National Urban League

Created in 1910, the National Urban League (NUL), a national organization in the United States, was established to address the issues affecting African Americans as many were relocating from southern towns to northern industrialized cities. Migrants carried hopes of a better quality of life, free from the institutionalized racism of the South, but found instead harsh living conditions, predatory attitudes, and unfair competition for the resources necessary to survive urban reality. In contrast to southern towns, the North's diversity prompted intense cultural competition among the workforce. But diversity also provided the opportunity to create an interracial organization. Ruth Baldwin, a white widow of a railroad tycoon, and George Hayne, a black Ph.D., together established the NUL under the name Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes. From its start, the NUL was a pragmatic organization, focused on education and providing services for daily survival in northern cities.

Today, the NUL has 105 affiliated centers and emphasizes empowerment efforts in education and youth, economy, health and quality of life, civic engagement and leadership, and civil rights and racial [Page 1013]justice. The NUL approaches its goals through direct services, programming, advocacy, and research, sometimes acting as an incubator and sometimes maintaining its own programming. An example of the latter is the Young Professionals Network, which encourages young African Americans to take lead roles within the NUL, in the civil rights movement, and in the larger society. Other efforts include the National Council of Urban League Guilds, which organizes community services, and the Black Executive Exchange, which invites executives to visit historically black colleges and universities to give students information about achieving success in corporate America.

In its early stages, the National Urban League's focus on social welfare, with heavy emphasis on education understood as individual change and improved work habits, received criticism from those who support radical political strategies. The NUL's emphasis on workforce preparation and its funding from corporations also led to concerns that corporate interests, rather than service recipients, were driving the organization. Even as the organization began to focus on small-scale systems reform, they received criticism for ignoring the underlying causes of inequality. These criticisms became visible in the public tension displayed between the NAACP and the NUL. The former consisted predominantly of black ministers who sided with the philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois and tended toward more direct actions, such as protesting for African American rights. The NUL was formed primarily by educators, led by the example of Booker T. Washington, and focused on individual improvement and assimilation.

Over the years, with new leadership, as situated within changing sociopolitical contexts, the NUL took on a more assertive role by moving beyond job training toward advocating deeper structural changes. These changes included early 1900s boycotts of companies that refused to hire black workers, lobbying the federal government, initiatives to include blacks in New Deal economic recovery programs, and persuading labor unions to admit black members. During World War II, the NUL focused attention on fair treatment of African Americans in wartime industrial environments and within the armed forces.

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