Robert A. Young

Robert A. Young (1824–1902) was an American minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. A descendant of slaveholding planters, he served as a minister in many churches in Tennessee, Alabama and Missouri in the Antebellum South. He served as the President of Florence Wesleyan University (later known as the University of North Alabama in Florence, Alabama from 1861 to 1864. He supported the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, and he did not believe in the "social equality of the Negro" after the war. His father, Captain John C. Young, was a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and "a large farmer and slaveholder" in Knox County, Tennessee, who died when Young was only six years old. which suggested blacks harked back to Eve's affair with a "subhuman beast" (sic). Even though Young "unashamedly admitted to anti-black prejudices" and failed to believe in the "social equality of the Negro," Young offered a scientific criticism suggesting there was only one human species regardless of skin color, citing Carl Linnaeus, George S. Blackie and Louis Agassiz.

Young served as the minister of Elm Street Methodist Church from 1870 to 1874. He continued to serve on its Board until 1902. Celebrities and less (European and American) (Nashville, Tennessee: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1888). Reminiscences. (Nashville, Dallas, Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Barbee & Smith, agents, 1900).