The Powerbroker portrays the life of Whitney Young, once called “the inside man of the black revolution.” As Executive Director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971, he helped thousands of people struggling against discrimination. Unique among black leaders, Young took the fight directly to the powerful white elite, gaining allies in business and government, but often arousing disdain from the very people he was trying to help. The Powerbroker chronicles the public and private trials of a man navigating a divided society in an explosive time.

Young’s journey took him from rural Kentucky to the segregated US Army, where he learned his first lessons in negotiating race relations. Back in civilian life, Young reached out to local businesses, encouraging them to employ their African American neighbors. When he reached national prominence, Young used the same strategy on a grander scale, acting as a diplomat between those in power and those striving for change during the turbulent 1960s.

Young advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, guiding each along a path toward historic change. To tell his story, Whitney Young’s niece, Emmy-award winning journalist Bonnie Boswell Hamilton, gathered never-before-seen archival footage, home movies, family photos, audio tapes of Young, as well as interviews with activists and scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Vernon Jordan, Dorothy Height, Ossie Davis, and John Hope Franklin.