T. Thomas Fortune Founds the Afro-American League

T. Thomas Fortune convened a national conference in Chicago that founded the National Afro-American League, the first significant Black civil rights organization of the post-Reconstruction era. The League called for full voting rights, equal access to public accommodations, and an end to lynching, an agenda that anticipated the NAACP by nearly two decades. Though the League was short-lived, it established a model of organized national protest that influenced all subsequent civil rights organizing.