His father, Winfield Young, was born into slavery in 1848 in Halifax County, but learned to read and write under the tutelage of his master's wife.
Between 1870 and 1880, Winfield and his young wife, Sallie Adams, moved from Halifax County into Littleton proper, where he ran a dry goods store.
[1]: 2–3, 6 Plummer attended the elementary and secondary grades at Reedy Creek Academy, a Baptist-run private school set up to educate black children.
[1]: 5 According to biographer Henry Lewis Suggs, Plummer "credited much of his learning to the True Reformer and to his employment as an errand boy for a local white daily.
In June 1907, Young moved his family from Littleton, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia, where he had accepted a job offer as a plant foreman for the Lodge Journal and Guide.
This, along with other small operational and editorial improvements, helped the weekly's circulation grow from 600 to 1,000 copies by the end of the year.
In December 1913, the Guide suffered a heavy loss, including its archive, when its Church Street plant was heavily damaged by fire.
[3] Two days after his death, the editorial board of The Virginian-Pilot featured a tribute to Young calling him a newspaper publisher of "stability, courage, and persistence in seeking the betterment of the Negro minority for which he spoke, and a competence of craftsmanship that won him the respect of all newspapermen who read his newspaper.