URBAN LEAGUE OF RACINE AND KENOSHA, INC.

MISSION STATEMENT

The Urban league is a non-profit community organization, with national headquarters in New York City and affiliates in cities throughout the nation.  The mission of the Urban League is to enable African Americans and other minority group members to cultivate and exercise their full human potential on a par with all other Americans.  To achieve this goal, the Urban League conducts programs in education, employment, housing, and urban affairs, economics development, community development, law and consumer affairs, social welfare and citizenship education.  These programs are designed to:

¨     Strengthen the growth and development of individuals and families;

¨     Conduct in-depth research to identify the social welfare needs of the League’s constituency and establish plans for corrective action;

¨     Work with existing institutions – public and private – to make them more responsive to, and provide services that will meet the needs of all groups in the community;

¨     Mobilize and organize minority communities to work for the development of alternatives to systems which have been identified as inadequate;

¨     And, where there is need, to develop new, and strengthen existing African American institutions committed to assuring the effective delivery of community services to African Americans.

To accomplish this mission, the Urban League intervenes at all points in social and economic structure where the interests of African Americans, other racial minorities and the poor are at stake; to train members of these communities in strategies and techniques for securing change in the status quo; and to challenge the major sources of power, both public and private, in order to bring about positive and rewarding changes in the daily lives of African Americans and other minorities.

Presented by Raymond Camosy, June, 1994

The History Behind Our Logos

Since its inception in 1910, the National Urban League has been striving to instill personal autonomy and economic opportunity in underserved populations. To illustrate these initiatives the first official logo featured the Lady Justice standing in her hall with the city splayed open at her sides, aglow in her radiance. Her figure represented the bastion of hope that the National Urban League was for the Black Migration Movement which suffered terrible social and economic injustice in the exodus north. In 1948, the logo would be redesigned to illustrate the National Urban League’s commitment to fighting discrimination and promotion of integration in the workforce, in the armed forces and in the Civil Rights Movement. The logo featured a black figure and a white figure walking in- stride, the backdrop of skyscrapers growing ever smaller and even more surmountable with each step forward. And finally the National Urban League’s current logo, a circle with the equal sign enclosed, symbolizes the unwavering commitment to equality for all people – a commitment that has stayed its course and purpose from 1910 to this very day.

The Urban League:
Serving people since 1910