Company type | Business group |
---|---|
Founded | 1900 |
Founder | Booker T. Washington |
Successor | National Business League |
Headquarters | , United States |
Services | Promote the interests of Black-owned businesses |
The National Negro Business League (NNBL) was an American organization founded in Boston in 1900 by Booker T. Washington to promote the interests of African-American businesses. [1] [2] [3] The mission and main goal of the National Negro Business League was "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro." It was recognized as "composed of negro men and women who have achieved success along business lines". [4] It grew rapidly with 320 chapters in 1905 and more than 600 chapters in 34 states in 1915.
In 1966, the League was renamed and reincorporated in Washington D.C. as the National Business League, which remains in operation.
The National Negro Business League (NNBL) was established in Boston, Massachusetts in 1900 by Booker T. Washington. The effort was supported by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.[ citation needed ] The organization was formally incorporated in 1901 in New York , and established 320 chapters across the United States.
The League included Negro small- business owners, doctors, farmers, other professionals, and craftsmen. Its goal was to allow business to put economic development at the forefront of getting African-American equality in the United States. Business was the main concern, but civil rights came next.
In 1905 the Nashville, Tennessee, chapter protested segregation in local transit with a boycott. Booker T. Washington felt that there was a need for African Americans to build an economic network and allow that to be a catalyst for change and social improvement. Also, extant press releases indicate that "the League organized the National Negro Business Service to 'help . . the Negro business men of the country solve their merchandising and advertising problems,' promoted advertising in Negro newspapers and magazines, and 'influenced . . . national advertisers to use Negro publications in reaching this importantly valuable group of people with its tremendous purchasing power.'" [5]
The organization inspired Robert R. Church Sr. to open Solvent Savings Bank in Memphis, Tennessee in 1906. [6] In 1927, the bank merged with Fraternal Savings Bank and Trust. It closed in 1929. [7]
In 1907 the group's Executive Committee included J. B. Bell of Houston, Texas; 2. S. E. Courtney, M.D. of Boston, Massachusetts; W. L. Taylor of Richmond, Virginia; T. Thomas Fortune of New York City, Chairman; N. T. Velar of Brinton, Pennsylvania; J. C. Jackson of Lexington, Kentucky; M. M. Lewey of Pensacola, Florida; E. P. Booze of Colorado Springs, Colorado; S. A. Furniss M.D. of Indianapolis, Indiana; John E. Bush of Little Rock, Arkansas; and James C. Napier of Nashville, Tennessee. [8]
In May 1913, a respected Black journalist, Ralph Waldo Tyler was elected as the first National Organizer of the NNBL. Tyler's role was to travel throughout the Southern United States and document the state of negro businesses and encourage enrollment in the NNBL. [9]
After the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, the League was headed by his successor at Tuskegee, Robert Russa Moton. Albon L. Holsey, an executive at Tuskegee, was executive secretary of the League. Other leaders in 1922-23 were John L. Webb, treasurer (succeeding Charles H. Anderson), and Charles Clinton Spaulding, head of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Durham, North Carolina. [10]
Affiliated professional organizations included: the National Negro Bankers Association, the National Negro Press Association, the National Association of Negro Funeral Directors, the National Negro Bar Association, the National Association of Negro Insurance Men, the National Negro Retail Merchants' Association, the National Association of Negro Real Estate Dealers, and the National Negro Finance Corporation. [10] The National Negro Bankers Association was organized at a meeting of the League in 1906 by Birmingham's William R. Pettiford. [11]
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
The Baltimore Elite Giants were a professional baseball team that played in the Negro leagues from 1920 to 1950. The team was established by Thomas T. Wilson, in Nashville, Tennessee as the semi-pro Nashville Standard Giants on March 26, 1920. The team was renamed the Elite Giants in 1921, and moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1938, where the team remained for the duration of their existence. The team and its fans pronounced the word "Elite" as "ee-light".
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
Walden University was a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1865 by missionaries from the Northern United States on behalf of the Methodist Church to serve freedmen. Known as Central Tennessee College from 1865 to 1900, Walden University provided education and professional training to African Americans until 1925.
Richard Henry Boyd was an African-American minister and businessman who was the founder and head of the National Baptist Publishing Board and a founder of the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc.
Maud Cuney Hare was an American pianist, musicologist, writer, and African-American activist in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. She was born in Galveston, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney, who led the Texas Republican Party during and after the Reconstruction Era, and his wife Adelina, a schoolteacher. In 1913 Cuney-Hare published a biography of her father.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
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Ralph Waldo Tyler (1860–1921) was an African-American journalist, war correspondent, and government official. He was the only accredited black foreign correspondent specifically reporting on African-American servicemen stationed in France during World War I. His career began in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, in the late 1880s, where he held several journalistic positions including editor of the Afro-American; co-founding the short-lived African-American newspaper, The Free American; contributing a Black news column and serving as society editor at the white-owned Columbus Evening Dispatch, and writing for The Ohio State Journal.
John Angelo Lester (1858-1934) was an American educator, physician and administrator in Nashville, Tennessee between 1895 and 1934. He was a professor of physiology at Meharry Medical College and was named Professor Emeritus in 1930. Lester served as an executive officer in the National Medical Association and various state and regional medical associations throughout Tennessee, a mecca for African-American physicians since Reconstruction.
On October 16, 1901, shortly after moving into the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser, the African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, to dine with him and his family. The event provoked an outpouring of condemnation from white politicians and press in the American South. This reaction affected subsequent White House practice and no other African American was invited to dinner for almost thirty years.
The Colored Conventions Movement, or Black Conventions Movement, was a series of national, regional, and state conventions held irregularly during the decades preceding and following the American Civil War. The delegates who attended these conventions consisted of both free and formerly enslaved African Americans, including religious leaders, businessmen, politicians, writers, publishers, editors, and abolitionists. The conventions provided "an organizational structure through which black men could maintain a distinct black leadership and pursue black abolitionist goals." Colored conventions occurred in thirty-one states across the United States and in Ontario, Canada. The movement involved more than five thousand delegates and tens of thousands of attendees.
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Samuel R. Lowery was an African American preacher and lawyer, who was the first black lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Lowery was sponsored to the Supreme Court Bar by Belva Ann Lockwood, the first woman admitted to the bar, in 1880. Lowery was the fifth black attorney to be admitted to the bar. Later in his life, he worked for African American industrial education and attempted to establish silk farming in Alabama.
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James Carroll Napier was an American businessman, lawyer, politician, and civil rights leader from Nashville, Tennessee, who served as Register of the Treasury from 1911 to 1913. He is one of only five African Americans with their signatures on American currency. He was one of four African-American politicians appointed to a government positions under President William Howard Taft, sometimes referred to as Taft's "Black Cabinet." He was instrumental in founding civic institutions in Nashville to benefit the African-American business community and residents including educational opportunities.
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Solvent Savings Bank and Trust was an African American-owned bank in Memphis, Tennessee, founded in 1906 by Robert Reed Church. It was the first African American-owned bank to achieve $1 million in assets. It merged with Fraternal Savings Bank and Trust in 1927, which failed in 1929.