Springfield College
Description
Beginning as a student secretary while in college, Max Yergan worked to promote the YMCA movement at colleges in the Southwest. After graduating, he became a teacher in Raleigh, N.C., but reconvened his YMCA work as a war work secretary in 1916. He spent two years accompanying the Indian Troops in Dar-Es-Salaam, German East Africa, and then went to France to work with the African-American units of the Expeditionary Army. After the war, he returned to the United States and was ordained a minister. In 1921, he set out for South Africa to develop a YMCA for black South Africans. A fierce advocate for the rights of black South Africans, Yergan lectured before the white Student Christian Associations in South Africa on the inclusive nature of the Kingdom of God, forcing them to re-examine the racial conditions of their country. Yergan’s work got a boost when John D. Rockefeller Jr., donated $25,000 toward the construction of a YMCA building, which Yergan called the South African Training Center. In 1936, he returned to the United States and became the first teacher of African-American studies at City College of New York. Yergan was a controversial activist whose politics, over the years, shifted from communist to anti-communist, but his pioneering YMCA work in South Africa stands as his monumental legacy.Max Yergen's application to the Secretarial Course of the International YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) from 1914.
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International YMCA Training School
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