The Council was the brainchild of New York journalist Timothy Thomas Fortune, whose earlier attempt—the National Afro-American League—had failed to generate momentum, and disappeared in the early 1890s.

Alarmed by the lynchings and racial discrimination against African Americans, Bishop Walters circulated a national letter of appeal in the spring of 1898, just weeks after the brutal murder of African-American postmaster Frazier B. Baker in Lake City, South Carolina by an armed mob of whites.

[3] The meeting endorsed creation of a non-partisan Council, to be supported by annual dues payments and based on the ideals expressed by the earlier League.

[4] The annual meetings began three months later in Washington, D.C., and were held each year thereafter in a large American city, attracting a vibrant cross-section of African-American leaders.

[6] The Council lobbied actively for the passage of a federal anti-lynching law and raised funds to finance a court test against the new Louisiana constitution's provision effectively disfranchising most of that state's black voters, under the terms of its so-called "grandfather clause."

Men judged to be illiterate were deprived of suffrage rights, but white voters with ancestors who had been registered to vote before a certain date were exempted form the literacy requirement.

Despite well-publicized meetings in New York in 1906 and Baltimore in 1907, however, the Council failed to stabilize and soon collapsed, due to internal friction and lack of revenue.

Many other former leaders of the Council, including Du Bois, George White, Mary Church Terrell, and Archibald Grimké, also helped form the core of the new NAACP, while others joined the new National Urban League.