Anthropologist/Folklorist Ulysses S. Young was born in Enoree, South Carolina, around 1914, and was raised in Philadelphia. He earned a B.A. (1936) from West Virginia State University, an M.A. in anthropology from University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. (1964) in sociology and anthropology from the University of Maryland.  

Like his fellow graduate student, Samuel C. Adams, Young was an important student contributor to the research team led by Charles S. Johnson, John Work III, and Lewis Wade Jones that conducted fieldwork during the multifaceted Fisk University-Library of Congress study of Coahoma County in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s. Young, as a graduate student in anthropology, documented the cultural life of Mississippi Delta communities at a point of abrupt cultural transition caused by exposure to industrialization and mechanization. Young conducted interviews with sharecroppers on cotton plantations in Mississippi to examine the  economic and cultural impacts of plantation mechanization on their lives, cultural traditions, and community institutions. The findings and lessons he learned from his fieldwork on this project shaped the social science curriculum he, as a professor, later crafted for his students at Bowie State.      

In 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, he joined the faculty of Maryland State Teacher’s College (now Bowie State University).  There, he served as Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Maryland’s first historically Black college. As faculty and an administrator at Bowie State, he led the normal college in developing a social science curriculum as the institution transformed into a liberal arts college and then university. Young also served as Dean of Men, Academic Dean, and Director of the Evening College. He became recognized as a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, a Mason, and a member of several honor societies. He retired in 1983.

Young’s scholarship in this project is incorporated in:  

John Work III, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr.,  Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study. 2005. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Select Secondary Resources:

Washington Post Obituary

Phyllis M. May-Machunda