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A Dream, A Quarter Century, A Reality!
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The Executive Secretary of the National Urban League now on leave with the federal government, goes to the record to appraise the work of the League. --The Editor |
The story of the League is really a striking account of the beautiful spirit of the founder as it diffused itself into the hearts of the hundreds of men and women, volunteers and employed workers, who unselfishly and devotedly applied themselves in a practical way to open the door of opportunity to Negroes in America. Mrs. Baldwin's ideal was no patronizing, charity-giving approach to the problem. "Not Alms, but Opportunity" was the slogan of the organization from the outset.
I came into the service of the movement six months after its founding. My first conference was with Mrs. Baldwin. I remember distinctly my first impressions. She was soft of speech, frank and direct, kindly and encouraging. She seemed to understand the deep sorrow of the Negro's soul, his ambitions and the despair with which too often he had given up in the grossly unfair battle of life. "Mr. Jones," she said, "the Negro deserves to share equally in the good things of our civilization. Not only should he have his rights but he should be helped to qualify in every way to take advantage of these opportunities as they present themselves." And she presented to me a program which for twenty-five years has met the test and claimed the liberal support of America's most discriminating supporters of movements: ( 1 ) Seek cooperation of welfare movements in efforts to apply to the Negro urban population the benefits of modern social service. (2) Investigate carefully and scientifically the manifestation among Negroes of antisocial and destructive social and economic forces -marshalling data factually (always honestly) and so convincingly that always practical programs of amelioration may be obvious and thus be assured of public support. (3 ) Train Negro social workers ( there were no Negro trained social workers then) so that they, themselves, might not only accelerate social work among their own people but pool their resources with those of white social workers for the good of humanity in general.
The full story of the Urban League from the early beginnings to date would read almost like a fairy tale if behind each record of achievement there were not the stern realities of life as we live it from day to day. I recall the first efforts that we made to persuade the Bellevue Hospital authorities to admit Negro internee. It took almost six years to "turn the trick." And then came the many "first's" in the record of League accomplishments. "The first Negro probation officer," "the first Negro Big Brother and Big Sister Worker," "the first Negro vocational counsellor," "the first Negro home for delinquent colored girls," "the first home for Negro convalescents," a boys' fresh air camp, a Harlem neighborhood playground, a street closed for play under supervision, inspection of dance halls, a better housing program, free employment service which not only found jobs for casual Negro workers, but opened up new positions requiring more skill and training, placing the cause of the Negro before conferences, colleges and church groups, forums and assemblies of all kinds. Then there were newspaper and magazine articles and later radio addresses and the use of the motion picture in spreading the gospel of good-will and cooperation.
During the World War the League had centers for aid of the unemployed, fostered special programs to aid Negro migrants in more than a score of our large cities in adjusting themselves to the new conditions they met. Homes had to be found, children had to be entered in school, church contacts had to be made, jobs had to be secured for the breadwinners, lessons in the value of efficiency, promptness and regularity in employment had to be taught, and interracial conferences had to be arranged to lessen the possibility of race friction. We persuaded Secretary of Labor Wilson to establish the Division of Negro Economics. Negro welfare workers were placed in factories and lecturers were sent to large bodies of employees in hundreds of industries in all sections of the country. Forty-four branches of the League are now located in as many cities. One, of course, immediately wonders how so much could be accomplished from such small beginnings. The answer is simple when one understands the formula: Train your workers and send them out to spread the gospel. The returns multiply in geometrical progression.
The League has had eighty-five "Fellows" in schools of social work and graduate departments of sociology and economics in leading universities. It has taken on its staffs scores of promising young university graduates and trained them in Urban League methods by assigning to them difficult tasks under supervision until they learned to stand on their own feet and in many cases assumed positions of leadership themselves in the field of social work. The roster of Urban League former "Fellows" reads almost like Who's Who in Negro Social Work: James H. Hubert, Executive Secretary, New York Urban League; Forrester B. Washington, Director of the Atlanta School of Social Work and sometime Director of Negro Work, F.E.R.A., Washington; Ira DeA. Reid, Professor of Sociology, Atlanta University and specialist on projects of the Works Progress Administration; R. Maurice Moss, Executive Secretary, Pittsburgh Urban League; Dr. Abram L. Harris, Professor of Economics, Howard University, now holder of a Guggenheim Fellowship; George W. Goodman, Executive Secretary, Boston Urban League; Dr. Dean S. Yarbrough, Assistant on Racial Problems, New York City Emergency Relief Bureau; Mrs. Myrtle Hull Elkins, Director of Work for Colored Children's Home, Cincinnati, Ohio; Mrs. Louise L. Bromley, Essex County (N. J.) Tuberculosis League; Alonzo G. Moron, Commissioner of Welfare, the Virgin Islands; Gerald E. Allen, Supervisor of Colored Work of the Playground Athletic League, Baltimore, Md.; Mrs. Ellie Walls Montgomery, Department of Sociology, Houston College for Negroes, Houston, Texas; and many others too numerous to list.
Then there are former secretaries and directors of research who gained experience in the organization thus aiding materially in helping them to qualify for important posts: Dr. George E. Haynes, the first Director of the League, now Secretary of the Interracial Commission, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America; Dr. Charles S. Johnson, Professor of Sociology, Fisk University; Dr. E. Franklin Frazier, Professor of Sociology, Howard University. Then there are T. Arnold Hill and Elmer A. Carter of New York; Robert J. Elzy of Brooklyn, A. L. Foster of Chicago, John T. Clark of St. Louis and John C. Dancy, President of the Board of the Detroit House of Correction, and many others whose labors in the social work field are eminently outstanding in their several communities using any yardstick as your gauge.
Although the best test of an organization's effectiveness is the personnel engaged in its services some people like to know more about the evidences of the good influence of the movement.
Early the League began to attach itself to progressive social work movements to integrate the Negro into the trend of ameliorative efforts towards human improvement. Staff members of the League have served as board members and vice-presidents of the National Conference of Social Work, chairmen and members of subcommittees of President Hoover's White House Conference, delegates to the International Conference of Social Work in Paris, many state social work conferences and scores of other social and economic conferences.
I had the pleasure of organizing the Harlem Boy Scouts Advisory Committee and of joining with Miss Ernestine Rose in organizing the Harlem Adult Education Committee and with Dr. Alain Locke in organizing the recently established Associates in Negro Folk Education. I served as Chairman of the Executive Board of the Negro Group of "America's Making"-an exposition held in New York in 1921 to display the gifts to America from twenty-six racial and national elements comprising our population.
When I proposed unsuccessfully to the Community Service, Inc., after the war, the appropriation of a special fund for propaganda for interracial good will in the South, I passed the idea on to Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones who shared the thought with Mr. John J. Eagan of Atlanta and Dr. Will W. Alexander who successfully persuaded the War Work Council of the Y.M.C.A. to appropriate funds to finance the early programs of the Southern Interracial Commission. It was the New York Urban League which first proposed the idea out of which the Dunbar Garden Apartments became a reality and the Chicago Urban League "sold" to the late Mr. Julius Rosenwald the idea which materialized into the Chicago Rosenwald Garden Apartments-each a more than two million dollar housing development and outstanding in this field among Negroes.
The League has fostered more than seventy-five major social studies of Negro groups-neighborhood, city and state surveys, labor union, recreation and housing studies-all used for some practical purpose. In twenty-nine cities where there are Urban Leagues there are community chests-and in each of these communities the League is a member of the community chest.
From the single League in New York City the organization has grown to include the national organization at 1133 Broadway, New York City and forty-three locals in as many cities. Here the League maintains neighborhood houses with its clubs and classes, free employment service, personnel for social studies and facilities for bringing the cause of the Negro effectively to the attention of the community at large.
For some years, the League conducted annual Negro health campaigns. In New York, we conducted an intensive drive for two years against the high Negro infant mortality rate resulting in a reduction from 202 (!) to 173 per 1,000 births (it is now only 87.32 based on 1,000 live births.) We joined with the Association for the Prevention and Relief of Heart Disease in work in the public schools to detect incipient heart disease in children and to demonstrate methods of prevention and control.
Many persons will learn now for the first time of what happened "behind the scenes" of the Tuskegee Veterans' Hospital (now called the Tuskegee Veterans' Facility) during the Harding administration. l was requested by a Red Cross official who visited my office to furnish a list of colored nurses from which to select nurses for the hospital then nearing completion. I furnished such a list. I was told that the personnel was subject to approval of the Veterans' Bureau. Later I was informed that colored nurses could not be employed as a confidential memorandum had been received from the Veterans' Bureau dated February 6, 1923, reading in part as follows:
"It is desired to advise that it is the policy of this Bureau to have the hospital at Tuskegee operated by white medical officers, preferably of southern birth. The Chief Nurse, the Chief Dietitian and Chief Aide, and the Administrative officers will also be white." ". . . all employees with the exception of orderlies, attendants and laborers, will be white."
I at once protested to the President, Mr. Harding, and communicated my discovery to the Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Principal of Tuskegee Institute. What followed is well known. A storm of protest arose from the National Medical Association, many Negro organizations and white friends. President Harding ordered that the hospital be manned throughout with Negroes. Colonel Joseph H. Ward was appointed Superintendent and today it is a credit to the administrative capacity of the race-rating among the first in efficiency among the veterans' hospitals.
The League persuaded Mayor John Purroy Mitchell to appoint a Negro as member of the New York City Board of Education; helped to draw up and lobby for the bill presented by Assemblyman E. A. Johnson to establish a New York State employment service in Harlem. The Chicago Urban League called together the citywide interracial committee during the Chicago race riots which induced the Governor to send in troops and to appoint subsequently the Commission which investigated the causes back of the riot. The League's Southern Field Secretary, Jesse O. Thomas, proposed to a group of southern delegates attending the National Conference of Social Work meeting in New Orleans in 1920 the formation of a Negro School of Social Work in the South. The Atlanta School of Social work was the result. The record of the Douglass Students Club organized in 1914 stands supreme as an example of the League's Club work. Here were New York City high school boys organized by John T. Clark, the Industrial Secretary of the League. All of these boys finished college. Two of the boys became successful dentists, one is an inspector of the New York State Insurance Department, one is a New York City public school teacher, one a New York Certified Public Accountant and another a prominent etcher now residing in Paris.
While we must admit that our success has not been signal towards securing recognition of Negro workers' rights through the American Federation of Labor, we are none the less pleased at our early insistence on the Negro's claim to fair recognition by the forces of organized labor. In 1918 we made our first formal demands of the American Federation of Labor through its Executive Council for the inclusion of Negroes in the memberships of the various internationals. In the Council sessions and at several A. F. of L. conventions we were instrumental in having resolutions passed calling for the admission of Negro workers to membership. We still feel that the cause of labor demands that Negroes be invited into the ranks of the organized groups. In some trades such as the miners and the longshoremen, the advantages of the "no prejudice" policy are evident but as long as Negroes are forced to remain the "proverbial scabs" labor cannot present a "solid front" in its struggle for a living wage and favorable working conditions.
During the past six-year period of depression the League has labored in season and out with municipal, state and national officials to extend services to our unfortunate Negro citizens. We have urged proper unemployment relief, fair low cost housing facilities, the appointment of Negroes to advisory boards and staffs of recovery services, and recognition of the Negro's claim to an equitable share of all of the benefits of our federal program of economic adjustment. Members of our staff and of our board have been loaned for public service-federal, state and local and results, although not by any means entirely satisfactory, have far exceeded the sanguine hopes of many who doubted that the Negro could receive any material benefits when so many whites were economically "hors de combat." We are not satisfied. But our accomplishments in the face of such powerful and uncompromising odds encourage us to a more vigorous campaign in the direction of our objectives.
OPPORTUNITY--Journal of Negro Life, the official organ of the National Urban League, completing in December thirteen brilliant years under the able editorship of Charles S. Johnson for six years and Elmer A. Carter for seven years, has made a distinctive contribution to the literature dealing with the problems of interracial contacts in America. Dispassionate, factual data and illuminating articles from the pens of some of America's most distinguished students and writers have graced the columns of the magazine -establishing it in the minds of discriminating readers as one of the indispensable sources of light on "America's most baffling problem."
OPPORTUNITY was largely responsible through annual Holstein Literary Prize Contests for the discovery of much latent literary genius in the younger Negro writers.
A list of prominent Americans who have endorsed the League's work by letter, service and donations would exhaust the space allotted to this article but I should mention some at least: former Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, Cardinal Gibbons, Chief Justice Hughes, Governor Lehman, John D. Rockefeller (the father and son), Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Grace Abbott, Charles W. Eliot, Felix Adler, Paul and Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald, Michael Friedsam, John S. Burke, Judge Louis Brandeis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Mrs. Leopold Stokowski, Lloyd Garrison, Walter A. May, Robert Treat Paine, Samuel Sachs, Julius and Henry Goldman, Robert W. Bingham, Lillian D. Wald, E. R. A., George and Isaac N. Seligman, Mr. and Mrs. John F. Moors, Miss Alice Tapley, Miss Louise Brooks.
Among the distinguished Negro Americans who might be mentioned are Booker T. Washington, George Cleveland Hall, William H. Brooks, Robert Russa Moton, James Weldon Johnson, Fred R. Moore, A. Clayton Powell, E. P. Roberts, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie H. Burroughs, C. C. Spaulding, W. G. Alexander, Robert L. Vann, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Roland Hayes, Channing Tobias, Kelly Miller, Mordecai Johnson, Emmett J. Scott, John Hope, W. R. Valentine, Raymond Pace Alexander and Sadie T. M. Alexander, Daisy C. Reed and Hubert T. Delany.
So many friends, white and colored, have contributed to the cause in funds, and more important, in unselfish and devoted service that it would be futile to attempt to list them and their deeds. But in deference to a staunch twenty-five year friendship and a keen appreciation and extraordinary understanding of the indivisible interests of mankind, my last word must be in tribute to a man of destiny, L. Hollingsworth Wood. It has been through him that divine inspiration has come to the Urban League since Mrs. Baldwin found it necessary, through illness, to relinquish the presidency of the League. Mr. Wood has never tired of the taxing duties incumbent upon the office he has held. He has raised funds, conferred on plans, discussed procedure, made long inspection tours, shared our mental anguish and buoyed us up when all seemed dark. He has often saved us from losing our faith in the "dominant" element of our population and pulled us out of many a slough of uncertainty and doubt. In observing the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the League it seems to me as though a dream has come true. Wherever there are Urban Leagues you find action on the racial front. Where twenty-five years ago there were only individual and spasmodic group efforts to bring to the Negro the practical benefits of society's struggle for economic security and community welfare, we now have the formula and the machinery for securing results. Let us put forth every effort to increase the "sinews of war" and to increase the man and brain power necessary to multiply the benefits which come from this interracial effort to give to the Negro "not alms, but opportunity." In the memorable words of Mrs. Baldwin, "Let us work not as colored people nor as white people for the narrow benefit of any group alone, but TOGETHER as American citizens for the common good of our common city, our common country."