UIC Library Preserves Chicago Urban League Papers with $100,000 Save America’s Treasures Grant
Records of the Chicago Urban League will be preserved and housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Richard J. Daley Library under terms of a two-year, $100,000 grant from Save America’s Treasures, a federal program administered by the National Park Service.
The records include about 400 cartons of correspondence, research papers, photographs, artifacts and news clippings dating from 1950 through 2000, including many materials from the civil rights era. Other records date back to the league’s start in 1916.
“Being selected for a Save America’s Treasures grant confirms the value of this collection not only to Chicago and the African Americans who migrated here, but also to the entire nation,” said Mary Case, head of the university library.
James Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League, said, “Priceless information about the equal rights movement and the work of our organization will be available for generations to come. This itself is a historic event and certainly a cause for celebration.”
The Chicago Urban League’s original mission was to help African Americans find jobs and housing and to help those who had migrated from the rural South adapt to urban life. Later, the league became involved in the labor, civil rights and urban renewal movements, largely through casework on behalf of individuals who complained of discrimination by employers, landlords, neighbors and service employees.
Highlights of the league’s collection:
- a 1916 annual report noting “firsts” among job placements of African Americans: a social worker at Cook County Hospital, a foreman at the B&O Railroad, and a traveler’s aid worker at the railroad stations. The report also praised a door-to-door campaign by women league members to promote citizenship among new arrivals;
- results of a 1950 national survey of cab companies asking if they hired African-American drivers;
- a chain of correspondence from 1950 detailing harassment of a group of ministers and churchgoers, vandalism of their car, and lax police response at a public beach;
- photos of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young at rallies during their 1966 visit;
- photos of a voter registration drive during the 1976 U.S. bicentennial;
- a 1974 press release and photos documenting the case of a woman paying $210 a month for a substandard four-room apartment on the South Side.
Under the grant, the library’s special collections staff will preserve the records to archival standards, make them available to researchers and present an online exhibition of documents when the project is finished.
The UIC library received a previous Save America’s Treasures grant in 1999 to preserve 6,500 photographs from the Jane Addams Memorial Collection.
The Park Service administers the Save America’s Treasures grants in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. This year, 61 grants were awarded from 337 applications nationally for museum collections, archives, architectural restoration and art conservation.
