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200 Chapter Six Not Ice Cream and Cake . . . Must Be Something Deeper The Neighborhood Club and Block Unit Movement The areas of Negro need in which the National Urban League has worked most freely and with least community opposition have been in industrial relations , vocational guidance, and neighborhood organization. For there are no other agencies on the national or local level equipped effectively to place Negroes in industrial and business jobs, to guide Negro youth toward wise choice of their careers, to organize Negro neighborhoods so as to develop indigenous and responsible leadership, and to promote better civic understanding and performance . —Lester B. Granger A lthough specific neighborhoods, like the Ville, were sometimes front and center of black reform efforts (as in the case of the Homer G. Phillips Hospital), these struggles were externally focused, aimed at wresting concessions from a racially discriminatory power structure. However , the social work tradition of community organization also had an internal group focus commonly known as “neighborhood work” or “group work.” During the period of this study, the SLUL dominated the neighborhood or group work within the African American community. The Urban League movement’s industrial employment efforts have dominated scholarly attention mainly at the expense of the league’s neighborhood community organizing efforts. Historical studies, in the main, have tended to devalue the league’s neighborhood work, reducing it to mere“clean up the block”campaigns. However , a closer examination of the SLUL’s neighborhood club and block unit The Neighborhood Club and Block Unit Movement 201 movement illustrates the deeper and more expansive concerns motivating these reform efforts. Neighborhood work, as league officials embraced it, aimed to develop a “consciousness among Negro residents that many civic, social and economic” problems they faced could be improved by group interest and group action. The aim was to nurture and “develop intelligent and unselfish leaders,” who could “properly guide in taking community action,” and to help overcome some of the traditional handicaps that tended to set the Negro apart as a “quasi” citizen.1 Although the SLUL’s neighborhood work was undoubtedly influenced by the increasing radicalism in the 1930s, the league’s neighborhood work began during the agency’s Progressive era origins. John T. Clark’s leadership, beginning in 1926, played a dominant role in the substance and form of the SLUL’s neighborhood work. As the Urban League’s chief representative in Harlem, N.Y., and head of the affiliate’s housing bureau before coming to St. Louis, Clark had established the Negro Civic and Improvement League, composed of leadership from various neighborhoods “whose integrity and whose general acquaintance with neighborhood conditions render them especially fit to lead such movements.”2 He organized “neighborhood unions” in each African American community in Harlem, with volunteers residing in each district who joined forces to secure the rights and to address the needs of neighborhood residents in that district. The work of the neighborhood unions fit neatly into the role of the NLUCAN’s housing bureau, which Clark described as “a center for consultation on practically all matters concerning the home life of Harlem Negroes who cannot solve their many problems.”Through the housing bureau, Clark and his staff investigated reported violations of tenement house, board of health, and police regulations and advocated on behalf of residents to municipal authorities. The housing bureau conducted public meetings featuring experts to “educate the people of the community in the rights and duties of landlords and tenants.” Real estate agents worked closely with the bureau, providing lists of vacancies and checking the credentials of tenants who applied.3 The Negro Civic Improvement League and the accompanying neighborhood unions are examples from the initial phase of the national neighborhood movement and were formed along quite similar lines of the neighborhood improvement associations whose membership analysts have identified mainly as white, middle- to upper-class in constituency. These scholars situate the origins of the movement between 1890 and 1920, when “progressives and liberals ” created local organizations to confront the challenges associated with turn-of-the-century cities. According to this argument, neighborhood activists focused their efforts on the needs of newly arrived ethnic groups or other members of the urban poor and emphasized poverty-related issues as well as building community and citizenship through the establishment of settlement houses and community centers. After 1920, these analysts contend, those involved 202 Groping toward Democracy in neighborhood-based work abandoned their residential orientation for a more individualized casework and small-group focus, and...

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