Arizona sun. [volume], April 22, 1960, National Urban Leagues Fiftieth Anniversary, Image 15

About Arizona sun. [volume] (Phoenix, Ariz.) 1942-196?

Image provided by: Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records; Phoenix, AZ

                
Your Vital Stake in the Urban League
How tHIs nationwide social and economic agency helps you
lead a richer life In today’s America.
by LESTER B. GRANGER
About 18 million Negroes live in
Al the United States—six out of ten
in the South, and the other four
in the North and West. The propor
tion is changing every day as Negroes
continue to leave the South for areas
where they can expect full protection
of the law and full benefit of public
education. As they move, the propor
tion of Negro urban residence rises—
for almost all northern and western
Negroes live in cities. As a racial
group we are now an integral part of
America’s urban civilization.
Here is a social revolution of which
the Urban League has been part from
its very beginning. In the early years
of this century, Negroes leaving the
South by tens of thousands marched
deep into blind alleys in such cities as
New York and Philadelphia, as well
as Nashville. Men were herded into
low-paid laboring jobs; women were
given the shoddiest housework and
paid practically nothing for it; houses
of prostitution recruited many of the
inexperienced and untrained. Fresh
from the farm, lost children in big
city life, these in-migrant Negroes
were slowly rotting away.
It was George E. Haynes, a brilliant
young Negro social scientist and the
first member of his race to graduate
from the New York School of Social
Work, who saw the need of a long
range, broadly-based social engineer
ing program to help Negroes take ad
vantage of opportunities in the city
and encourage their white neighbors to
make those opportunities available on
the basis of merit, rather than race.
So he sat down with the widow of Wil
liam H. Baldwin (William Baldwin
was President of the Long Island Rail
road Company and a truly advanced
social thinker); and out of their discussions was
formed in April, 1910—the Committee on Urban
Conditions Among Negroes—today’s National Urban
League. Here was the beginning of the interracial
cooperation that has been the trademark of the Urban
League ever since, for the first Board was composed
almost equally of distinguished white and colored
citizens, and everything that has been done by the
Urban League since 1910 has been on the basis of an
interracial membership, interracial boards and inter
racial committees in each of the 63 local Urban
Leagues spread throughout the country.
In those 63 cities are to be found over half of the
urban Negro population of the country, and, natural
ly, it is there that clearest public understanding is to
be found of the Urban League’s work. The fact is,
however, that every one of the 10-million Negroes of
urban residence in this country—every man, woman
and child among them —is affected by the work that
the League has done over the past 50 years.
The MAN WHO gets a JOB in some big industrial
plant, even in a city without an Urban League, is
benefiting from the League’s work in industrial re
lations—a special activity organized in 1925. When
he joins a union, whose officers may not even have
heard of the League, he is cashing in on Urban
League relations (both friendly and unfriendly) with
organized labor that started back in 1917 when
Eugene Kinckle Jones was executive secretary. When
he buys a house and gets a mortgage from a bank,
when he registers at a public employment office
which would have refused him twenty years ago,
is referred to a job on the basis of his qualifications
instead of his race—when the Negro does any of
these things essential to his economic and social wel
fare, he is drawing a little interest on the investment
of effort made in his behalf for fifty years by the
Urban League.
Even in the short period since World War 11, tens
of thousands of Negroes, because of Urban League
activities, have gone into jobs never before held by
members of their race. Think of the telephone op
erators and taxi-cab drivers, policemen and firemen,
stenographers and draftsmen, civil service employ
ees, engineers, scientists, and technicians, and work
ers in dozens of other fields who were the first* or
among the first of their race employed in their jobs—
because the Urban League was in there working
for them.
As far back as World War I, the League intro
duced hundreds of industrial employers to the unused
pool of Negro unskilled and semi-skilled labor. When
these workers were dropped after the war was over,
Urban Leagues in two-dozen cities accepted responsi
bility for stubbornly finding other jobs for the dis
placed and for pushing the state employment offices to
do their share toward re-employment of jobless
Negroes.
But though the League is best known as “that
organization that gets jobs for colored people”, this
has been only a part of its responsibility. It trained
MR. GRANGER, Executive Director, Notional Urban League,
is past President, National Conference of Social Welfare, ond
has served in the field of race relations for over 30 years.
the first Negro social workers- in the
country, and opened the doors that led
to a thousand more being trained. It
criticized, prodded, coaxed and advised
other social agencies into giving case
work, group work, family and child
care and psychiatric attention to the
needs of the Negro public.
During the depression and World
War 11, the Urban League took over
the job of educating the Negro popu
lation in the structural changes of the
national and state governments, and
of educating government officials of
their responsibilities toward the Ne
gro public. It hammered at federal
agencies to serve the Negro unem
ployed and dependent more fairly. It
struck out at government-sponsored
segregation in housing, and at official
racial discrimination in relief, and
service agencies. It educated thou
sands of Negroes in labor union op
portunities and policies.
Long before there was a President’s
FEPC during World War 11, Urban
Leagues placed more than 150,000 Ne
gro workers in defense and war jobs
previously closed to them. The League’s
key determinant role in eliminating
racial segregation from the armed
forces was officially certified by Presi
dent Truman. Toward the War’s end,
Urban League social survey teams
warded off racial troubles in a dozgn
principal northern and southern cities
threatened with post-war riots, and
left those cities free of the riot fever
and greatly advanced in standards of
housing, employment and general wel
fare affecting the Negro population.
The Urban League was the first
agency to explore deeply the guidance
needs of Negro youth and the social
needs of Negro families. It pioneered
in neighborhood organizations and block units for the
protection of neighborhood life and the development
of Negro leadership. Some of today’s progressive
policies by governmental agencies in housing, em
ployment, health and welfare were suggested and in
sisted upon by the Urban League.
A big job still needs to be done, and it is important
for our leadership to • understand how the advances
have been made thus far —what special tools for these
special tasks have been used and what tools still need
to be made.
Some of us are still thinking about old-fashioned
methods in today’s highly complex society. We still
argue that “white folks is evil and colored folks is
unlucky”, when it may be that white people are only
uninformed or misinformed —or frightened; while we
ourselves are too angry to reassure and too confused
to instruct.
But somebody has to do the job of education, or
ganization, discussion and negotiation to get the
whole job done, and the Urban League has done it
successfully for 50 years—so successfully that a
movement that had a dozen Board members, two staff
members and $8,500 for its first year (1910-1911)
now stretches an interracial team operation across
the length and breadth of this land. Its total follow
ing—officers and staff, members, associates and con
tributors —number not much over 100,000; but of
that number, more than 5,000 men and women active
ly serve on League Boards and committees, giving
their time freely to open new job, housing, family
opportunities for Negroes in the American city.
Someone has estimated that 150,000 hours of work
ing time is given annually to the Urban League move
ment by volunteers, most of whom could not be hired
for the salaries paid by any social agency in America.