The National Urban League was established through the merger of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York, the League for the Protection of Colored Women, and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. An interracial organization, the National Urban League was primarily concerned with helping southern black migrants adjust to life in the urban North.
The Great Migration, in which about half a million African Americans moved to the urban North from the rural South, began about 1905 and ended around 1930.
The Chicago Defender was an influential black newspaper founded in 1905 that, during the early and mid-twentieth century, was a major force in encouraging the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.
Labor agents were facilitators of black migration during the Jim Crow era. Labor agents were paid by northern industrialists to recruit southern blacks to work in factories in the North. Though labor agents helped bring black workers to the North, many African Americans eventually returned to the South after finding work and living conditions in the industrialized North untenable.
The National Urban League was founded in 1911 for improving the lives of African Americans in urban areas. During its early years, it focused particularly on helping African American migrants from the South transition to northern city life and find jobs and housing.
During the Great Migration, Chicago became a major destination for African Americans migrating from the South. The city’s industrial expansion made it attractive to job seekers, and Chicago’s Southside in particular became an important black enclave as African Americans took up residence in the neighborhood to work in meatpacking jobs and steel mills.