A Kind of Bridge

Whitney Moore Young Jr. was too sensitive a man to ignore the hurt of being called "Uncle Whitney" or "Whitey Young" by black extremists. Nor did he enjoy being labeled a "moderate," when he felt as angry and as militant about white racism as any of his brothers. Young spent many tortured nights talking out his anguish with close friends. Yet he always concluded that his own popularity was irrelevant to what he felt he could do best to aid black progress: awaken white corporate boardrooms to the economic injustice of discrimination against blacks. When Young, 49, died last week while swimming in the Atlantic surf off Lagos, black America lost one of its most effective leaders.

In his ten years as executive director of the National Urban League, the imposing (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.) Young, who was a dull public speaker but an articulate private persuader, had transformed the League into an activist job-seeking organization with new roots in the ghettos. Before Young's arrival, the League's image had been that of a research-oriented interracial group whose members prowled libraries and whose middle-class contributors munched cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches at suburban teas, while deploring the plight of city blacks. Under Young, the League helped 54,000 blacks find jobs; it and its affiliates raised or funnelled $45 million into such practical programs as its street academies for high school dropouts and its job-training facilities in 100 cities. "Pride and dignity come when you reach in your pocket and find money, not a hole," Young argued.

An upper-class black with a $45,000 salary, Young neither shunned blunt talk when addressing white banquets nor donned a dashiki to convince his fellow blacks that he had soul. He was always an individual, difficult to classify. Young's special strength, notes a black journalist, was that "he was urbane enough to talk with the fat cats downtown and hip enough to talk with the tough cats uptown and he never seemed out of place doing either." Indeed, even some of the most bitter black spokesmen came to warmly appreciate Young. When informed of his death, Poet and Playwright Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) wept. "There is a loss here that a lot of black people aren't aware of," Jones said. "Whitney Young had become a kind of bridge between that part of the community which is activist and that part which is mainstream. He unified all forces."

One of Young's greatest contributions was to convince many black radicals that whites can still help their cause. Black apartheid, he argued, "plays right into the hands of the enemy, who would like nothing better than to have us separated." But he would accept whites only on his own terms. "We don't want missionaries and masochists. We want technical assistance. And we need to educate the masses of white people about racism in this society."

Young deplored the academic studies of the "black problem," contending that what was needed were studies to find out why whites "want to bring up their children in those bland, sterile, antiseptic, gilded ghettos, producing stagnation and uncreative people." He scoffed at talk of armed black rebellion as simply "suicidal." Young was cheered when he accepted the concept of Black Power at a 1968 meeting of CORE, although he carefully defined it as a reach for "pride and community solidarity" without resort to violence.

Born in Lincoln Ridge, Ky., where his father had become the first black president of Lincoln Institute, a white-run high school for blacks, Young held a bachelor's degree from Kentucky State College and an M.A. in social work from the University of Minnesota. When he enlisted in the Army in World War 11, he was assigned first to electrical engineering studies at M.I.T., but later wound up building roads in Europe in a black company commanded by Southern whites. As a first sergeant he became an effective negotiator between officers and men. "I insisted on the officers treating the men with dignity and eliminating all forms of brutality," he recalled. He later utilized the same middleman skills in service with Urban League units in St. Paul and Omaha, as dean of Atlanta University's School of Social Work, and upon joining the Urban League's national staff in 1961.

Hovels. Young's most publicized plea was for a "domestic Marshall plan" to help U.S. blacks recover from "more than three centuries of abuse, humiliation, segregation and bias."

Young first proposed it in 1964, and he pushed the idea again last year, arguing: "Nothing is more irritating than to visit Western Germany and other countries in Europe that have been aided by our tax dollars and find no slums, then to go to the Harlems of this country and see the widows and mothers of people who died in World War II living in hovels."

Although he was keenly aware of the nation's "oppressive potential for brutality," Whitney Young insisted to the last that the two races must reach an accommodation. His attitude led one white businessman to tell Young: "You know, if all Negroes were like you, we wouldn't have a race problem." Replied Young: "Do you know, if all white people were like me, there wouldn't be a race problem." Young advocated an open, diversified society, in which all members of both races could freely choose their style of living.

For himself, Young chose a colonial home in New Rochelle, a New York suburb. But as his commuter train rolled through Harlem each workday, Young was troubled. "Should I get off this train this morning and stand on 125th Street cussing Whitey to show I am tough?" he once mused. "Or should I go downtown and talk to an executive of General Motors about 2,000 jobs for unemployed blacks?" Young, a civil rights leader who was interested above all in results, remained on the train.

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