Whitney M. Young Jr.

Whitney Moore Young Jr. was born in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, on the thirty-first of July 1921, the son of educators. He took his undergraduate degree at Kentucky State, served as a master sergeant in a segregated Army anti-aircraft unit during the Second World War, and earned his master's in social work from the University of Minnesota in 1947.

He was executive director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971. Under his direction the Urban League's budget grew from four million dollars to seventy-five million; its program staff increased fourfold; and the organization's mission shifted from providing service to Black migrants in northern cities to a comprehensive Marshall Plan for the American Black community, which Young proposed publicly in 1964.

He was the principal Black voice inside the boardrooms of corporate America during the 1960s — a position from which he steered substantive philanthropic giving toward Black educational and economic projects and worked, often invisibly, to integrate the executive suites of Fortune 500 companies. Lyndon Johnson called him "my conscience on civil rights."

He co-organized the 1963 March on Washington alongside A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969.

He drowned in Lagos, Nigeria, on the eleventh of March 1971, age forty-nine, while attending the African-American Dialogue, a conference he had organized to build sustained ties between African American leaders and African states. The exact circumstances of his death remain disputed by his family.

He is honored here as the executive director who turned the Urban League into an engine of policy and corporate change.