In a Recession, Urban League Furthers Its Mission of Economic Equity

When Lonnie Brent heard about a four-month program that could train and certify him to fix heating and air-conditioning systems, he couldn’t wait to apply.

Homeless for the previous two years, the 57-year-old Charlotte, N.C., man was accepted.

One cold, drizzly morning recently, he returned from a repair call with his instructor and classmates feeling upbeat.

“It’s a good field,” he said. “No matter where you go, somebody needs heating or air conditioning.”

The National Urban League, which runs the program, hopes he will soon become another success story in its 100-year history of helping black Americans lift themselves from poverty to prosperity.

Founded in New York in 1910, the organization spoke up for millions of black people who fled Jim Crow racism in the South, only to find themselves confronting subtler forms of discrimination in the big cities of the North.

Urban League officials say they have always focused on providing inner-city residents with a pipeline to better jobs, housing, and education. But with today’s bad economy sucking both jobs and hope out of declining urban centers, they say its mission is just as urgent now as it was a century ago.

“When times are tough,” says Marc Morial, the league’s president, “people look to us.”

The Urban League serves about two million people annually. One of its biggest challenges today, says Mr. Morial, is the fact that the economic downturn has caused overwhelming numbers of people to seek help from its 98 affiliates, spread across 38 states and the District of Columbia.

Over the past three years, for instance, Urban League of Central Carolinas went from serving about 2,700 Charlotte-area residents annually to serving 5,000.

And while some economists say they see signs of a recovery, African Americans have been hit harder and could take longer to rebound, the Urban League says. Unemployment for black people stood at 16 percent in November, according to Department of Labor figures, while it was just 8.9 percent for whites.

“We want so much to believe we’re in a post-racial America,” says Patrick Graham, president of the Urban League’s Charlotte office. “But we still have a long way to go.”

100-Year History

The world has changed significantly since an interracial group of social activists and philanthropists established what would come to be known as the Urban League on September 29, 1910. Back then, racial prejudice stood as the unmistakably central problem blocking black Americans’ path to progress. The Urban League worked with the waves of immigrants who came north, helping them battle segregated labor unions and slumlords who discriminated against them in big cities like New York and Chicago.

While the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attacked segregation in the courts, the Urban League provided counseling and services that helped people get good jobs, housing, and education. Today’s Urban League, whose national office runs on an annual budget of about $50-million, still has self-improvement and economic empowerment at the heart of its mission.

But instead of helping Southern immigrants new to the cities, today’s organization finds itself dealing with the struggling underclass that remained after middle-class whites and blacks left urban areas for the suburbs. Instead of focusing solely on black issues, the organization is increasingly looking to help the growing numbers of Latinos in the inner cities as well.

Mr. Graham, the Charlotte Urban League president, noted that in such inner-city neighborhoods, few African-American doctors, lawyers, or other professionals remain to provide the kind of social ballast common in those neighborhoods before integration. The situation creates disparities that today revolve more around class differences than racial ones.

John Hofmeister, chairman of the Urban League’s national board and a former president of Shell Oil, said the organization is fighting to find answers to some of the most difficult questions raised by the deterioration of America’s inner cities.

“How do people in the urban core lift themselves up when jobs are leaving? When there’s a foreclosure crisis? When the housing stock is old?” he asks. “The pressure on the Urban League to provide the ideas, to do the work, to service the constituents who live in the urban center is just as great as it was in the first 100 years.”

Focusing on Job Training

Some, however, say the Urban League, like the NAACP, struggles to stay relevant in a world in which formal segregation no longer exists and Barack Obama has made history as the nation’s first black president. They note that today’s Urban League occupies a much different place in American life than it did a century ago. Once, Urban League leaders operated as outsiders banging on the doors of government and industry for access. Today’s organization draws much of its financial support from federal and corporate grants.

Bruce Haynes, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis and the grandson of George Haynes, Urban League’s founder, says he wishes the league had a broader pool of support and could take on a more vocal, activist role in American society. Still, with inner-city public-school systems failing, he believes the job training and education programs the Urban League runs provide a critical safety net for millions of blacks with nowhere else to turn.

“It’s easy to say they’re irrelevant and they’re out of touch,” he says of the Urban League. “I do criticize them. I do wish they could do more. But I do have a lot of respect for them. They’ve spent a lot of years trying to make life easier for people.”

Clarifying Its Image

Mr. Morial, a former New Orleans mayor, took the league’s helm seven years ago and has tried to reinvigorate the charity without casting aside the best of its traditions and values.

One of his most important moves, he says, was to bring in a younger generation of leaders, such as Mr. Graham, who just turned 40, and new people from outside the organization. About 70 percent of the Urban League’s roughly 100-member national staff came aboard after Mr. Morial’s arrival, and half of the executives leading local affiliates have been in place less than five years.

“This is not about throwing out the old and bringing in the new. This is about transformation,” Mr. Morial says. “You build on what you have, but you’re not wedded to things just because that’s the way you’ve always done it.”

The organization also took on a national image campaign, hoping to clarify its role to a public that usually thinks of the NAACP when talk of civil-rights groups comes up.

The Urban League streamlined its programs, says Mr. Morial, focusing on the efforts it could do best and trying to reach more people with those projects. Both the size of the national network and the revenue from the dues-paying affiliates have grown by about 23 percent in the past five years.

Over all, the national organization’s revenues have doubled since 2004, the charity’s president says. In 2010 the group’s headquarters raised $25-million in cash and garnered another $14-million in free advertising for its cause.

A five-year, $285-million fund-raising campaign completed in December, allowed the Urban League to provide services to nearly 10 million people. The total exceeded the original goal by $17-million. Said Mr. Morial: “We’ve had a lot of success in a difficult period of recession.”

It has also reached out beyond blacks. The Urban League is known for its annual “State of Black America” report. This year, the accompanying “Equality Index” includes for the first time an analysis of racial disparities suffered by Hispanics.

The Urban League celebrated its centennial year by kicking off “I Am Empowered,” a national public-service campaign, which seeks to use social networks to help millions of Americans pledge to help fight for good jobs, education, housing, and health care.

The league’s leaders say that despite the grim economy and the problems facing inner cities, they are in a good position to help meet the challenges.

“We are optimistic,” says Mr. Hofmeister. “We’ve got a big job ahead of us, but if I can borrow some words from the Obama campaign from a couple of years ago, the Urban League is fired up and ready to go.”

KEYS TO SUCCESS

Broadening its reach: The organization now serves Hispanics as well as blacks.

Identifying young leaders: The organization has made a conscious effort to attract talented young people to lead local affiliates.

Keeping a strong local presence: The group works closely with its 98 local affiliates to keep abreast of key problems facing urban areas.