Colored National League

The Colored National League was not a single individual author but an African American civil rights organization active in Boston in the late 1890s. The group is credited by the Library of Congress as the author of Open Letter to President McKinley (1899), a pamphlet created in response to racial injustice and the federal government's failure to protect Black Americans.

Library of Congress records describe the pamphlet as a letter from prominent African American citizens of Boston to President William McKinley, protesting discrimination, violence, and the denial of civil rights in the South. The item is also associated with figures including I. D. Barnett, listed as president, and Archibald H. Grimké, who chaired the committee and read the letter at a mass meeting held at Charles Street A.M.E. Church in Boston on October 3, 1899.

Today, the League is remembered mainly through this printed appeal and related archival records. Rather than leaving behind a conventional author biography, it left a document of collective protest—one that speaks to the role of Black civic organizations in pushing the United States to live up to its own promises.