This chapter focuses on pre-Civil War national political and fraternal organizations that operated through Black community leaders. It examines how the various African American organizations that fed into the Underground Railroad network, the Black churches, conferences, fraternal societies, and conventions, functioned as the public, often urban, action arm of the Underground Railroad. Black organizations and fraternal societies fostered interracial cooperation by holding convention meetings and other gatherings where participants representing Black churches or the Prince Hall Order of Free and Accepted Masons routinely interacted with Underground Railroad operatives. This chapter also shows that slaveholders and politicians, responding to demands by people of color to be released from slavery and its concomitant evils, enacted a series of fugitive slave laws that increasingly fueled the fires of rebellion and war. The Civil War ended a long strategic continuum among abolitionists and antislavery workers.