This book uncovers the forgotten contributions of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century national organizations—including the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Niagara Movement—in developing strategies for racial justice organizing, which they then passed on to the NAACP and the National Urban League. It tells the story of these organizations' leaders and motivations, the initiatives they undertook, and the ideas about law and racial justice activism they developed and passed on to future g ... More

This book uncovers the forgotten contributions of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century national organizations—including the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Niagara Movement—in developing strategies for racial justice organizing, which they then passed on to the NAACP and the National Urban League. It tells the story of these organizations' leaders and motivations, the initiatives they undertook, and the ideas about law and racial justice activism they developed and passed on to future generations. In so doing it sheds new light on how these early origins helped set the path for twentieth-century legal civil rights activism in the United States. The book shows that, at an early foundational stage of national racial justice organizing, activists thought about civil and political rights and the social welfare and economic aspects of achieving racial justice as interrelated aspects of a comprehensive agenda. As the enormity and difficulty of the task became clearer with experience over time, organizations developed specializations in both issue areas and strategies. This tendency was unstable, however, and reflected pragmatic concerns rather than any deep ideological commitment to pursue some aspects of the racial justice agenda over others.