National Urban League Celebrates 20 Years of Transformational Leadership Under President And CEO Marc H. Morial

NEW YORK (June 5, 2023) – Just a few weeks after taking the reins of the nation’s largest historic civil rights organization, Marc H. Morial delivered his first “State of the Urban League” keynote address at the Conference in Pittsburgh, laying out a bold, 5-point Empowerment Agenda that would come to define the next two decades of civil rights leadership.

Twenty years later, these five points stand enshrined as the National Urban League’s five pillars: Jobs and Economic Empowerment, Education and Youth Development, Health and Quality of Life, Housing and Community Development, Justice and Civic Engagement.

As the first elected official to lead the National Urban League, Morial has brought an unprecedented political savvy and deep comprehension of the inner workings of government not just to the Urban League, but to the entire 21st Century Civil Rights Movement. 

In that prophetic speech in Pittsburgh 20 years ago, Marc said “We must enthusiastically embrace our heritage as a civil rights organization that promotes racial justice, from employment to police violence, from redistricting issues to racial profiling.” Since then, Morial has marshalled the forces that mobilized to defeat the lynching brute “Jim Crow” to battle his treacherous, gerrymandering son “James Crow, Esquire,” and now stands just as defiantly against his tiki-torch-carrying grandson, “Jimmy Crow.”

Morial’s 20th anniversary will be reflected among the key themes of the National Urban League Conference in Houston July 26, through 29, through an examination of how the nation has changed and how the racial justice movement has evolved.  As a literal child of the Civil Rights Movement whose activist parents’ courtship began over “an intense conversation about Brown v. Board of Education,” Morial’s perspective is sweeping and unique.
 

To read the full press release, please see here.