The Powerbroker: Whitney Young's Fight for Civil Rights

The Powerbroker: Whitney Young's Fight for Civil Rights tells the story of Whitney Young, who biographer Nancy Weiss Malkiel called "the inside man of the black revolution." By challenging America's business and political communities directly, Young was able to make in-roads where other civil rights leader could not. His efforts to open the doors of equal opportunity were often attacked by the very people he was trying to help. The film chronicles the public and private trials of a man navigating a divided society in an explosive time. Years in the making, The Powerbroker: Whitney Young's Fight for Civil Rights reveals a story that has been overlooked by history. Whitney Young's niece, Emmy-award winning journalist Bonnie Boswell and her team have gathered never-before-seen archival footage, home movies, family photos, audio tapes of Young, as well as interviews with legendary activists and scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Vernon Jordan, Dorothy Height, Ossie Davis, Howard Zinn and John Hope Franklin. Young's journey took him from rural Kentucky to the segregated U.S. Army, where he learned his first lessons in negotiating race relations. Back in the States, Young reached out to local businesses, encouraging them to give their African-American neighbors a chance for a job. As Executive Director of the National Urban League, he used the same strategy on grander scale. The Powerbroker follows Young as he shuttles between the streets of Harlem and the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, tying the needs of Main Street to the interests of Wall Street. Young advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and guided each along a path toward historic change. And through his story, all the pivotal events of the civil rights era - Brown v. Board of Education, the March on Washington and the Vietnam War - are seen through the eyes of a man striving to change the established powers the way no one else did could - from within.