Races: The Other 97%

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real competition would come in the integrated world.

The first test came with World War II. Young enlisted, was sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an intensive course in electrical engineering. At first, his white roommate from Mississippi refused to speak to him. Within six months, the Mississippian asked Young to be best man at his wedding (Young accepted) and suggested that he would tolerate Young as a brother-in-law (he declined). Instead, he married Margaret Buchner, a stunning schoolteacher whom he had met at Kentucky State College. She now writes children's books on civil rights and Negro history. They have two daughters, Marcia, 20, and Lauren, 13.

Life's Work. Despite his bachelor's degree from Kentucky State and electrical-engineering training at M.I.T., Young went to Europe as an enlisted man in a Negro road-construction company that was principally officered by Southern whites. "I had to negotiate between them," says Young. "I insisted on the officers' treating the men with dignity, giving them passes, and eliminating all forms of brutality. I suppose it was this experience that made me decide that I wanted to make my life's work race relations."

After the war, Young went to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a master's degree in social work (his thesis topic: a study of the Urban League in St. Paul) and helped organize a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. He worked for Urban League groups, first in St. Paul and then in Omaha, while lecturing at colleges in both cities. He then became dean of Atlanta University's School of Social Work. In Georgia, Young joined the N.A.A.C.P., eventually rose to become its state president before joining the National Urban League.

Wry & Romantic. Young wears his commitment on his lapel, in the form of a disk bearing the algebraic equal-sign ( = ). It is made of platinum, and he calls it his "more-than-equal button." His personal style is a beguiling mixture of the realistic, the wry and the romantic. He frankly lists among his assets as a Negro mediator with the white world his knowledge of "what happens in the sauna bath at the Harvard Club." When he feels he has pushed a white audience as far as he can, he turns a joke on himself. He admits facetiously to having felt "some anxiety" the first time he flew with a Negro pilot. "That shows how much I had been brainwashed." If the subject is Negro immorality, he points out that he did not get his relatively light color "because of an overly aggressive grandmother."

Young carries in his pocket the lyrics to The Quest, a song from Man of La Mancha, and will read the lines to himself or others at the slightest provocation. To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe,/ To bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go. Last week, when a well-known Negro intellectual voiced his despair over the future of moderate leadership, Young rushed over to buck up his friend. First, he reminded him that the "wild men" among the militants would like nothing better than to see responsible leaders opt out of the civil rights cause. Then the romantic Young read the La Mancha lyrics.

Young making like Don Quixote? The superficial resemblance is slight. For exercise he mounts not a nag but