For the Missouri politician, see Robert A. Young. Robert A. Young (1824-1902) was an American minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. A descendant of slaveholding planters, he served as a minister in many churches in Tennessee, Alabama and Missouri in the Antebellum South. He served as the President of Florence Wesleyan University (later known as the University of North Alabama in Florence, Alabama from 1861 to 1864. He supported the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, and he did not believe in the "social equality of the Negro" after the war. He was a founding trustee of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.