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Whitney M. Young, Jr., executive director of the Urban League from 1961 to 1971, was born in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, and received hi B. S. degree at Kentucky Stated College in 1941. He later did graduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned an M.A. in social work from the University of Minnesota in 1947.
From 1954 to 1961 Young served as dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work. During the academic year 1960-1961 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University under a Rockefeller Foundation grant.

A prominent lecturer and author of several articles which appeared in professional journals, Young completed his first full-length book, To Be Equal, in 1964. A second, Beyond Racism, was published in 1969.

Young was president of the National Association of Social Workers and the National Conference on Social Welfare. He served on the boards and advisory committees of the Rockefeller Foundation, Urban Coalition, and Urban Institute, and on seven Presidential Commissions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

In 1969 Young was one of the 20 Americans selected by President Johnson to receive the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

Young's many friendships with business and political leaders of the United States stirred much controversy within the black community. Though these relationships were important to the achievement of the Urban League's objectives of jobs for blacks, the epithet "Uncle Tom" was frequently hurled at him. Young, however, was far from an Uncle Tom. He spoke out forcefully, right up to his untimely death, against the slow pace with which businesses and government agencies were fulfilling their promises to blacks. But to Young, the important point was to maintain communication with America's centers of financial and political power, no matter how these race relations might become in the nation's streets and schools. Young died while visiting Africa in 1971.