Alice Young, first Black principal in Rochester, dies at 100

Alice Young, the first Black school principal in Rochester and a founding trustee of Monroe Community College, died April 24 at age 100.

Her death came 10 days after she suffered a stroke, according to her son, Rodney Young. She had been in declining health since another stroke in 2022.

"I realize now that even the longest life is short," Rodney Young said.

Her death was announced publicly in a statement from Mayor Malik Evans.

"Dr. Alice Holloway Young was a true pioneer whose courage, love, and commitment to provide an outstanding education for all Rochesterians has left an everlasting impact on our community," he said. "She played a transformative role in the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and adults, improving equitable access to education, and encouraging those in underrepresented ethnic and racial groups to become teachers and leaders in our schools."

There will be a public memorial service at 1 p.m. Saturday, June 1 on the MCC campus, Rodney Young said.

Early years

Alice Victoria Holloway was born Sept. 29, 1923 in North Carolina and grew up in the small town of Wise. Her mother, Lucy Allen, had earned a college degree from the Hampton Institute in 1906, while her father, John Amos Holloway, never attended school. They moved to Wise when Alice was young because it had a relatively new and well regarded school for Black children that she and her six siblings could attend.

Dr. Young graduated from high school in 1940 and set off for Bennett College in Greensboro, armed with a $1,500 scholarship and a single pair of blue shoes. She referred often to those shoes later in her life when encouraging children to take their own education seriously.

“I’d say, ‘Now, where will that pair of shoes take you?’” she said in a 2020 biography written by Sally Parker. “Because I’ve often thought about that – one pair of shoes and that one scholarship. Without it, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.”

She graduated in 1944 and planned to enter a graduate program in science at Cornell University. She was sidetracked, however, when she and a friend spent the summer leading a nursery school program for the children of migrant workers on a farm near Hamilton, Madison County.

When the parents returned from the fields in the evenings, she would teach them rudimental literacy and help to explain documents.

“These poor people coming from Sanford, Florida, working like slaves, and coming in with nothing and leaving with nothing,” Dr. Young said in a 2018 interview. “They were so needy (but) so interested; they just wanted to learn how to write their names.”

Instead of moving to Ithaca, she came to Rochester with her friend. Shortly thereafter she met James “Buddy” Young at St. Simon’s Episcopal Church. They married in 1946 and had three children to go along with James’ son from his first marriage.

Dr. Young often talked about how, when she and her husband moved into their house in a previously all-white neighborhood, they were greeted with a threatening note signed by “the Ku Klux Klan of Millbank Street.” They had been forced to buy the house through a straw purchaser because no Realtor would show them properties outside the prescribed Black parts of town.

First Black principal

She joined the Rochester City School District as a teacher in 1952 and 10 years later was appointed principal of School 24 in the Highland Park neighborhood, the first Black person to attain that position.

The superintendent at the time, George Springer, told her the news and let her know that he would be watching her. “Yeah, and so many others will be watching me, but you’ll like what you see,” she responded.

Among her other groundbreaking accomplishments was forgoing a dress for a pants suit, something she said she did after noticing that painters outside the building were ogling female teachers’ legs. The wardrobe choice made the newspaper headlines for several days in late 1970.

Dr. Young later was promoted to a series of supervisory positions in the district administration, integrating its central office as well. As Title I coordinator in the mid-1960s she oversaw several of the district’s early efforts at desegregation, then wrote a dissertation about one of them in 1969 to earn her doctoral degree from the University of Rochester. She retired from RCSD in 1986.

The school district honored her in 2021 by naming School 3 in the historic Black Third Ward as the Dr. Alice Holloway Young School of Excellence. She replaced the school’s former namesake, city founder Nathaniel Rochester; families and staff had called for the renaming because he owned people in slavery.

“Your name replaces a history of inequity and inequality in our community," Superintendent Lesli Myers-Small said at a ceremony marking the change. “Your name becomes the pride of our district.”

The school will be closed at the end of 2024 as part of a districtwide reconfiguration, but the building will still bear her name, the district said.

MCC founding member

Dr. Young’s other signal achievement was her 60 years of service to Monroe Community College. She was recruited to join the school’s board of trustees in 1961, the year before it began. She was not only the lone Black person but also the only female, and as such was often pressed into secretarial duties.

“I was not Alice Young; I was Mrs. James T. Young,” she later said. “After a while I got so I would not respond to Mrs. James T. Young, because my husband was home.”

In 1978 she was named chairwoman of the board and remained in that role until 1998. She remained as chairwoman emerita until her death and was recognized as the longest-serving trustee at any New York community college. The college hosted a celebration for her 100th birthday in 2023.

In addition to MCC, Dr. Young served on a slew of committees and boards over the years, including the Rochester Museum and Science Center, the Monroe County Human Relations Commission, the United Way of Greater Rochester and the Girls Scouts of the Genesee Valley.

Among her many honors are the Dr. Alice Holloway Young Commons, a residence hall at MCC; several scholarship funds in her name; and her 2018 selection as a New York State Woman of Distinction. She also received an honorary doctoral degree from her alma mater, Bennett College.

"One of the things she’d always say is, 'Give me my flowers now,' and the community certainly has done that," Rodney Young said. He requested donations in her honor to the Dr. Alice Holloway Young Endowed Scholarship Fund.

In her retirement, Dr. Young spent a lot of time at a property she owned on Black Lake in St. Lawrence County. Before tearing her meniscus five years ago, she exercised four days a week at the JCC of Greater Rochester, "keeping up with those 50- and 60- year-olds at Jazzercise and whatever else," Rodney Young said.

Her ashes will be spread at Black Lake and also on her family's land in Wise, North Carolina.

Her husband, James Young, died in 2008. She is survived by her sons Rodney and Calvin, her daughter Kathleen Young and two granddaughters.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Alice Young, first Black principal in Rochester NY, dies at 100