Excerpts from Whitney Young's inaugural address as head of the National Urban League in 1961. Remember that at this time, the term "Negro" was acceptable to most African Americans.
The National Urban League is on a crusade for justice, for decency, for morality, h
onesty, and frankness. It is on a crusade to put into operational framework on a day-to-day, person-to-person basis the American creed and democratic promise. Ours is an obligation most immediate to the Negro citizen or other minorities whom we serve, but in the final analysis it is a responsibility to all America as it faces its greatest hour of challenge.
I contend, over many protests, that as the Negro for over 300 years has been given the special consideration of exclusion, he must now be given special treatment-through services and opportunities by society-that will insure his inclusion as a citizen able to compete equally with all others.
We are living in a national society that no longer feels that it discriminates, because it has removed some of the most visible signs which disturbed its conscience and were repugnant to its sense of decency and its knowledge of fair play. It is a society that in the process of so doing would simultaneously close its eyes to the subtle prejudices that remain. It is one inclined to conveniently claim amnesia concerning the generations of tragic deprivation and denial to which the Negro citizen has been subjected and from which many still bear the scars. It is a national society that would like to behave as if we are all starting this race today on an equal basis.
Recently, we experienced the deaths of two great icons of the American civil rights movement. In October, Rosa Parks died at the incredible age of 92. On Tuesday of this week, Coretta Scott King died at age 78. I note with regret the passing of these two brave and dedicated women. And I am awed by the many years they worked for justice and equality. They, along with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. were on the forefront of the non-violent struggle for social change and peace.
We are all familiar with the names Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King. But we may not know or remember the names of other pioneers of the civil rights movement. Among them there was a Unitarian Universalist, Whitney Moore Young, Jr. In 1968 Young
received a Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, from President Lyndon Johnson, for his work in the field.
Whitney Young was a highly educated, talented and dedicated black leader. He was most well known as the head of the National Urban League. Between 1961 and 1971, Whitney Young changed the National Urban League from a relatively passive civil rights organization into one that aggressively fought for justice. He was not a rabble rouser, but was noted for his ability to get things done, to bring folks together and to mediate between opposing sides.
He was, in short, a builder of bridges. He was a builder of bridges between black and white, between ghetto dweller and comfortable suburbanite, between poor private citizens, powerful corporations and government agencies. He was a builder of bridges between civil rights organizers and the two Presidential administrations of Kennedy and Johnson.
The life of Whitney Young was all too brief, cut short by a tragic accident at age 49. Yet in those few years, he accomplished a tremendous amount. He opened up great opportunities for minorities, especially in education, job training and employment. He was fiercely dedicated to the causes of freedom, justice and equality.
Whitney Young was a Unitarian Universalist for 20 years and belonged to three UU churches: in St. Paul, Minnesota, Omaha, Nebraska and White Plains, New York. He also served on the Board of the UU Service Committee and on two UUA commissions and regularly spoke before UU congregations and gatherings.
In his memory, the UUA's Faith in Action department in 1983 established the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Urban Ministry Fund. This fund gives out one year grants to projects which make a difference in cities across the country. Josh Pawelek, as a ministerial intern in the Faith in Action Dept., wrote an excellent essay about Young, which I am using as the main source for this sermon.
I'd like to share with you the story of Whitney Young. He was born in 1921 on the campus of Lincoln Institute. This was a boarding high school for blacks in rural Kentucky near the Indiana border. His father taught there and in 1935 became the school's first black president. Whitney and his two sisters were raised and educated at Lincoln.
As a child, Young was taught not to feel inferior to white people, despite the verbal abuse he met outside the Institute. He understood that segregation was a man-made institution, not ordained by God. His father's lessons about the struggle for justice were not those of radicalism and protest, but of self-empowerment and persistence. Young said, "My father taught me and all of his students how to accept the unpleasant and to cope with it instead of running away from it." Knowledge and education were the principal paths to freedom. These became two of the hallmarks of Whitney Young's life and work.
When he entered the Kentucky State Industrial College, Young originally thought of a career in medicine. But World War II interrupted his plans and he joined the Army. In Europe during the war, Young became more aware of the problems of race relations. As captain of his Army
unit, he saw a deep division between blacks and whites, but also saw ways to address them through negotiation and compromise. It was then that he began to realize the possibilities for dialogue between blacks and whites.
He said, "I began to feel the first flicker of hope that if justice could be won for the American Negro in a foreign land, then it could be won in his own country... This was a problem which called for education on both sides: education for the Negro in skills to make up for centuries of slavery and discrimination; and education for white people in exposure in human relations and to teach them appreciation and respect for the Negro as an individual."
When Young returned home after the war, he married a young woman whom he had met in college, Margaret Buckner. Then he began his life-long career of challenging racist assumptions and the practices of "business as usual" in the U.S. He followed Margaret to the University of Minnesota, where she was finishing a master's degree in educational psychology. There he earned a degree in social work, and focused his studies on patterns of race-based discrimination in this country. Afterward, he went to work for the St. Paul Urban League, developing greater job opportunities for blacks in the Twin Cities. This meant speaking with local blacks and with the local white employers who had the economic power to provide jobs. He succeeded, one job at a time. Blacks were hired in industries where they had never worked before. In two years, he increased by 25% the number of companies and government agencies that employed blacks. This is the kind of work Young did his whole career... rarely in the headlines; always behind the scenes; always seeking out those with power to make changes on behalf of racially oppressed people.
By then, Whitney and Margaret had two little daughters, Marcia and Lauren. The family moved on to Omaha, Nebraska, where Whitney served for three years as the executive director of the Omaha Urban League. In 1954, Young was invited to be the Dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work. The family went to Atlanta, and Young quickly set to work to improve the school - professionalizing the faculty, recruiting talented students and increasing the school's public visibility.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was beginning to blossom throughout the South and Young began to find his voice there as well. He continued to build bridges behind the scenes. He was involved in many campaigns in Atlanta and the State of Georgia and battled discrimination in employment, education, and in the use of public facilities such as restrooms, transit lines and libraries. Young was a founding member of the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action, a group of young black professional and businessmen. There he spearheaded the publication of A Second Look: The Negro Citizen in Atlanta. It documented the many inequalities faced by blacks and provided the basis for further anti-segregation activities.
After six years in Atlanta it was time for the Youngs to move on. In 1960, Young took a year-long sabbatical at Harvard to study the legal barriers to economic and social advancement for blacks. From there he was called to his celebrated position as Executive Director of the National Urban League, based in New York City.
As the Urban League's new head, Whitney Young hit the ground running. He appealed to the enlightened self-interest of corporate leaders and philanthropists and greatly increased funding for the organization. In the time he was there, the League's annual budget rose
from about $340,000 to $15 million. In 1972, the year after his death, it rose to $18 million. Young also used his national position to bring the discussion of civil rights to a broader spectrum of Americans.
By 1963, Young had spelled out the rationale for affirmative action (although back then it was called "compensatory action"). He argued that this action was necessary to raise up blacks and other minorities, especially those trapped in poor urban and rural areas. He detailed his program in the book To Be Equal, and his program became known as the "Domestic Marshall Plan." The Urban League called for the infusion of hundred of millions of dollars into a massive "crash" attack on poverty. Through public and private agencies, energy and resources would be poured into education, employment, housing, social services and leadership development. Young argued that that cost would be worth it in the long-run, saving millions in health and welfare services. And such spending would reverse the deterioration of urban families and communities and prevent this in the future.
Critics argued that the plan went well beyond the limits of the national consensus on civil rights. Surveys on white attitudes revealed a belief that the law should guarantee equal opportunity, but almost unanimously whites were against preferential treatment to make up for past discrimination. Although Young was unable to overcome the weight of such public opinion, he revealed the hypocrisy behind this thinking.
In a speech before his UU congregation in White Plains, he said,
"People who all these years have never said anything about preference the other way, have now suddenly become very sensitive about preference ... People, who all of these years have never said anything about zero percent quotas of Negroes and one hundred percent quotas of white people, now suddenly get awfully upset when we have to talk about numbers."
By the mid-1960's, the civil rights movement was shifting from the courts to the streets. The National Urban League had always been moderate and had never before focused on civil rights. Its tools were negotiation, persuasion, education and investigation. It collected data on poverty, social status and race and tried to convince employers to hire blacks. But Young knew that the League would have to change if it was going to remain credible in the black community.
One of Whitney Young's first activities as a civil rights leader was to represent the Urban League on the organizing committee of the historic 1963 March on Washington. Not only did he serve as a bridge-builder and negotiator among the organizers, but also between the organizers and the Kennedy Administration. The administration was in the process of bringing its omnibus Civil Rights Bill to Congress. It was deeply concerned that march-related violence would push Congressional opinion the wrong way. Fortunately the march was peaceful. Instead, Congress was persuaded by the great success of the march to pass the bill.
Despite Young's very busy schedule, he found the time to serve on the Board of the UU Service Committee and on a new UUA Commission on Religion and Race. He had reservations about serving on the latter because it was formed after the UUA General Assembly in Chicago. That gathering had failed to pass a resolution denying voting rights to congregations that denied membership to people based on race, color or nationality. He confessed that the vote "almost made me embarrassed to be a Unitarian." Then in 1966, the General Assembly passed a business resolution urging all churches in the denomination to work towards full integration. It also urged the UUA as a whole to recruit and train more black ministers and ministers from other minority groups.
In general, he was positive and encouraging in his dealings with UUA officials. He wrote many letters offering advice and making recommendations. In 1968, he was invited to serve on the UUA Commission for Action on Race. He also got his home congregation, the White Plains Unitarian Church, to pay more than lip service to its liberal ideals about civil rights in the
community.
He said about churches and ministers in general, "Eleven to twelve A.M. on Sundays has been the most segregated hour in America, and it has been easier to integrate the chorus line of a burlesque show than to integrate a choir in most of our churches. The Church must decide what it is going to do and what it is going to be. Is it a physical plant or is it a social institution? Is the ministry a profession where practitioners are more concerned with the facial expressions of their largest contributors than with helping their congregations to live up to the teachings of the Scriptures?"
I think we as a denomination have made good progress since that GA in Chicago in terms of awareness and integration of some of our urban churches. Yet sadly we still have a long way to go. Just look around many of our congregations and I think you'll agree.
As the 60's wore on and the civil rights movement progressed, the new, younger leadership in the black power movement became critical of Young's relatively "moderate" views. And they didn't like his connections to white corporate and government leaders. For his part, Young sought to strike a balance. He did his best to support his fiery black critics while keeping his reputation in the white world. He also maintained that there should be a range of methods and strategies in the struggle for justice. Everyone, he said, had a role to play and the collective was stronger than the individual. He knew, in fact, that the extremism of Black Power activists and other radicals created an opportunity for him to present his more moderate solutions to racial problems.
Yet, as his biographer put it, "the very role he carved out for himself meant that he would be mistrusted among his own people." He was called such insulting names as "Uncle Tom" and "Oreo." At times, Young must have felt very isolated and misunderstood and not totally comfortable in either the white or the black community.
Although popular legend has tended to see Young from the perspective of his critics-as a panderer to white corporate leaders-history reveals a different picture. He was a man of vision and vigilance who would tolerate and encourage any change if it was in the right direction, but who had no patience for racism and the belittling of the human spirit. He understood power in the United States and he understood that racism was the product of white power. He attempted to make white people understand their role in a racist society and what they could do with their power to change it. In the final analysis, he tried to connect people. As the Los Angeles Times explained shortly after his death in 1971, "Whitney Young Jr. tried to build bridges. That was what he was all about."
In March 1971, Young died while swimming off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria. It was possible that he died of a stroke, although no one knows for sure. His death sent shockwaves through the U.S. corporate, governmental and civil rights communities. 18,000 mourners came to his wake at New York's Riverside Church and 4,500 attended the funeral. Thousands more attended the burial service in Lexington, Kentucky.
Howard Thurman's observed this about the breadth of Young's appeal:
"At Whitney Young's funeral, I could think of no other occasion which, by choice, would bring together the very rich and the poor, the black separatist and the white segregationist, those who had abandoned all hope for the internal reordering of society on the basis of equality of opportunity and privilege, and those who were dedicated to an orderly reshuffling of priorities which would give maximum participation to all in the fruits of a good society."
His minister at the White Plains church claimed that "Young often remarked, 'there are always ways not to do what you don't want to do. A nation that can send men to walk on the moon can eliminate its ghettos if it wants to.' And he tried to make us want to enough... Separation was the evil he strove to overcome."
Whitney Young left us with a warning: "The prophets of violence are waiting to see if we fail. The prophets of bitterness are waiting to reap the whirlwind of America's indifference." And he left us with a challenge: "The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self."
Why should we work for justice? As Whitney Young said, "It is only when an individual identifies with something that transcends self that life has real meaning." Amen!
Thomas Blair, Whitney Moore Young, Jr.: Social Work Administrator, 1921-1971. An essay on the Notable American Unitarians website of the Harvard Square Library.
Website address: www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/young.html.
Josh Paweleck, An Informational Essay on Whitney M Young, Jr., an essay written Fall 1996 for the Faith in Action Dept. of the UUA.