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MISSING THE
MARK
by Mark
Webster
This year’s Frankfort Book Fair will be held on November the 17th
at the Exum Center at Kentucky State University.
In 1998 I attended the Book Fair for the specific purpose of buying
an autographed copy of Tracy Campbell’s Short of the Mark: The Fall
and Redemption of Edward F. Prichard, Jr.
While waiting in line for Mr. Campbell to sign my book, I noticed
the author to his right had no one in his line.
That author was Dennis C. Dickerson, a history professor at
Williams College who was there to autograph his new book, Militant
Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr.
I eventually read both books, both of which were published by the
University Press of Kentucky. Neither
man was anything close to a Libertarian.
Although Mr. Prichard proved to be the more colorful character,
Whitney Young was the greater man.
Prichard is well known to most Kentuckians.
He was a Democrat Icarus to many Democrat fathers.
From youth to middle age, he flew high with several Democrat
mentors: from Pierce Patton, the County Clerk of Bourbon County; to Felix
Frankfurter, his mentor at Harvard Law School and eventual employer when
Prichard clerked for Frankfurter at the U.S. Supreme Court;
to Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, the Mr. Fix-it of
President Roosevelt’s first two terms; to Fred Vinson, Truman’s
incompetent Secretary of the Treasury and the last Kentuckian to be a
member of a President’s cabinet until Elaine Chao.
Prichard was an anomaly. He
spent his early life trying to escape the prison of ordinariness.
Although a New Dealer with a professed interest in the common man,
he was not interested in ordinary life.
To his family he was a “black hearted son of a bitch.” He
failed his physical for the draft because of his obesity.
As a Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate, he could draft
complex legislation to regulate business interests he little understood
but could not draft a simple will. As
a young lawyer with the Treasury department, neither he nor his boss, the
forgettable Fred Vinson, understood the basics of the economy.
Although President Truman was always generous to him,
Prichard made fun of Truman behind his back. In short, Prichard was a fat resume, not a functioning adult.
Prichard’s career came to a splashy end when he was indicted for
conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Bourbon County voters by
defrauding them of a fair election by stuffing a ballot box with two
hundred fifty-four fraudulent votes in the 1948 presidential election.
Although his body did not die until December 23, 1984, his
political life ended in July of 1949 when Kentucky’s best and brightest
hope as a future governor or president became a convict at the federal
penitentiary in Ashland. President
Truman pardoned him as he left office, and Prichard was exiled to
Frankfort to practice law after his law license was restored.
Whitney Young, Jr., on the other hand, was an ordinary person with
ordinary mentors. His
father, Whitney Young, Sr., whose maternal grandfather was a slave in
Scott County, was a disciple of Booker T. Washington.
He eventually became head of the Lincoln Institute in Shelby
County. The senior Young
taught the younger Young the courage to be a mediator and peacemaker. From
his mother, who became the Postmistress of Lincoln Ridge, he
learned the skills of confrontation and argument.
Raised in the black communities of Louisville and Simpsonville,
Young graduated from Kentucky State with dreams of becoming a doctor.
However, Howard and Meharry medical schools rejected him.
He briefly taught at Rosenwald High School in Madisonville before
enlisting in the Army Reserves in 1942 and eventually serving in Europe in
1944. As a non-commissioned
officer in the Army, he honed his skills as a negotiator, particularly in
resolving racial problems between black enlisted men and white officers.
After the war, he earned a Masters from the University of Minnesota
School of Social Work and began his public life in the Twin Cities Urban
League by supporting laws against job bias.
The National Urban League was a voluntary, interracial service agency which was
created to help rural blacks migrating to big cities adjust to urban life.
Young performed similar duties in Omaha before becoming the Dean of
Social Studies at Atlanta University.
In 1961 he became the Chief Executive of the National Urban League.
As the head of the Urban League, Young successfully transformed a
small, conservative organization with modest goals into a national,
professional service agency and a vanguard in the leadership of the civil
rights movement. He realized
that his philosophical viewpoint, somewhere between timid conservatives
who did not want trouble and firebrand radicals who sought trouble, made
him the perfect mediator. He
could quietly get things done through negotiations in corporate board
rooms that others could not in more vocal, publicized protests on the
street. While the radicals made the headlines, Young made the deals.
Ironically, his access to rich whites and his loyalty to President
Johnson, another famous ballot box stuffer, eventually cost him his
reputation in the black community as demonstrated by the uncomplimentary
references to Young in Gil Scott-Herron’s angry posturing in his song
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
The best example of Young’s negotiating skills took place prior
to the 1963 March on Washington. Young
was the first civil rights leader to support A. Phillip Randolph’s call
for a march, a march President Kennedy did not support.
In his famous speech before the Lincoln monument, Martin Luther
King, Jr., said: ”In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to
cash a check.’ He was
talking about collecting on promises made by this country. However,
neither King nor the organization he represented provided any cash for the
march. It took Young to
convince the conservative National Urban League to donate several thousand
dollars. Young worked to make
sure no politicians would speak at the march and to mollify interracial
labor and church leaders who demanded that the rhetoric of the more radial
speeches be toned down. As a
result, the march was a peaceful success in a year of violence and
tragedy. Young received very
little credit for his efforts. He
has become the invisible man of the civil rights movement.
Young died forty years ago on March 11, 1971, while attending a
Ford Foundation Conference in Lagos, Nigeria.
He and the former Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, skipped a final
reception to go swimming. Young drowned in heavy surf despite Clark’s attempt to
revive him. He was just a few
months short of his fortieth birthday, almost the same age as Martin
Luther King, Jr., was at his death. Young
was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Lexington.
President Nixon delivered the eulogy.
Both Prichard and Young fell short of the mark.
For the theft of the civil rights of his neighbors, Prichard
deserves oblivion, despite the Courier Journal’s effort to
canonize him as a wise man. For his work in extending liberty and civil rights to all
Americans, Young deserves the remembrance that is his due.
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