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An interracial social service organization that attempts to obtain full participation in American society for African Americans through lobbying, research, and direct social services.
Unlike organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), which has been judged by how successfully it has fought for blacks' civil and political rights, the National Urban League (NUL) has had less measurable goals. Since its founding in 1911, the organization has used the tools of scientific social work to offer programs to help African Americans. The NUL originally provided direct services to African Americans who had migrated from the rural South to northern cities. Later in the century, as social conditions changed, the organization increased its scope. It undertook sociological research that disputed commonly held misconceptions about African American inferiority; it began to lobby businesses, labor unions, and the government; and it embraced direct protest during the Civil Rights Movement as a means of gaining greater
social and economic participation for African Americans.
At its inception, the NUL modeled its social services on white charitable
organizations of the day such as settlement houses, charitable agencies, and
immigrant aid societies and adapted them to blacks' needs. As many African
Americans moved North during the Great Migration, the NUL worked through
local affiliates to help them adjust to urban life. The affiliates taught basic skills such as behavior, dress, sanitation, health, and homemaking. The NUL also sponsored community centers, clinics, kindergartens, day care, and summer camps. League workers provided individual care to African Americans in a range of areas, including juvenile delinquency, truancy, and marital adjustment.
The Great Migration increased demands on the NUL, and the organization soon
had affiliates in nearly every industrial city in the United States. The NUL began offering vocational training to immigrants, urging businesses to hire blacks, and attempting to persuade unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to accept black members. The NUL achieved its main aim of improving employment opportunities for blacks, but such gains were temporary. At the war's end, returning soldiers put many blacks out of work again.
During the Great Depression, the NUL broadened its scope still more under the leadership of Lester B. Granger. While continuing to offer vocational training and social services to urban blacks, the NUL sought to persuade the federal government to include blacks in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs. The organization lobbied the federal government to end discrimination in allocating government benefits. During World War II, the NUL fought to desegregate wartime employment and the armed forces, supporting A. Philip Randolph's plan for a march on Washington. In exchange for Randolph's calling off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order (E.O.) 8802, which barred discrimination in defense industries and in federal agencies, and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was responsible for implementing E.O. 8802.
The NUL also sought to shape public and private opinion through its research. Its sociological studies - published independently and, from 1923 to 1949, in its journal, Opportunity - took an explicitly scientific approach to social problems. NUL leaders criticized the NAACP's journal, the Crisis, believing it to be too "subjective." Opportunity also published black writers and artists such as Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen.
In the 1960s, under Whitney M. Young Jr., the NUL expanded its traditional
social service approach by strengthening its commitment to civil rights. It embraced direct action, promoted community organization, and sponsored leadership development and voter education and registration projects. It helped organize two important events of the Civil Rights Movement: the March on Washington in 1963 and the Poor People's Campaign in 1968. Toward the end of the 1960s, the NUL attempted to revitalize ghettos by calling for a domestic Marshall Plan.
Following Whitney Young's death in 1971, Vernon Jordan became president of the NUL. Jordan helped to begin programs in health, housing, education, and job training. In 1975 the NUL began to publish a journal, The Urban League Review, and began issuing an annual report, The State of Black America. In 1982, Jordan was succeeded by John Jacobs.
When the federal government cut social programs in the 1980s, the NUL responded by emphasizing self-help and seeking solutions to new and continuing problems facing African Americans, including high rates of teen pregnancy, families headed by single women, declining quality of public schools, and crime. Under Hugh Price, who has served as NUL president since 1994, the Urban League has tackled the consequences of welfare "reform," the roll back of affirmative action programs, and the persistence of racial discrimination and exclusion in the work place. Price, a communications veteran, has been a strong national voice on behalf of economic opportunity and equality.
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