ULEC History

Local History

William H. Ashby was born in 1889 in Carter’s Grove, Virginia. A child of fourth-generation free landowners, he was nonetheless exposed to the harsh reality of racism. His grandfather was bludgeoned to death by four white men who were jealous of his wealth, and when William was 11, the sight of an acquaintance hanging from a tree made a deep impression on him. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1911. Frustrated by the limited scope of career options for African Americans (Waiter was considered the highest possible position an African American could hold), he went on to Yale Divinity School, graduating in 1916. In 1917, he was chosen by the National Urban League in New York to start a Newark affiliate, becoming New Jersey’s first black social worker.

A friend of W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, Ashby was committed to doing everything he could to improve conditions for the rural Southern poor migrating into the area. The New Jersey Negro Welfare League began as a statewide committee of clergymen, social workers, and businessmen determined to help African-Americans “to improve their social, economic and moral condition in urban communities.” Initially the agency concentrated on placing migrants in domestic service jobs, but eventually, they were engaged in placing educated Blacks in up and coming positions of real opportunity.

The Great Depression pushed the Urban League back into direct casework, as the struggle for food, clothes, shoes, and jobs intensified. The long campaign for decent housing finally came to fruition thanks to Prudential and the Newark Housing Authority, and the Douglas-Harrison Apartments were born. As the Depression resolved into post-war boom, the agency focused on jobs and training, and many firsts were established in industry and government. As African-Americans began gaining footing in real jobs, the League helped form neighborhood improvement groups to resolve racial tensions.

In the 1950s, the League focused on youth career clubs, a conference on Central Ward problems, a 1954 drive for a medical college, Equal Opportunity Day dinners, and efforts to find foster homes for African-American children.

The civil rights efforts of the 1960s propelled the Urban League into conference rooms every where, as the League was uniquely positioned to work with business leaders based on its long history of employment opportunities. While other organizations took to the streets, the Urban League was swamped with requests from businesses needing to hire minorities and from minorities eager to take advantage of newly accessible opportunities. Forming the Business and Industrial Coordinating Council with business and industrial leaders, the League helped this pioneering organization close the gap between the skilled job and the unskilled African American potential employee. The League operated the most successful Skills Bank in the nation, placing 2,500 people in jobs.

While the quest for employment placements usurped most other efforts, the League also managed to create CHOICE, a suburban house-finding service, a branch office in East Orange, leadership training for 40 community residents, studies for pre-natal care, a college information center, voter registration drives, and legislative campaigns.

National History

The National Urban League has played a pivotal a role in the 20th-Century Freedom Movement. 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, that African Americans clearly understood.

But to capitalize on that opportunity, to successfully adapt to urban life and to reduce the pervasive discrimination African Americans 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.

Summary

Since it’s founding in 1917 by William B. Ashby, the Urban League has provided training, assistance and direction to thousands of African-Americans and others in the Essex County area. Whether providing financial assistance to recently arrived settlers from the South in the 1920s and 30s, arranging for an applicant’s first job in the 1940s and 1950s, to providing Financial Education and Computer Job Training for adults and Early Childhood Education in the 1990s, the Urban League of Essex County has always had an important impact on quality of life for many African-Americans in the community.