Whitney Young

• Born: July 31, 1921
• Birthplace: Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky
• Died: March 11, 1971
• Place of death: Lagos, Nigeria

Civil rights leader and social worker

Young won the support of influential political leaders and white corporate America to combat employment discrimination and establish equitable access to housing, health care, education, and social opportunities for poor African Americans. Parts of Young’s socioeconomic plan, designated the “domestic Marshall Plan,” were included in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Education

Early Life

Whitney Moore Young, Jr., was born in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, to Laura Ray and Whitney M. Young, Sr. He grew up on the campus of Lincoln Institute with his two sisters, Arnita (born 1920) and Eleanor (born 1922). An all-black boarding school, Lincoln Institute was established in 1910 by the trustees of previously integrated Berea College in response to Jim Crow laws banning integrated education.

Young’s parents, Laura Ray and Whitney, Sr., married in 1914. Young grew up in an intellectual environment, exposed to the work of African American leaders including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. He was influenced by the tenacity of his mother, who became an instructor at the Lincoln Institute and was appointed the first African American postmaster of Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, in 1945.

After migrating to Detroit, Michigan, where Young’s father worked as an engineer for the Detroit United Railway Co., the family returned to Kentucky in 1920. Whitney, Sr., served as an engineering instructor and subsequently as president of Lincoln Institute. He employed strategies reminiscent of Washington, garnering support from white philanthropists for a janitorial degree program for his school when support for an engineering program lagged. Janitorial education required knowledge of electricity, plumbing, and steam boiler systems, thus enabling African Americans trained at the institute to work in factories, office buildings, and power plants.

Young observed his parents’ strategies for gaining fair treatment and access for African Americans. The knowledge he gained from them contributed to the interracial mediation skills that he demonstrated throughout his life’s work.

Life’s Work

After graduating as valedictorian from the Lincoln Institute, Young attended Kentucky State College, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in 1941. In college, he met Margaret Buckner, whom he married in 1944. The couple had two daughters, Marcia Elaine and Lauren Lee.

Young enlisted in the U.S. Army for service in World War II, rising to the rank of first sergeant. Segregation in the U.S. military relegated African American servicemen to menial duties under the command of white officers. Young’s pragmatism contributed to his becoming a mediator between disgruntled black servicemen and the white power structure. Finding he liked this role, he changed his career goal from that of doctor to social worker.

Young enrolled at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, earning a master’s degree in social work in 1947. He volunteered with the St. Paul chapter of the National Urban League in 1947 and became president of the Omaha, Nebraska, branch in 1950.

Young was appointed dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work, where he worked from 1954 to 1961. During this time, he became president of the Georgia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although he is best known for his distinguished service as executive director of the National Urban League (1961-1971), Young also served as president of the National Association of Social Workers (1969-1971) and was an adviser on racial issues to Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

As executive director of the National Urban League, Young persuaded powerful white political, corporate, and philanthropic leaders to support the Civil Rights movement with the assertion that the movement was consistent with their political and economic interests. Outlining his assertions in two books, To Be Equal (1964) and Beyond Racism (1969), Young anticipated a future in which African Americans would be relegated to inner-city poverty as whites moved into suburban enclaves. In response, he outlined a federal plan based on integration, community organizing, tax incentives for businesses and industry, and abandonment of discriminatory employment, health care, and welfare practices. As an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Young presented a bold plan for eliminating poverty in black America, calling for federal expenditures of $145 billion over ten years. His became known as the “domestic Marshall Plan,” and parts were later included in President Johnson’s War on Poverty.

While attending a conference in Nigeria, Young drowned on March 11, 1971. President Nixon gave the eulogy at his funeral.

Significance

Young grew up amid a confluence of family, social, and political contexts that shaped his renowned ability to negotiate, mediate, organize, strategize, and subsequently to convince those in power that they would benefit from extending opportunities to disenfranchised African Americans. While he supported the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights efforts, his tendency was to work within the white power structure rather than to march and rally against it. Young earned his place in history as a civil rights leader and social-work pioneer by persuading white leaders to support the Civil Rights movement and by leading the National Urban League to provide socieconomic programs that helped more African Americans become economically and civically productive. In the twenty-first century, numerous schools, bridges, scholarships, and social programs across the U.S. bear his name.

Bibliography

Dickerson, Dennis C. Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Examines Young’s interracial leadership strategies within the context of the Civil Rights movement. Explores his success at securing white America’s support for integration via inner-city renewal and jobs programs.

Weiss, Nancy J. Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Examines Young’s tenuous position negotiating between the power elite and the black community while establishing the previously beleaguered National Urban League as a major force for civil rights.

Wilkins, Pebbles W. “Young, Whitney Moore, Jr.” In Encyclopedia of Social Work, edited by R. L. Edwards. 19th ed. Washington, D.C.: NASW Press, 1995. Young is of particular importance to the profession of social work as a social worker and civil rights pioneer, former dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work, and president of the National Association of Social Workers.

Young, Whitney M., Jr. Beyond Racism: Building an Open Society. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. Anticipating a future that holds limited opportunities for African Americans, Young outlines a federal plan, called the Open Society, for their uplift and empowerment.