Militant mediator : Whitney M. Young, Jr. /

Among the half dozen major civil rights leaders of the 1960s, Whitney Young Jr. was the most successful in building support from both black and white Americans. Young played a key role as the executive director of the National Urban League. He was forceful in convincing white leaders of the urgency of the civil rights struggle and of the value of spending government, corporate, and foundation funds to improve the lives of African Americans. Dickerson's excellent biography establishes that Young was similarly successful in building support among blacks. In contrast to Nancy J. Weiss's Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights (CH, Sep'90), Dickerson gives a solid account of how Young organized diverse black leaders and groups, winning wide support from both middle-class and working-class blacks. Dickerson also does a good job of tracing the influences that shaped Young's leadership, particularly the impact of Young's father. Attacked by black nationalists and white conservatives, Young served as a successful black ambassador to white leaders and an effective voice for black America in the tumultuous 1960s. This book is very readable and well documented, with 42 pages of notes and citations from dozens of interviews the author conducted with critical players in the Civil Rights Movement. Excellent bibliography. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries alike. R. Detweiler; California State University, Dominguez Hills

As a local Urban League leader in the '40s and '50s and National Urban League executive director in the '60s, Young was a bridge between white elites in corporations, foundations, and government and African Americans struggling to exercise their civil rights, in the process raising millions for the League's service programs. When black power replaced integration as the goal of many movement leaders, Young inevitably came to be viewed as too integrationist--one study (Nancy J. Weiss, Whitney M. Young Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1989) saw his work with powerful white leaders as constraining his Urban League agenda. Williams College history professor Dickerson disagrees, reminding '90s readers that, like Young and the Urban League, middle-and working-class African Americans were committed to integration in the '60s, and stressing Young's consistent efforts to maintain support in the black community (through fraternities, churches, voluntary associations, and other institutions) as well as from white elites. A respectful but not hagiographic biography of an often undervalued civil rights leader. --Mary Carroll

A thoughtful study of an often overlooked figure in the American civil-rights movement, by a professor of history at Williams College and historiographer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Whitney Young made his most important contributions to the causes of integration and equal rights as the executive director of the National Urban League--a moderate organization when compared with Stokely Carmichael's SNCC, James Farmer's CORE, or even the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as guided by Martin Luther King. Raised in Kentucky, Young was influenced greatly by his educator father, who shared Booker T. Washington's conservative view of race relations. His subsequent educational and social-work experiences in St. Paul, Minn., Omaha, Neb., and at traditionally black Atlanta University ultimately led to Young's appointment as the league's head. In this position, he walked a fine line between courting wealthy white interests, such as the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller families (the latter helped to fund his graduate studies at Harvard), and acting as a liaison between government and African-American communities in distress. For his high-level white contacts, which included presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Young was often labeled an Uncle Tom and called ""Whitey Young"" by more radical black detractors. In return, Young was not shy about publicly expressing his distaste for the likes of Carmichael, Harlem politician Adam Clayton Powell, and Malcolm X (though he maintained a private correspondence with the Black Muslim leader). To his credit, Dickerson doesn't write hagiography; he points out Young's naivetƿ in believing he could enter the upper echelons of political power despite his color, and Young's support of LBJ's escalation of the Vietnam War because of the president's support for civil-fights initiatives--perhaps Young's greatest political miscalculation. What Dickerson's work lacks is a fuller exploration of Young's personal life. Militant Mediator is likely to rekindle interest in this influential civil-rights advocate. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.