Whitney Young
From Philosopedia
Whitney Moore Young Jr. (31 July 1921 - 11 March 1971)
A United States civil rights leader, Young was Executive Director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971. He was one of the leading civil rights activists of the 1960s.
Young was born in Shelby County, Kentucky, the son of the president of the Lincoln Institute. His mother, Laura, was a postmaster, the first African-American postmaster in Kentucky, the second in the United States.
He earned his B.S. from Kentucky State University. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during World War II, he was trained in electrical engineering. After the war he earned his master's degree at the University of Minnesota.
In 1950 he became president of the National Urban League's Omaha, Nebraska, chapter, after which he became dean of social work at Atlanta University In Georgia. In 1960 he joined the NAACP and became the state president.
Young was a member of the White Plains Community Church (Unitarian) in White Plains, New York. Many of his specific proposals were incorporated into President Lyndon B. Johnson’s antipoverty programs in the mid-1960s. He wrote To Be Equal (1964) and Beyond Racism (1969).
A 1998 biography, Militant Mediator by Dennis C. Dickerson, challenged the black militant view that Young was an “Oreo cookie” who favored corporate chieftains rather than his own people. Young, he found, depended upon corporations and the government for funds to support the Urban League’s services. He condemned Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” fights and, yes, may have “failed to maintain the delicate balance between acceptability to powerful whites and credibility with grass-roots blacks.” But his was a patriotic message of self-help, and he was widely respected for his efforts to improve interracial cooperation.
Young's wife, Margaret Buckner Young, died 5 December 2009. She has been a writer and educator. In the 1950s, she was a professor of educational psychology at Spelman College in Atlanta.
Mrs. Young wrote several books for children about the African-American experience. Among them are The First Book of American Negroes (1966), The Picture Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Black American Leaders (1969) and The Picture Life of Thurgood Marshall (1971).
(See the obituary for Margaret Buckner Young.)
