Urban League of Long Island celebrates 50 years

When the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black aviators in the United States armed forces, returned home from World War II, some found work on Long Island at Grumman.

Many thought their backgrounds would help them advance at the Bethpage aerospace giant, but instead they were passed over for promotions and faced discrimination at work.

A group of those workers banded together and, after several attempts, in 1974 formed a Long Island affiliate of the National Urban League, one of the country’s “Big Five” civil rights organizations.

“After serving their country, the Tuskegee Airman faced challenges when they came back from the war and started working at Grumman,” said Su Chen, the local organization’s board chair. “They started the Urban League of Long Island.”

What began largely as an organization dedicated to equality and placing minority workers in jobs has become a group providing mentoring, education, employment assistance and more.

National League president and CEO Marc H. Morial in a written statement said the Urban League of Long Island “for decades has been a force on Long Island to empower communities and change lives.”

The local league affiliate recently celebrated its 50th anniversary at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, honoring its aviation roots. About 325 people gathered at the museum on Nov. 15 to celebrate the nonprofit’s past, present and the future, as well as its founders.

A LEAGUE IS BORN

Several civil rights organizations merged in 1911 to create the Harlem-based National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, helping recent arrivals from the South find jobs and housing. The organization abbreviated its name to the National Urban League in 1920.

Chen noted the organization leadership has always been interracial. Founders include George Edmund Haynes, the first Black person to earn a PhD from Columbia University; and Ruth Standish Baldwin, a white, Jewish philanthropist.

Long Island affiliate founders included Jean R. Esquerre, a Tuskegee Airman who lived in Greenlawn and worked at Grumman, where he rose to become an executive before retiring in 1987. Fighting for racial parity for others on Long Island became a lifelong mission for him.

Esquerre, then the local league’s board president, told Newsday in 1974 that the Long Island business community needed to prove its commitment to equal employment opportunity by not abandoning affirmative action in hiring “when the economy is bad.”

Travis Jackson, the Long Island group’s parliamentarian, said Grumman plants employed relatively few minorities and tended to promote slowly. “There was a disparity,” he said. “That issue was across Long Island.”

Reginald Tuggle, now retired and living in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, became the group’s first executive director in 1975.

“The focus in those days was equality, equal opportunity in housing and jobs,” said Tuggle, 77, and a pastor at Roosevelt Memorial Presbyterian Church for 38 years until 2014. “And equal opportunity before the judicial system. We focused on jobs, access to better health care and justice in the courts.”

ADVOCATING EQUITY

The National Urban League and its Long Island affiliate were among the first to call on the state to investigate the practices of Long Island real estate agents following a 2019 Newsday investigation that found unequal treatment for minorities. In 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced settlements with three brokerages associated with agents who she said engaged in illegal housing discrimination uncovered by the Newsday probe.

The group has been in a transitional period in recent years after former longtime president and CEO Theresa Sanders, of West Babylon, stepped down in 2023 when the organization sued her alleging that she mishandled funds, a claim she denied. The case has since been dropped.

In a recent interview, Sanders cited a report on the state of Black Long Islanders as among her accomplishments during her nearly 30-year tenure. A 2017 report from the Oakland, California-based research institute PolicyLink and the University of Southern California in collaboration with the Urban League of Long Island compiled data on health care, education, housing and jobs. It concluded the local economy could have been $24 billion stronger in 2014 if the racial income gap were eliminated, and a 2024 update reached a similar conclusion.

“The old saying is, if you don’t have data, you don’t have evidence,” Sanders said. “We found Black people weren’t getting what they should in Nassau and Suffolk County.”

Jackson said the organization today often focuses on communities that have significant minority populations such as Elmont, Valley Stream, Roosevelt, Brentwood, Deer Park, Wyandanch, Central Islip and Riverhead.

“We put certain programs in place to allow these communities to better themselves” he said. “It’s not just minorities. It’s all races across the board on Long Island.”

TRAINING PROGRAMS

Through its Project Ready Let’s Surge initiative, the local group provides educational activities, trips, mentors and financial literacy training for youth from kindergarten through college.

For adults, they also teach data analytics and computer programming in Garden City through a partnership with the Springboard Incubator and team with Arista Careers to teach computer programming in Hempstead.

Through Accelerate 360, the group partners with O-High Technology to teach resume preparation and office skills in Plainview. Programs are free for members, and membership rates are charged on a sliding scale, Chen said.

Those interested in the affiliate’s programs should email info@urbanleagueoflongisland.org or call 516-402-3511, Chen said.

The board chair sees the Long Island affiliate as constantly trying to renew itself and remain relevant in a world full of change.

“I like to say that the Urban League of Long Island is rising out of the ashes like a phoenix,” Chen said. “That’s the only way to make a diamond, under pressure.”