The center is named in memory of Manchester alumna educator and activist Jean Childs Young.
A child of the segregated South, Jean Childs followed two older sisters to Manchester and earned a degree in elementary education. Weeks after graduating, she married Andrew Young, who would remain at the side of his close friend Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the civil rights movement. Later, Andrew became a U.S. congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta.
Jean had a distinguished career as a teacher and an advocate for human rights and children’s welfare. In 1977, President Carter appointed her chair of the U.S. Commission of the International Year of the Child. She also established the Atlanta Task Force on Education, served as co-founder of the Atlanta-Fulton Commission on Children and Youth, and helped develop Atlanta Junior College.
She served Manchester as a trustee from 1975 to 1979 and received an honorary doctorate from MU in 1980. She died of liver cancer in 1994 at the age of 61.