Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement

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.

The National Urban League and the Fight for US Adoption Reform

The National Urban League initiated its Foster Care and Adoption Project in 1953 to increase African Americans’ participation in formal adoptions. League officials encouraged reforms in US policies and practices to eliminate the economic and social obatacles that limited African Americans’ adoptions. League officials also promoted greater integration of adoption agencies’ administrative and social work staff to advance the organization’s goals of encouraging interracial cooperation in social service agencies. The outcomes of the national project were inconsistent, in part because of resistance from some white child welfare professionals and the organized efforts of white citizens’ councils to defraud and defund many League branches. The project did highlight the social and institutional barriers that affected African Americans’ domestic and transnational adoptions. This chapter foregrounds the challenges adoption agencies faced when they endeavoured to placed Korean black children with African American families. It reveals why many successful agencies had to implement, on a case-by-case basis, many of the reforms that the League had hoped would produce national, comprehensive adoption reform.

Susie Saavedra

Susie Saavedra was recently promoted to Vice President for Policy and Legislative Affairs at the National Urban League Washington Bureau. Prior to this role, she served as Senior Director for the same department. Specifically, Ms. Saavedra is the League’s chief education and health policy officer, a responsibility she has held since 2013. She offers over 15 years of federal legislative, policy, and political experience along with a passion for advancing social and economic justice. Before joining the National Urban League, Ms. Saavedra spent a decade working in both the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate for four Members of Congress, as a Legislative Aide to former Senator Hillary Clinton, and as a Legislative Director for Representatives Karen Bass, Al Green and Joe Baca. She also promoted diversity in the halls of Congress as former President of the Congressional Hispanic Staff Association (CHSA) and has advocated for expanding opportunities for Hispanics in higher education as a governing board member of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). Ms. Saavedra is also the Vice President of the Hispanic Lobbyists Association which is dedicated to building diversity in the government relations profession. She holds a Master of Public Administration degree from George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Denver.

Introduction

This introductory chapter lays out a brief biography of Eugene Kinckle Jones and his work in black social reform, including his affiliation with the National Urban League (NUL). It laments the lack of scholarship on Jones's role in both the NUL and the American social-work movement. Moreover, the chapter narrows the focus of this book—not to the NUL in particular—but to Jones and his role in the professionalization of black social work, in order to increase our understanding of the “urban black experience”—the processes of migration and of migrants becoming black urbanites. The chapter furthermore attempts to illustrate how social work as a profession engaged black Americans and how it was administered during its infancy. It then closes with a brief overview of the following chapters.