of the Crisis, which periodical began publication in November of this year.  The organization was successful from the first, and local branches were formed all over the country, some years elapsing, however, before the South was penetrated.  Said the Director:  “Of two things we Negroes have dreamed for many years:  An organization so effective and so powerful that when discrimination and injustice touched one Negro, it would touch 12,000,000.  We have not got this yet, but we have taken a great step toward it.  We have dreamed, too, of an organization that would work ceaselessly to make Americans know that the so-called ‘Negro problem’ is simply one phase of the vaster problem of democracy in America, and that those who wish freedom and justice for their country must wish it for every black citizen.  This is the great and insistent message of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”

[Footnote 1:  For detailed statement of origin see pamphlet, “How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began,” by Mary White Ovington, published by the Association.]

This organization is outstanding as an effort in cooeperation between the races for the improvement of the condition of the Negro.  Of special interest along the line of economic betterment has been the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, now known as the National Urban League, which also has numerous branches with headquarters in New York and through whose offices thousands of Negroes have been placed in honorable employment.  The National Urban League was also formally organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro population, especially of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been organized in 1906.  As we shall see, the work of the League was to be greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene Kinckle Jones, with the assistance of alert and patriotic officers, its work was to prove one of genuinely national service.

Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern college man about the problems at his door.  Within just a few years after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar fellowships would be founded in other institutions; and there was interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.

Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a “vale of tears” a new day of effort and of hope.  For the real contest the forces were gathering.  The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.