Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement

Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement
Author: Joe William TrotterJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2020-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813179939

During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP—often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters—bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.

Eugene Kinckle Jones

Eugene Kinckle Jones
Author: Felix L. Armfield
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2011-02-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252093623

A leading African American intellectual, Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) was instrumental in professionalizing black social work in America. Jones used his position was executive secretary of the National Urban League to work with social reformers advocating on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination. He also led the Urban League's efforts at campaigning for equal hiring practices and the inclusion of black workers in labor unions, and promoted the importance of vocational training and social work. Drawing on interviews with Jones's colleagues and associates, as well as recently opened family and Urban League archives, Felix L. Armfield blends biography with an in-depth discussion of the roles of black institutions and organizations. The result is a work that offers new details on the growth of African American communities, the evolution of African American life, and the role of black social workers in the years before the civil rights era.

Not Alms but Opportunity

Not Alms but Opportunity
Author: Touré F. Reed
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807888540

Illuminating the class issues that shaped the racial uplift movement, Toure Reed explores the ideology and policies of the national, New York, and Chicago Urban Leagues during the first half of the twentieth century. Reed argues that racial uplift in the Urban League reflected many of the class biases pervading contemporaneous social reform movements, resulting in an emphasis on behavioral, rather than structural, remedies to the disadvantages faced by Afro-Americans. Reed traces the Urban League's ideology to the famed Chicago School of Sociology. The Chicago School offered Leaguers powerful scientific tools with which to foil the thrust of eugenics. However, Reed argues, concepts such as ethnic cycle and social disorganization and reorganization led the League to embrace behavioral models of uplift that reflected a deep circumspection about poor Afro-Americans and fostered a preoccupation with the needs of middle-class blacks. According to Reed, the League's reform endeavors from the migration era through World War II oscillated between projects to "adjust" or even "contain" unacculturated Afro-Americans and projects intended to enhance the status of the Afro-American middle class. Reed's analysis complicates the mainstream account of how particular class concerns and ideological influences shaped the League's vision of group advancement as well as the consequences of its endeavors.

History of the Chicago Urban League

History of the Chicago Urban League
Author: Arvarh E. Strickland
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826213471

Reed, author of The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910-1966, cites Strickland's work as a landmark study of the earliest civil rights efforts in Chicago."--BOOK JACKET.

Just Imagine...What If There Were No Black People in the World?: Jaxon and Kevin's Black History Trip Downtown

Just Imagine...What If There Were No Black People in the World?: Jaxon and Kevin's Black History Trip Downtown
Author: Tamara Shiloh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2020-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9780998969688

More Magic! More Ghosts! Enjoy a fun trip downtown with Jaxon, Kevin and the ghosts of historical Black inventors and scientists. Jaxon and his cousin Kevin meet and chat with a few very interesting African American historical figures from the past. On this trip Jaxon learns that sharing information about the necklace can be a problem.