The Urban League traces its roots to three organizations—the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York (founded in 1906), the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (founded 1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (founded 1910)—that merged in 1911 to form the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. The new organization sought to help African Americans, especially those moving to New York City from rural locations in the South (seeGreat Migration), to find jobs and housing and generally to adjust to urban life. The model organization established in New York City was imitated in other cities where affiliateswere soon established. By 1920 the national organization had assumed the shorter name, National Urban League.
Full Article. National Urban League, American service agency found ed for the purpose of eliminating racial segregation and discrimination and helping African Americans and other minorities to participate in all phases of American life. By the late 20th century more than 110 local affiliated groups were active throughout the United States.
It is headquartered in New York City. The Urban League traces its roots to three organizations—the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York (founded in 1906), the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (founded 1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes ...
Great Migration, in U.S. history, the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural communities in the South to large cities in the North and West. At the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of black Americans lived in the Southern states. From 1916 to…
history, the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural communities in the South to large cities in the North and West. At the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of black Americans lived in the Southern states. From 1916 to….
Vernon Jordan. …serving as president of the National Urban League (1972–81), Jordan joined corporate boards such as American Express and Dow Jones, thereby using business connections to press the case for minority hiring and advancement. He survived a white supremacist’s assassination attempt in 1980 but was wounded by gunshot.
From its founding, the league has been interracial; the organization’s very establishment was led by George Edmund Haynes, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and Ruth Standish Baldwin, a white New York City philanthropist.
The National Urban League (NUL) was formed on October 11, 1910, to help African American migrants assimilate into urban life. The NUL began with the merger of three smaller groups, The National League for the Protection of Colored Women, The Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions for Negroes in New York, and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes in New York, all dedicated to helping Americans urban newcomers mainly from the South, expand their employment, housing, healthcare, and educational opportunities. Its first executive secretary, George E. Haynes (1910-1917), established its guiding principle, promote positive interracial interaction by persuading whites that they should work with African Americans for mutual advantage.
Its first executive secretary, George E . Haynes (1910-1917), established its guiding principle, promote positive interracial interaction by persuading whites that they should work with African Americans for mutual advantage. Eugene Kinkle Jones, who became executive secretary of the Urban League in 1917 and led the organization ...
Through the first half of the 20th century, the NUL in fact saw gaining employment for the black migrants to the city as one of its principal functions. In 1925, the magazine Opportunity was created to present factual data on African American life to businessmen, government officials, labor leaders, and the general white community.
In 1961, Granger’s successor, Whitney M. Young Jr., expanded on most of Granger’s ideas and made the NUL one of the five major civil rights organizations in the nation during that decade. Young led crucial fundraising efforts which supported civil rights activism. He was one of the first black civil rights leaders to promote affirmative action initiatives that were put in place during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As direct civil rights activism began to recede in the early 1970s, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr ., who became executive director in 1971, shifted the organization’s focus to the promotion of cultural pluralism. He developed “The State of Black America” report as well as a citizenship education program that helped increase the black vote.
The National Urban League is a historic civil rights organization dedicated to economic empowerment, equality, and social justice.
To help African-Americans and others in underserved communities achieve their highest true social parity, economic self- reliance, power, and civil rights. The League promotes economic empowerment through education and job training, housing and community development, workforce development, entrepreneurship, health, and quality of life.
Migration also exerts feedback effects on the pattern of urban growth that are mediated by the level of urbanization (Keyfitz 1980; Montgomery et al. 2003 ). The primary role attributed to rural-to-urban migration in the early phase is related to the small size of cities. Sustained in-migration then accelerates urban growth, which hastens the dominance of natural increase in a larger population. Urban in-migration must also decline with the depopulation of rural areas. Because death rates were already low in the 1950s in Albania, urban natural increase should have progressively dominated urban growth over the course of urbanization.
Rural socialization and marriage migrations can be seen to explain migrants’ birth differential compared with the urban standard (Lerch 2013c ), and these behavioral effects appear to be related to the gender selection of internal and international migration in the context of a patriarchal culture and the post-communist crisis. Males were attributed a breadwinner role abroad, whereas women retreated from the labor market and assumed the responsibility of family maintenance in the new social and economic centers of Albania. However, to further postpone the aging of urban populations, a continuing inflow of young and recently married migrants is necessary because of their recent and partial adoption of urban fertility patterns (i.e., birth limitation without postponement). More evidence on this diversification of the urban fertility transition would contribute to easier prediction of urban demography in Albania. Income inequality has risen along with development, and the economic geography of internal movements has pointed to an urbanization of poverty (Zezza et al. 2005 ). As in other world regions, the diversification in childbearing patterns may indicate the coexistence of two parallel paths of urban fertility transition, such as the emergence of new family models among affluent populations and birth limitations among the deprived (Basu 1986; Cosio-Zavala 1995 ).
According to these estimates, one-fifth of the 1.2 million Albanians lived in urban areas in 1950 (Table 1 ). Urban and rural crude death rates were equally low (14 per thousand inhabitants), whereas the rural crude birth rate increased from 39 to 48 per thousand during the 1950s because of a pretransitional rise in fertility (see Central Directory of Statistics 1991; Falkingham and Gjonca 2001 ). Consequently, rural natural increase was high (3.1 % annually).
Because population movements were constrained within sealed national borders, rural-to-urban migration and reclassification were important in international comparison and represented the main sources of the marked urban growth. With the regime’s subsequent retention of residents in the countryside, urbanization stalled. During the post-communist crisis, the process caught up at a fast pace despite a rise in urban emigration. Given the renewed freedom of movement, the transformation in rural institutions, and the structural changes in the economy, the rate of rural exodus again surpassed most experiences in the developing world. The release of the demographic pressure that had accumulated over the preceding three decades actually led to depopulation in the countryside. Yet, Albania shifted from its first, restrained urban transition into its second because the (male) labor force component of rural outflows was redirected to more attractive destinations abroad to sustain a living for the families left behind.
Vries’ ( 1990) model decomposed the population growth of a closed country (i.e., without international migration) in its urban and rural sector. He distinguished three phases in the historical process of urbanization according to the relative importance in urban growth of rural-to-urban migration and urban natural increase (Dyson 2011; Vries 1990 ). In the first phase, populations are stabilized through a continuing inflow of migrants that compensates for high mortality. In the second phase, as sanitary improvements become effective in lowering death rates, urban growth is sustained by natural increase. In the third phase, the drop in urban death rates to below the rural level leads to higher urban than rural natural increase (assuming similar birth rates), 1 which consequently dominates urbanization.
Although natural increase has been recognized as the main driver of postwar urban growth in developing countries, urban transition theory predicts a dominant role for population mobility in the early and late phases of the process. To account for this discrepancy between theory and empirical evidence, I demonstrate the complex role played by internal and international migration in the pattern of urban growth. Using a combination of indirect demographic estimations for postwar Albania, I show that the dominant contribution of natural increase from the 1960s to the 1990s was induced by a limited urban in-migration; this was due to the restrictions on leaving the countryside imposed under communist rule and, thereafter, to the redirection abroad of rural out-migrants. Although young adults in cities also engaged in international movements and significantly reduced their fertility, the indirect effects of rural-to-urban migration attenuated the fall in urban birth rates and postponed demographic aging. In-migrants swelled urban cohorts of reproductive age and delayed the urban fertility transition. Despite a high level of urban natural increase in Albania, I thus conclude that the role of population mobility dominated in the early and most recent phases of urban growth. The results also have implications for our understanding of demographic processes during the second urban transition in developing countries.
The post-communist privatization process was accompanied by a sharp rise in unemployment as former industries closed down and the public sector contracted (World Bank 2007 ). Rural institutions transformed with the per capita distribution of land, which atomized agricultural plots and undermined the widespread subsistence agriculture. Social upheavals during the collapse of the regime and economy in 1991–1992, as well as a banking crisis in 1996–1997, exacerbated uncertainty. As Albania opened up to the world, people engaged in large-scale migration to find a new living in the neighboring countries of the European Union (Italy and Greece). Rural residents also moved en masse to domestic cities where social and economic change was concentrated (INSTAT 2004a; King and Vullnetari 2003 ). Although remittances played a crucial role in sustaining household consumption and in the country’s fast-paced economic recovery since 1993, one-third of rural households still lived under the national poverty line in 2002 (INSTAT et al. 2009 ).
A common observation was that urbanization was rapid and driven by rural-urban migration. Consistent with the dual economy (Harris-Todaro) model, the perception was that migrants had a difficult time adjusting in the urban area and were often unemployed or underemployed. Percolating through the time periods as well, was an old demographic adage about the composition of the migrant stream: that it was predominantly, unmarried young males. Concurrently, rapid urban growth fueled concern about denigration of the surrounding physical environment.
Migration is the demographic process that links rural to urban areas, generating or spurring the growth of cities. The resultant urbanization is linked to a variety of policy issues, spanning demographic, economic, and environmental concerns. Growing cities are often seen as the agents of environmental degradation.
As we have discussed migration accounts for roughly half of urban growth in most developing country cities. Most demographic analyses confirm that overall urban growth rates are closely ties to national population growth rates. Declining fertility rates overall will help reduce urban population pressure. High income economies experience the mirror image effect. Most of these nations have very low rates of natural increase. Consequently international migration contributes a substantial fraction of total year-to-year national population growth. The lesson is that it is important to have the comparative framework clear when making assertions about the impact of migration.
Urbanization can place stress on the land through sprawl; coincident industrial development may threaten air and water quality. In the eyes of many observers, rapid urbanization is also linked to problems of unemployment and the social adaptation of migrants in their new urban setting.
Since migration feeds urbanization, and since urban growth is associated with industrial development (pollution) and land consumption, migration is often held culpable in environmental degradation. Although the link is there, it is not clear how strong that link is.
The second major impetus for the New Migration is economic restructuring. Many countries have reoriented their economies in the direction of more free market activity. To argue that this trend is universal or that the movement is to an unfettered marketplace would be silly. Nevertheless, in several important ways the shift is on, and population distribution is a manifest component of this shift. The most notable case is China. Where once all residence was controlled by registration permit (or hukou), the years since market reform have enabled individuals to relocate to areas of economic opportunity. This has created a huge pool --a "floating population" in the tens of millions of persons -- living apart from their place of formal registration. While often referred to as "temporary" migrants, the length of residence in destination can now approach several years. Considerable controversy swirled about the motivations of these temporary migrants (including the claim that women were moving to avoid the structures of the one-child family planning policy), but the migration seems to be economically driven.
The first round of migration models presumed that movement -- permanent movement -- was induced by prevailing wage differentials and economic opportunities. Thus one observed transatlantic migration from Old to New World as part of a permanent population redistribution within and across generations.