Whitney Young's Birthplace: A Civil Rights Leader's Kentucky Roots

In a modest frame house on the campus of a Black high school in Shelby County, Kentucky, one of the most influential civil rights leaders of the twentieth century was born in nineteen twenty-one.

Whitney Moore Young Junior grew up here at the Lincoln Institute, where his father, Whitney Young Senior, served as principal of one of Kentucky's leading historically Black schools. The younger Whitney attended Lincoln through high school before going on to Kentucky State College and eventually a career that placed him at the center of the civil rights movement.

As executive director of the National Urban League from nineteen sixty-one to nineteen seventy-one, Young focused on economic opportunity, pressing corporations to hire Black workers and advising three presidents. The house where he was born is now a National Historic Landmark and a small museum, maintaining photographs and documents from both Young's life and the Lincoln Institute's decades of service to Black education in a segregated Kentucky.