of 1963 and the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. The League's executive director, Whitney M. Young Jr., called for a domestic Marshall Plan, a ten-point plan designed to close the economic gap between white and black Americans, which influenced the War on Poverty of the Johnson administration.
Since the 1960s the Urban League has continued working to improve urban life, expanding into community programs that provide services such as health care, housing and community development, job training and placement, and AIDS education. It remains involved in national politics and frequently reports on issues such as equal employment and welfare reform.
Bibliography
Hamilton, Charles V. The Struggle for Political Equality. New York: National Urban League, 1976.
Moore, Jesse Thomas, Jr. A Search for Equality: The National Urban League, 1910–1961. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981.
Parris, Guichard, and Lester Brooks. Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.
Wiess, Nancy J. The National Urban League, 1910–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
———. Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
