The National Urban League

Established in 1910, The Urban League is the nation's oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream. Today, the National Urban League, headquartered in New York City, spearheads the non-partisan efforts of its local affiliates. There are over 100 local affiliates of the National Urban League located in 35 states and the District of Columbia providing direct services to more than 2 million people nationwide through programs, advocacy and research. The Urban League of Essex County is one such affiliate.

Mission

The mission of the Urban League movement is to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights.

Strategy

The Urban League employs a five point strategy, tailored to local needs, in order to implement the mission of our movement.

• Education and Youth Empowerment: Ensuring that all of our children are well educated and prepared for economic self-reliance in the 21st century through college scholarships, early childhood literacy, Head Start and after care programs.
• Economic Empowerment: Empowering all people in attaining economic self-sufficiency through job training, good jobs, homeownership, entrepreneurship and wealth accumulation.
• Health and Quality of Life Empowerment: Working to build healthy and safe communities to eliminate health disparities through prevention, healthy eating, fitness, as well as ensuring access and complete access to affordable healthcare for all people.
• Civic Engagement and Leadership Empowerment: Empowering all people to take an active role in determining the direction, quality of life, public policy and leadership in their communities by full participation as citizens and voters, as well as through active community service and leadership development.
• Civil Rights and Racial Justice Empowerment: Promoting and ensuring our civil rights by actively working to eradicate all barriers to equal participation in the all aspects of American society, whether political, economic, social, educational or cultural.

History

The National Urban League, which has played so pivotal a role in the 20th-Century Freedom Movement, grew out of that spontaneous grassroots movement for freedom and opportunity that came to be called the Black Migrations. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared its approval of segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the brutal system of economic, social and political oppression the White South quickly adopted rapidly transformed what had been a trickle of African Americans northward into a flood.

Those newcomers to the North soon discovered they had not escaped racial discrimination. Excluded from all but menial jobs in the larger society, victimized by poor housing and education, and inexperienced in the ways of urban living, many lived in terrible social and economic conditions.

Still, in the degree of difference between South and North lay opportunity, and that African Americans clearly understood.

But to capitalize on that opportunity, to successfully adapt to urban life and to reduce the pervasive discrimination they faced, they would need help. That was the reason the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes was established on September 29, 1910 in New York City. Central to the organization's founding were two remarkable people: Mrs. Ruth Standish Baldwin and Dr. George Edmund Haynes, who would become the Committee's first executive secretary.

Mrs. Baldwin, the widow of a railroad magnate and a member of one of America's oldest families, had a remarkable social conscience and was a stalwart champion of the poor and disadvantaged. Dr. Haynes, a graduate of Fisk University, Yale University, and Columbia University (he was the first African American to receive a doctorate from that institution), felt a compelling need to use his training as a social worker to serve his people. The interracial character of the League's board was set from its first days.

A year later, the Committee merged with the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York (founded in New York in 1906), and the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (founded in 1905) to form the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. In 1920, the name was later shortened to the National Urban League.

Leadership

The former New Orleans Mayor Marc H. Morial was appointed by the Board of Trustees of the National Urban League in 2003. Since then, Morial has worked to reenergize the movement's diverse constituencies by building on the strengths of the NUL's 95-year-old legacy and increasing the organization's profile both locally and nationally.

In his first year, Morial worked to streamline the organizations' headquarters, secured over $10 million dollars in new funding to support affiliate programs, created the first Legislative Policy Conference "NUL on the Hill', revamped the State of Black America report, created profitability for the annual conference, and secured a $127.5 million equity fund for the minority businesses through the new markets tax credit program. He introduced and developed a stronger strategic direction of the organization with a "five point empowerment agenda' that focuses on closing the equality gaps which exist for African Americans and other emerging ethnic communities in education, economic empowerment, health and quality of life, civic engagement, and civil rights and racial justice.

For more information on the National Urban League, please visit the web site at www.nul.org.