WHITNEY MOORE YOUNG, JR.
Oil, 1980, 38 x 31 inches
Whitney Moore
Young, Jr., executive, was born in 1921 in Kentucky, where he
graduated from Kentucky State College. He took his Master's degree
in 1947 at the University of Minnesota. Degree in hand, he joined
the staff of the Urban League of Saint Paul, Minnesota, as the
director of industrial relations and vocational guidance programs.
Three years later he became executive director of the Urban League
in Omaha, where he was also on the faculty of the School of Social
Work at the University of Nebraska.
During the fifties he also taught at Creighton University and
at Atlanta University. In 1960 he held a Rockefeller Foundation
grant that gave him a postgraduate year at Harvard University,
and this leave was followed by appointment in 1961 as the executive
director of the National Urban League. He was a strong force for
good in that important position, and in 1963 he was one of the
organizers of the March on Washington. A book of his essays entitled
To Be Equal was published in 1964 and throughout the 1960s he
continued his work. In 1971 that work took him to Lagos, Nigeria,
to a conference sponsored by the African-American Association,
where he died at fifty years of age. Under his leadership the
National Urban League had grown to have about a hundred affiliate
organizations in over thirty states.
The Armed Forces Information Services has an
interesting article about Whitney Moore Young, Jr. on their web
site.
