How black “folk” survived in the modern south: Industrialization, popular culture, and the transformation of black working-class leisure in the Jim Crow South

This chapter examines the class perspectives and the assimilationist projects of Jewish and black reformers during periods of substantial migration through a comparison of the activities of the Educational Alliance and the Urban League. It focuses on the class visions of Afro-American social activists in the broader frame of Progressive reform, by treating the Alliance and the League as case studies in Americanization and racial uplift. To appreciate the parallels in class perspective between Jewish and black reformers, the chapter also focuses on the housing, neighborhood improvement, and employment programs initiated by the Educational Alliance and the Urban League. Jewish leaders formed the Educational Alliance in 1891 in order to Americanize the city's growing Jewish immigrant population. Black elites established the National Urban League in 1910 to assist black migrants' adjustment to New York and other cities across the nation.