WHITNEY YOUNG, JR. AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS <i> by Nancy J. Weiss (Princeton University Press: $24.95; 286 pp.) </i>

Hollywood is unlikely to make a film out of Whitney M. Young Jr.’s life; it would be like dramatizing the forces that help melt an iceberg. As director of the Urban League from 1961-1971, Young was a bridge between the black and white worlds, a man whom Newsday dubbed “the Negro ambassador.” Reared in Kentucky, the son of a black schoolteacher, Young grew up largely removed from the harsher realities of racism; by virtue of his inbred confidence and even temper, he became the consummate negotiator for black advancement in the white power structure.

Nancy J. Weiss’ biography of Young lacks drama, but the rich detail she brings to her subject gives an eye-opening picture of the complexity of black society under segregation. Young’s father, as head of a school for blacks, presided over an integrated faculty in the 1930s, and Young’s sister recalls that “it didn’t strike us to think we couldn’t be boss.”

World War II gave Young his first extended experience among uneducated blacks, where he found himself an outsider. The tensions between black enlisted men and white officers in the European theater of war were so aggravated, however, that Young was recruited to mediate. When he returned home, his path as mediator was determined, and he entered graduate school in social work in Minnesota. He rose quickly in the Urban League, using his diplomatic skills to persuade businessmen to hire blacks--and to persuade blacks to prepare themselves for work not traditionally open to them. When Young accepted a job in Atlanta, the sudden plunge into the heavily segregated South threatened to tear apart his family. Young’s wife found the transition so painful that she almost took the children back up North to wait until such time as Young “had had enough.”

The Urban League’s cautious position fell into disfavor among blacks during the radicalization of the civil rights movement, and Young himself never scored high in black opinion polls against other civil rights leaders. “Ironically,” writes Weiss, “the role that Young played so effectively made it inevitable that he would be undervalued during his lifetime.” Weiss’ biography clearly seeks to defend him against criticism that he was too conciliatory, and she paints a persuasively admirable portrait.