In April 1904 in New York’s Carnegie Hall, a meeting was held between two groups—the Alabama Child Labor Committee led by Rev. Edgar G. Murphy and the New York Child Labor Committee. Rev. Murphy proposed the creation of the National Child Labor Committee to advocate for the education and well-being of working children.¹ Once the organization was created, Felix Adler was made the first president, and the organization expanded quickly as concerns over child labor grew more widespread.

On February 21, 1907, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) was chartered by Congress (34 Stat 914). Section 2 said:

That the objects of the said corporation shall be: To promote the welfare of society with respect to the employment of children in gainful occupations; to investigate and report the facts concerning child labor; to raise the standard of parental responsibility with respect to the employment of children; to assist in protecting children, by suitable legislation, against premature or otherwise injurious employment, and thus to aid in securing for them an opportunity for elementary education and physical development sufficient for the demands of citizenship and the requirements of industrial efficiency; to aid in promoting the enforcement of laws relating to child labor; to coordinate, unify, and supplement the work of State or local child -labor committees, and encourage the formation of such committees where they do not exist.²

The elevated profile allowed the Committee to do more including hiring Lewis Hine, a sociologist and photographer who had previously worked for the Russell Sage Foundation. Hine spent the next decade documenting through his photographs children working in factories, cotton mills, and mines. These photographs would prove very important in publicizing the conditions of the many children who worked under hard conditions and were crucial to the NCLC goals—they have since become the images of working children in the early 20th century.

Over the coming years, issues related to child labor continued to be of interest, but the NCLC wanted to go further and made it a goal to create a federal level department. On April 9, 1912, this goal was realized when President Taft signed into law a bill that created the Children’s Bureau as part of the Department of Commerce and Labor. He tapped Julia Lathrop to be its first Chief. Today, the Children's Bureau is part of the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families.

A few years later, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 was passed and became the first federal law that regulated child labor in the United States. The law was declared unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart (247 U.S. 251) in 1918 when the Court decided Congress couldn't regulate working conditions, but that decision was overturned in 1941 with United States v. Darby Lumber Co. that upheld the FSLA and the federal government could regulate employment conditions. The desire to regulate child labor at the federal level wasn’t over and in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed. This law contained provisions on child labor that still govern child labor today.

The National Child Labor Committee continued to advocate for children until 2017 when it ceased operations after over 100 years of dedicated work.