Whitney M. Young Jr.

Whitney Moore Young Jr. was born on the thirty-first of July 1921 in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, the son of educators who raised him on the campus of the Lincoln Institute, a school for Black students that his father led. Reared in a household that prized learning and dignity, he took his undergraduate degree at Kentucky State College in 1941 and set his early sights on a career in medicine.

During the Second World War he was trained in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served in a segregated Army, rising to the rank of first sergeant while assigned to a road-construction unit of Black soldiers commanded by white Southern officers. The experience of mediating between aggrieved troops and their commanders turned him from medicine toward the work of race relations. Afterward he earned a master's degree in social work from the University of Minnesota in 1947.

From 1961 until his death, Young served as executive director of the National Urban League, transforming a cautious social-service body into an assertive force for economic justice. He grew its staff and budget many times over, opened corporate boardrooms and government offices to Black Americans, helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, and served as a trusted counsel to presidents and business leaders alike.

In 1969 President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. On the eleventh of March 1971 he drowned while swimming off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of forty-nine. May the bridge he built between worlds, and the dignity he carried into every room, be honored for all time.