Created in 1910 as a voluntary-service agency, the Urban League constituted one of the major civil rights organizations in the United States and became known as the social service agency of African Americans.
Headquartered in New York City, the Urban League brought together black and white members in an effort to promote economic self-reliance, equality, and civil rights for all African Americans. Working as a nonprofit, nonpartisan, community-based movement, the Urban League targeted education, employment, and economic stability as the main avenues to secure equal participation in mainstream society for all black Americans. With offices at the local, state, and national level, the Urban League used a variety of programs, including advocacy, policy analysis, and community mobilization, to carry out its mission.
To help further its goals, the Urban League relied on scientific social work, civil rights techniques, and pressure group tactics to open various employment and educational opportunities that had been closed to African Americans. With a majority of its members living in the northern and western states, the Urban League focused the greatest part of its efforts on the North and West.
In the years following World War II, African Americans feared a loss of economic and social gains made during the conflict. The unemployment rates among African Americans in the cities, always high, began to rise in the postwar years, and many African-American veterans were unable to find work. Concerned about the threat of urban racial violence amid job discrimination, the Urban League—led by Lester Granger, a league veteran and prominent newspaper columnist—prodded the federal government to take a more active role in helping blacks achieve equality.
Driven by a desire to protect and expand job opportunities for black Americans, the Urban League sought the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, which might guarantee that African Americans could share in policymaking and program planning while promoting unemployment insurance for domestic and agricultural workers. It also pushed for the integration of unions, using its own Industrial Relations Laboratory to secure fair employment opportunities for all black American workers. In 1948, in part because of Urban League lobbying, President Harry S. Truman banned employment discrimination in federal government agencies. In addition, efforts made by the Urban League during the war, such as the establishment of a black youth training program designed to provide young workers with the skills required to obtain blue-collar jobs, expanded in the postwar years in the form of career conferences held on the campuses of traditionally African-American colleges to encourage employment in white-collar positions.
The Urban League advocated change in other areas as well. In 1952, the group created the Office of Housing Activities to deal with discriminatory housing practices. Having long supported the removal of racially restrictive covenants from all federally assisted housing, the Urban League now acted to stop racially discriminatory company-built housing. The Urban League lobbied intensively both U. S. Steel and the Levittown Corporation, companies that barred black residents from living in their housing developments.
By the late 1950s, the Urban League began to suffer from internal divisions. Its critics argued that the group had done little more than assist urban black Americans in acquiring low-skill, low-paying jobs and housing in traditionally black neighborhoods. Granger came under increasingly heavy attack by more militant members of the organization, who called for more aggressive action, much like that of other civil rights organizations of the period. Granger, however, remained focused on achieving African-American self-reliance by working through social programs, insisting that the emphasis of the Urban League remained that of getting people to work and not of engaging in violent protest.
Concerned with alienating white policymakers and supporters of the Urban League, Granger limited the organization’s involvement in direct action and nonviolent protest. As a result, other civil rights groups became more important to many African Americans than the Urban League. The image of the organization began to change when Whitney M. Young replaced Lester Granger as president in 1961. Chosen because of his more aggressive style of leadership, Young led the league to become an active partner with other civil rights organizations.
Support for the Urban League grew under the direction of Young due in large part to the development of its 1964 Voter Education Project. Using a grassroots approach, league members were effective in educating and motivating black Americans to register and vote. Meanwhile, Young shifted the group’s focus from its long-held goal of promoting equality of opportunity to eradicating the gap between the economic and social opportunities available to black and white citizens. In an effort to bring democracy and hope to poor, urban areas, the group supported the establishment of economic institutions by helping to develop African American-owned businesses, cooperatives, consumer unions, and franchises.
In later years, the Urban League expanded its social service efforts and supported new housing, health care, and education initiatives. Additional emphasis was placed on reducing teen pregnancy and combating crime in African-American communities.
Further reading: Jesse Thomas Moore, A Search for Equality: The National Urban League, 1910-1961 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981); Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban League, 1910-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
—Caryn Neumann
World History
