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.