An influential civil rights leader was born and raised right here in Kentucky.

Whitney Young Jr.

trained as a social worker at Kentucky State University, going on to spend most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States.

From leading a national organization to create jobs and advising three U.S.

presidents, Whitney Young Jr.

inspired many, and his legacy lives on.

[music playing] I think what we're fighting against isn't so much making White bad as not making Black bad, and what we are working toward is a society where we lift the positives out of both cultures, reject the negatives, and we can find negatives in both cultures, and move toward a new society that is much better than either of the old.

Think about the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, no one thinks about Kentucky, you know, but we were very much a part of the movement.

And then you think about Whitney Young, you know, someone who's part of this Big Six, but, you know, you don't hear much about Whitney Young, just like you don't hear much about Kentucky and the civil rights movement.

And he is one example of the fact that we produced leaders in Kentucky that influenced and shaped policy in the United States.

He was comfortable in the presence of White people, he was comfortable being the only African-American in the room, he believed that he was equal to anybody.

His voice was in the boardroom and in the White House.

He didn't look down on civil protests in the streets, he saw that that was important, but he also saw that, you know, it was important for us to translate those civil rights demands to shape policy.

Whitney Young was born in Kentucky, 1921, graduated from Lincoln Institute in 1936.

In Shelby County, Kentucky, an all-Black boarding school was built in response to segregation.

The Lincoln Institute, founded in 1910, emerged after the passage of the Day Law by the Kentucky legislature, which ended racially integrated education in the state.

Whitney Young Sr.

served as the school's first Black president.

His wife, Lori Young, made history in her own right, becoming Kentucky's first Black postmistress.

Their son, Whitney Young Jr., was raised on this campus alongside his two older sisters.

Today, the Lincoln Institute and the Young family home remain preserved as a national historic landmark.

Whitney Young Sr.

was very astute and crafty, and, you know, not only wanted more for his children but also others who would be attending Lincoln Institute as well.

It focused more on vocational employment, you know, whether janitorial services or being a cook or some sort of domestic service.

Whitney Young Jr.

graduated as valedictorian, then continued his education at Kentucky State University, where he met his wife, Margaret Butler.

During World War II, Young enlisted in the U.S.

Army.

He was trained at MIT in engineering.

He excelled and became a sergeant, but he found himself in a situation where he was constantly negotiating and mediating between White officers and Black infantry.

You know, that's where Whitney Young, I think, actually found his calling in terms of being able to mediate that tension, and from that point forward became more committed to addressing the tension between Blacks and Whites, but, more importantly, trying to elevate opportunities for African-Americans.

I think we can attribute it directly, in part, to the mobility of Negroes as made necessary by World War II, when Negroes were taken out of the South for the first time in their lives, they traveled throughout the world.

They saw how they got a taste of freedom, taste of what it meant to be a man.

They found out that their lives did not have to be lived in misery and abuse.

Once, you know, he gets his master's degree in social work after going to St.

Paul, Minnesota, and, you know, begin working with the Urban League, and then going on to Omaha, Nebraska, and becoming the president of the local Urban League.

The Urban League basically prepared people to take on jobs that were normally reserved for White people.

They focused not just on Black people, but they also focused on low-income people across the board.

We are the social engineers, we are the strategists, we are the planners, we are the people who work at the level of policy making, policy implementation.

We're the highest echelons of the corporate community, the highest echelons of the governmental community, both at federal, state, and local level.

The highest echelons of the labor movement.

The Urban League was an organization that was not known for its civil rights activities.

He had worked with major foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, and one of their executives recognized his talent and brought him on in 1961 as executive director of the National Urban League, and now we're getting at the height of the civil rights movement.

It's when the protests are really taking off.

The sit-in demonstrations, stand-ins, economic boycotts.

Of course, it would be 1963 when you'd have the march on Washington.

But I spoke about the responsibility of Negroes to do a lot of different types of marching.

We must also march our children to the libraries, and their parents must march to the adult education centers, the retraining centers, and to the PTA meetings, and to these other places, to be assured that once those rights were won and the doors were down, that the people would be in a position to take advantage of them.

Martin Luther King was quite impressed, with, in his words, with Whitney Young's, quote-unquote, “creative vitality.” King recognized that Whitney Young could complement what the other civil rights leaders were doing.

He was influential without a lot of fanfare.

He knew what had to be said in those boardrooms to prepare them to understand how to address the current social unrest that was taking place.

Because he was in a business suit, surrounded by White corporate leaders, that he was in spaces that, you know, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and others could not venture into.

You know, the name-calling didn't affect him.

You know, he had a mission, he had a vision, and he refused to be deterred or denied.

Despite criticism and even death threats, Whitney Young Jr.

never stopped pushing for change.

His work brought him into the highest levels of government, beginning with the Kennedy administration and growing into a powerful partnership with President Lyndon B. Johnson But Johnson felt that he could talk with Whitney Young, and they could think about how we could get into these corporate rooms, and how could we get African-Americans more access to employment opportunities, and to housing and education opportunities, and all of that.

And so, that's where the two of them were able to work together on the Great Society program.

Martin Luther King made Johnson feel a bit uncomfortable, because King's coming at you morally, and Whitney Young was a businessman.

You know, he was an integrationist, but he was a businessman.

He was a pragmatist.

You know, he and Johnson could identify with each other and say, “Okay, what can I get out of this?” He was able to kind of bridge that sort of initial divide between he and Nixon, because of his gift as someone who knew how to speak that language, and, when I say “speak that language,” was able to articulate not only what it meant to be an African-American, but what was needed, and what the government had not done.

And, of course, Nixon ended up respecting him very much.

In fact, when, you know, when Whitney Young dies in March of 1971, he sends a plane to Lagos, Nigeria, to bring his body back.

In 1971, during a trip to Lagos, Nigeria, Whitney Young Jr.

's life came to an untimely end.

His death was first reported as a heart attack, but was later determined to have been caused by drowning.

This photograph was taken the day before his passing.

He was buried in Lexington, at Cove Haven Cemetery.

It was definitely a monumental event, of a Black man being buried in a Black cemetery, in a Black community, and the president of the United States, who was a Republican, is there offering remarks on Whitney Young's accomplishments.

From a campus in Kentucky to the corridors of power in Washington, Whitney Young Jr.

's legacy endures in the pursuit of equality, and the work continues.

You cannot be colorblind today, when color consciousness has been the history of the Negro in this country, and it's not enough now to be colorblind.

For a while, we've got to be color-conscious in a positive way.