The Power Broker

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Biography Documentary hosted by Alfre Woodard, published by PBS broadcasted as part of PBS Independent Lens series in 2013 - English narration

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The Powerbroker: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights 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. The film shows the pivotal events of the civil rights era — Brown v Board of Education, the March on Washington, and the Vietnam War — through the eyes of a man striving to change the established powers in a way no one else could: from within.

This calm, purposeful, dapper, and pragmatic man didn’t need glory or public credit for his accomplishments. "I am not anxious to be the loudest voice or the most popular,” he once said. “But I would like to think that at a crucial moment, I was an effective voice of the voiceless, an effective hope of the hopeless.”

His close ties with powerful whites sometimes came at a cost, including an attempted assassination described as part of a “black revolutionary plot.” Some called him “Whitey” Young, and mocked him as “the Wall Street of the civil rights movement.”