National Afro-American League Founded 1890

T. Thomas Fortune convened the founding meeting of the National Afro-American League in Chicago on January 15, 1890 — a date chosen to honor Frederick Douglass's birthday. The League was an early forerunner of the NAACP, calling for legal challenges to disenfranchisement, railroad segregation, and lynching. Though it dissolved by 1893 for lack of funding, it reconstituted as the Afro-American Council in 1898 and kept the concept of a national civil rights organization alive.