In March, Marcia Young Cantarella, Whitney Young's daughter, delivered a speech at the AIA's Grassroots conference in San Diego that played off her father's 1968 address. Here is an excerpt.

The question is how can you see yourselves solving problems that may not be fully of your creation but may well be created by your clients who don’t have the creative vision or sense of social responsibility that you could potentially bring to a planning process.

My father spoke of the rightness of doing these things but the reality is that he also spoke, often one at a time to CEOs, about the business imperative of doing this work. You are not operating in isolation, find the thought partners like [research psychiatrist] Mindy [Fullilove] or other scholars and then take the lead with your clients—some of whom may have a progressive streak of their own and only need to be lead, to make social change that will truly impact the quality of life for the society we will inhabit.

I want to close with words from that 1968 speech. It was a call to action to you and its message rings true today:

“As a profession, you ought to be taking stands on these kinds of things. If you don’t as architects stand up and endorse Model Cities and appropriations, if you don’t speak out for rent supplements or the housing bill calling for a million homes, if you don’t speak out for some kind of scholarship program that will enable you to consciously and deliberately seek to bring in minority people who have been discriminated against in many cases, either kept out because of your indifference or couldn’t make it—it takes seven to 10 years to become an architect— then you will have done a disservice to the memory of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bob Kennedy and most of all, to yourselves. You are part of this society. It is not easy. I am not suggesting the easy road, but the time has come when no longer the kooks and crackpots speak for America. The decent people have to learn to speak up, and you shouldn’t have to be the victim to feel for other people. I make no pretense that it is easy.”