Breaking Barriers: Father Peter G. Young’s Fight for Economic Freedom

For more than fifty years, Father Peter G. Young heard the same sentence at his door: “Father, I can’t get a job.” In this Magic Hook from The Slingin Podcast, he talks about the one mark on a record that follows people home from prison, and his fight to turn it into economic freedom.

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Watch: “Breaking Barriers: One Man’s Fight for Economic Freedom”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“People that come in the door are saying, ‘Father, I can’t get a job.’ … With that one kind of block, it becomes an impediment, an obstacle that they can’t get over. It locks them in whatever they try to do.”

One felony. Maybe one drug sale, or getting caught on the wrong turf, as he puts it in the clip. That single line on a background check shuts the door on the very thing that keeps people out of trouble: a paycheck. Father Young doesn’t call it a personal failing. He called it a lock, and he spent his life looking for the key.

From Creating Taxpayers to Second Chances

When he arrived in Albany’s South End in 1959, it took him no time to see what the men there needed most. Work. Many families had come up from the South, and the jobs open to Black men were cleaning, the brickyard, working as porters and picking fruit in season. The unions and state jobs weren’t open to them. Back then the barrier was race.

So he got to work. Being a Catholic priest in Albany opened doors, and he used it to get meetings with industry leaders and introduce his people to the men who could hire them. When the polite route on the Elks and Rotary committees went nowhere, he argued, and got called a troublemaker for it. He started a cleaning company, a landscaping business and a placement agency, and when the Selkirk railyard opened he formed the Inner City Driving School to train tractor-trailer drivers. The parish ran its own employment agency, staffed by volunteers, many of them retired state executives, who helped with résumés and drove people to interviews.

Decades later the barrier changed shape. Men coming home from prison, many of them graduates of the ASAT program he founded inside the state prisons, kept getting turned away because of their records. So his agency built its own job network and trained people for food service, computers, maintenance, snow removal and cleaning work.

From the Memoir

From Chapter 11, “Creating Taxpayers,” in his memoir Fifty Years Young, he names the mission that has guided his work since the start, and connects the South End of the sixties to today:

“It is often the same story today for men coming home from prison. Without community support, they fail.”

The same chapter explains why jobs come first for him, alongside housing and treatment:

“Without the dignity of a paycheck, they lose hope of climbing out of the pit of hopelessness and despair. That’s why employment is once again my major effort: to create taxpayers, and to restore their hope.”

From Chapter 34, “Vets and Parolees,” he draws a straight line from the civil rights marches he joined as a young pastor to the fight he’s in now:

“Today I’m trying to break down barriers built not on race but on criminal records, and interestingly enough, most of the people hurt by this new discrimination are Black, just as before.”

Chapter 34 also tells how he did it on the ground in Brooklyn. He brought on a Brooklyn leader whose family name carried weight in the neighborhood to walk into hospitals and housing offices and ask for start-up jobs. He would be upfront about a man’s troubled record and say, in Father Young’s words, “just give him a chance; he deserves a second chance to prove himself and earn a paycheck.”

Why It Matters Now

Father Young calls jobs “the hardest leg” of the three-legged stool: safe, sober housing, training that leads to a job, and continued treatment. Housing and treatment can get a person stable. A job is what lets them stand on their own, support their family and stay home.

That’s the legacy. A priest who saw the same wall go up twice, first built on race and then built on records, and kept swinging at it both times. The movement belongs to whoever picks it up next: the employer willing to read past one line on an application, the neighbor who makes a call, the leader who gives somebody a shot. As he writes, not many people march anymore, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t go to the lobby and make ourselves heard.”

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, follow Hoodz Radio for more clips, and look out for the 10-part series 50 Years Young.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.