Vicksburg leader
gives it all for her community
Gertrude Young’s role is special in more ways than one

A native of Indianola, MS, Gertrude Young has a soft spot in her heart for the Delta. That’s one of the reasons why she works so tirelessly on behalf of the southern most part of the Delta as alderwoman for Vicksburg.

“My parents moved us to Vicksburg when I was five—in 1960— because they wanted a better life for their children,” Young says. “My dad worked here for the Coca-Cola company and my mother was a maid. They worked very, very hard to provide for all seven of us.”

Young went to Rosa A. Temple School (now Vicksburg Junior High) as a youngster, graduating high school in 1973. She entered Mississippi Valley State University on an honors scholarship as a nursing student afterward. “I graduated from Valley State early, in 1976, with my nursing degree. I went on to practice as a registered nurse for some twenty years here in Vicksburg and for a while in Louisiana. I was both a nursing supervisor and a manager in ICU/CCU and the emergency room.”

At the same time she was nursing, Young created her own radio talk show in Vicksburg called “Talk To Me”. “It was aimed at troubled teens and had a 24-hour talk line,” she recalls. “The show ran on WQBC for six years after I approached the station with the idea. It was sponsored by the hospital I was working for at the time. Troubled kids would call in with problems ranging from suicide to school and social issues, and I would get different professionals to come on the air and help them.”

Young even went so far as to give out her home phone number so that the kids could call at any time for help. “I’m glad to say that we helped a lot of children, some of whom are still here in Vicksburg and are doing well in life. One of the young ladies I helped through my show is a doctor in town” she adds.

On top of this, Young also found time to run for and win the seat of a Warren County Election Commissioner in 1988, “the first black female ever elected to any office in District 3,” she says, “and the first female elected for the City of Vicksburg.”

“I had been interested in politics since I was a child,” she says. “In fact,” the Democrat chuckles, “my first political experience was working for Thad Cochran’s campaign when I was 14. I went out and solicited votes for him; you can only do so much at that age! He and I joke about it now. I mentioned it again recently in a speech I gave at a function just prior to the Senator speaking.”

Young still worked as a nurse when she was elected Commissioner, but gave up that career to start another: North Ward Alderwoman in 1992.

“A close friend of mine urged me to run for office in that election,” Young recalls. “I won and have held the seat since.”

When asked what her proudest political accomplishments are, Young replies that they are many. “One of the main ones is a curfew I put into effect for the city so that the children would not be able to walk the streets at night,” the ordained Baptist minister says. “There was no youth detention center at the time I created the curfew so if a child was arrested they were placed under house arrest, which was a joke. Plus, drug dealers would use children who walked the streets to pass out their drugs and an officer would have no reason to stop a child for questioning. The curfew changed that—there now was a reason.”

The hardest part of her job, Young says, is convincing the citizens that with progress there often comes some pain. “All change brings some resistance,” she notes, “and sometimes progress brings with it a small cost. But that’s the price you have to pay.

“The goal is to make our community better and put our personalities aside,” Young says. “I serve about 14,000 people in my district and my job is to make the Ward a better place to live. I think the city as a whole is on the right track and we are moving along very fast.”

There’s no doubt that Vicksburg is on this “right track” due in no small part to Gertrude Young. Her tirelessness and love of Vicksburg is cause for the most southern part of the Delta to be proud to call her one of its own.

Alderwoman, nurse, minister—even a licensed realtor—this lady wears a lot of hats. Any future political aspirations for Gertrude Young? “We’ll see,” she answers coyly, breaking into one of her famous grins. DBJ