The Memoirs of Wendell W. Young III

Wendell W. Young, III (1938-2013) led Philadelphia's Retail Clerks Union (United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1776) for over forty years. Beginning in the early 1960s, he was active in the city's Democratic Party, elected as a Northeast Philadelphia ward leader, serving as a delegate to five national conventions and as Philadelphia campaign manager for George McGovern's 1972 presidential race. In the 1970s and 80s, he played a pivotal role in forging a broad, city-wide coalition of progressive trade unionists, liberals and African American voters to challenge the urban populism of Mayor Frank L. Rizzo and the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. An advocate of social justice unionism throughout his life, Young was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and built alliances with the regional civil rights movement, neighborhood-based anti-poverty initiatives, and was a leader of the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, a group that coordinated programs between organized labor and the environmental movement. Francis Ryan is director of the Masters of Labor and Employment Relations program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is the author of AFSCME's Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century (Temple).