He completed his B.D. degree four years later, and, strongly influenced by his study of the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, Young resolved to "change this country without violence."
Civil Rights Activist
In 1955 Young was ordained a minister in the socially liberal and predominantly white United Church of Christ. He pastored African American Congregational churches in Marion, Alabama, and the southern Georgia small towns of Thomasville and Beachton, before becoming the associate director of the Department of Youth Work for the National Council of Churches in 1957. As a part of his duties there he administered a voter education and registration project funded by the Field Foundation, and this brought him into contact with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In the summer of 1961 Young joined that organization and rapidly became an able administrative assistant and confidant of King.
Worldly in matters of finance and organizational techniques and conversant in the language of the white establishment as well as the patois of the uneducated rural African Americans, Young excelled as a fund-raiser and strategist and was SCLC's principal negotiator. While others became newsworthy by getting arrested and beaten, Young worked quietly behind the scene to persuade the white power structure of the futility of resistance to the African American civil rights movement.
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