"I really believed what I was taught in Sunday school," said Young, who died in 1996 at age 77. "You are supposed to love your brother and sister. That’s the way it is with the union movement."

Born in Paducah in 1919, Young was baptized into Washington Street Baptist Church in 1937, the fateful year in which Paducah had its own version of the Biblical flood. Young was a deacon, trustee, moderator, Sunday School superintendent and building committee chairman.

Young also spent 46 years in the labor movement. He retired in 1987 as Region 10 director of the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education.

Young never forgot his labor roots were in Paducah. Paducah labor remembers Young.

The highest honor the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, bestows is the annual W.C. Young Award. Young was the first honoree in 1994.

Young carried his first union card as a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks at the old Illinois Central Railroad Shops in 1941. Those were Jim Crow days in Paducah. Segregation and race discrimination were the law and the social order. Majority whites kept African Americans separate and unequal from them.

But Young lived to see organized labor make common cause with the civil rights movement. J.W. Cleary, president of the Paducah-McCracken County NAACP branch and a member of PACE Local 5-550 at the Paducah nuclear gaseous diffusion plant, remembered that Young "had a union card in one hand and an NAACP card in the other. African Americans wouldn’t be where they are today without the unions."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the modern American civil rights movement, said much the same thing. "The labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth," he said.

In his 1967 book, Where do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. King wrote that "the labor movement, especially in its earlier days, was one of the few great institutions where a degree of hospitality and mobility was available to Negroes. While the rest of the nation accepted rank discrimination and prejudice as ordinary and usual...trade unions, particularly in the CIO, leveled all barriers to equal membership. In a number of instances Negroes rose to influential national office."

W.C. Young was among them.

Young’s last office was in the old Building Trades’ union headquarters about 100 yards from his front doorstep. But for many years, he commuted by car or airplane between an office in Chicago and his Paducah home.

Young traveled many miles for the union movement. He visited all 50 states. In 1993, he journeyed to South Africa representing the AFL-CIO on a mission to find out what Americans could do to help blacks long suffering under Apartheid. The trip was made a year before South Africa’s first free and open presidential election.

Young was also a veteran civil rights leader. He was a life member of the Paducah-McCracken County NAACP branch. In 1961, he was named to a national panel that advised President John F. Kennedy on civil rights legislation. Three years later, he became an aide to Kentucky Gov. Ned Breathitt. During Breathitt’s term, Kentucky became the first Southern state to pass civil rights legislation.

In 1968, Young became field director of the COPE Minority Department in Washington. He said civil rights leaders "have always known that with the labor movement they have a strong friend with clout."

In 1977, Young was sent to Chicago to be director of COPE Region One, which encompassed seven Midwestern states. After a reorganization, he became head of Region 10, which included Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

Young also loved politics. A devoted Democrat, he helped in many state, local and national campaigns. At age 75, he worked for Congressman Tom Barlow of Paducah as a field representative.

Young’s work on behalf of his church, organized labor, civil rights and his hometown did not go unrecognized. The W.C. Young Community Center in Paducah is named for him.

Young founded the center in 1976. It has become the unofficial headquarters for the annual Eighth of August celebration, an historically African American holiday that began many years ago in Paducah.

Young received many honors, including a 1989 award from the Louisville chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a national organization that helps encourage minorities to vote and get involved in the political process. Like Young, Randolph was a national labor and civil rights leader. Young served on the national board of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

Young was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2003.