South African National Council of YMCAs News, 1912-1963 (scattered). (Box 3, Folder 7)

This folder contans materials created by/collected about Max Yergan, born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1892. He became an officer in the Student Christian movement in 1915, beginning a 25-year long association with the YMCA. With the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to organize YMCA units among the African regiments that the British Army was raising in Kenya. After the war, Yergan applied to serve as the YMCA's foreign secretary in South Africa. While the YMCA had been active in South Africa since the 1840s, the work had previous been geared toward serving white South Africans. Yergan's work, mainly among students and teachers, focused broadly on promoting Christianity and fostering interracial cooperation. In recognition of his work he received the Harmon Award in 1926 and the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for interracial achievements in 1933. By the mid-1930s, Yergan became increasingly troubled by the political, economic, and social conditions faced by Blacks in South Africa. In 1936, Yergan resigned from the YMCA but continued to work work on behalf of Africa by starting, along with singer Paul Robeson and others, the Council on African Affairs. He maintained ties and working relationships with many of the YMCA's prominent African American leaders who had mentored him in his YMCA career, including Channing Tobias and Jesse Moorland. In 1936, Yergan was also appointed to the chair in Negro History at City College of New York, becoming the first teacher of African American and African Diasporic studies on a major campus in the United States. As head of the National Negro Congress, on which he served in the 1940s, Yergan led a delegation from that organization to petition the United Nations for the elimination of discrimination in the United States. In 1947 Yergan left the National Negro Congress due to what he considered to be "Communist infiltration," and subsequently became a supporter of a number of right-wing causes, including Barry Goldwater's candidacy for the Presidency.