As segregation tightened and racial oppression escalated across the United States, some leaders of the African American community, often called the talented tenth, began to reject Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory approach. W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders channeled their activism by founding the Niagara Movement in 1905. Later, they joined white reformers in 1909 to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Early in its fight for equality, the NAACP used the federal courts to challenge disenfranchisement and residential segregation. Job opportunities were the primary focus of the National Urban League, which was established in 1910.
During the Great Migration (1910–1920), African Americans by the thousands poured into industrial cities to find work and later to fill labor shortages created by World War I. Though they continued to face exclusion and discrimination in employment, as well as some segregation in schools and public accommodations, Northern black men faced fewer barriers to voting. As their numbers increased, their vote emerged as a crucial factor in elections. The war and migration bolstered a heightened self-confidence in African Americans that manifested in the New Negro Movement of the 1920s. Evoking the “New Negro,” the NAACP lobbied aggressively for a federal anti-lynching law.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal provided more federal support to African Americans than at any time since Reconstruction. Even so, New Deal legislation and policies continued to allow considerable discrimination. During the mid-thirties the NAACP launched a legal campaign against de jure (according to law) segregation, focusing on inequalities in public education. By 1936, the majority of black voters had abandoned their historic allegiance to the Republican Party and joined with labor unions, farmers, progressives, and ethnic minorities in assuring President Roosevelt’s landslide re-election. The election played a significant role in shifting the balance of power in the Democratic Party from its Southern bloc of white conservatives towards this new coalition
