Andrew Young

Politician

• Born: March 12, 1932
• Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana

Activist and politician

Young became a leader in the Civil Rights movement in 1961, working with Martin Luther King, Jr., for seven years. In 1972, Young was elected to the US Congress, and he later served as a representative to the United Nations and as the mayor of Atlanta.

Areas of achievement: Diplomacy; Government and politics; Social issues

Early Life

Andrew Jackson Young, Jr., was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 12, 1932, the eldest son of Andrew and Daisy Young. The junior Young grew up in a comfortable Cleveland Street home, raised primarily by his mother, who had been a teacher. His father, a dentist, provided a solid middle-class living. The family emphasized education and religion, attending a Congregational church. Young’s neighborhood was diverse, racially and ethnically, providing him the experience of multiculturalism at an early age. At six, Young enrolled at Valena C. Jones Elementary School, jumping to third grade because he could read. Since public schools in New Orleans offered no eighth grade to African Americans, Young entered the ninth grade at the prestigious Gilbert Academy when he was only eleven, and he graduated at fifteen.

Young’s father took his sons on trips into rural areas of Louisiana, which was dangerous for African American men in the 1930s. The father taught his boys that racism was a sickness, and that the best approach was to remain calm and always try to have compassion for those who were rude. He first attempted to have his sons trained in boxing, but when the boys did not embrace that sport he arranged for former Olympic star Ralph Metcalfe to teach them how to run.

After high school, Young attended nearby Dillard University for one year before transferring to Howard University in Washington, DC. Earning a bachelor’s degree in biology in May, 1951, Young found work in Connecticut and enrolled at Hartford Theological Seminary that fall. During the summer of 1952, Young interned at a church in Marion, Alabama, where he met Jean Childs, who lived in Marion but attended Manchester College in Indiana. The young couple fell in love, and after Childs won a prestigious fellowship they spent six weeks in Austria, working with refugees during the summer of 1953. In 1954, Young and Childs were married, and Young completed his bachelor’s degree in divinity in January 1955. The newlyweds moved to Thomasville, Georgia, to minister to a congregation.

Life’s Work

The couple lived in Thomasville for two years. In August 1957, the family moved to New York, where Young took a job with the Youth Division of the National Council of Churches. As one of only two African Americans working among several hundred employees, Young considered it his duty to teach about racism. Living and working in a multicultural metropolis during the late 1950s was an exciting opportunity for the Young family. Nonetheless, in August 1961, they moved to Atlanta, where Young began working for the Citizenship Education Program.

During his first year in Atlanta, Young increasingly came into contact with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In late 1962, during the protests in Albany, Georgia, Young began working directly for the SCLC. In the spring of 1963, the SCLC organized a major civil rights event in Birmingham, Alabama, and King asked Young to represent the SCLC in negotiations with white business leaders. His ability to serve as an intermediary between the black and white communities helped bring about a successful settlement in Birmingham.

The dramatic events in Alabama caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy, who asked the US Congress to pass an effective civil rights bill. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, made the legislation a top priority. In April 1964, Young became executive director of the SCLC and persuaded King to organize demonstrations in St. Augustine, Florida. While leading a march there in June, Young was badly beaten by the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. This violence in Florida was the final showdown before Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Johnson signed into law on July 2.

The Civil Rights Act brought tremendous progress in the fight to end segregation and to open jobs to people of color and women, but it did not address the disfranchisement of African Americans that had been rampant throughout the South since the end of Reconstruction. In the hope of drawing attention to this, the SCLC decided to organize demonstrations in Selma, Alabama. Young knew the area well, because it was near the home of his wife, so he went to Selma in January 1965 to begin planning the protests.

Young was on the scene when the first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7 was beaten back by Alabama state troopers. He worked with King to coordinate the SCLC response to this attack, which resulted in a successful five-day march from Selma to Montgomery later in the month. This watershed event galvanized popular opinion across the country in favor of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed and Johnson signed into law in August 1965.

In 1966, Young and the SCLC attempted to move the struggle to the urban north and improve the lives of poor African Americans in Chicago, with limited success. In 1967, King publicly criticized Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, and Young helped King write the “Beyond Vietnam” speech that he delivered in New York in April. Opposing the war resulted in serious criticism of the SCLC, and, as executive director, Young tried to respond. Frustration turned to tragedy in April 1968 when King was killed in Memphis, and a dramatic period of Young’s career soon came to a close.

In 1970, Young ran unsuccessfully for the seat in the House of Representatives for Georgia’s fifth district, but he tried again in 1972 and joined Barbara Jordan as the first African Americans elected to Congress in former Confederate states since 1901. Young took office in January 1973 and quickly made a name for himself on Capitol Hill. He was appointed to the House Banking and Currency Committee and joined its Subcommittee on International Trade.

During his four years in Congress, Young became increasingly involved in relations with Africa, proposing a successful amendment that prohibited American support for the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique and attempting to reimpose economic sanctions against Rhodesia. He visited South Africa for the first time in 1974, befriending antiapartheid leader Robert Sobukwe and bringing two of Sobukwe’s children to live with him in Atlanta. In 1975, he accompanied Coretta Scott King on a trip to Zambia, where they celebrated the opening of the Martin Luther King Library in Lusaka.

In 1976, Young actively supported the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter. When Carter won, in great part because of the overwhelming vote of African Americans across the South, he appointed Young as his permanent representative to the United Nations. In his position as UN ambassador, Young focused primarily on Africa. He persuaded Carter to repeal the Byrd Amendment, thus putting sanctions back into effect against Rhodesia. Young, Carter, and other members of the administration spent significant amounts of time and energy to settle the Rhodesian conflict. Their efforts contributed to the process that produced the Lancaster House Agreement in December, 1979, which brought peace and a new constitution to Rhodesia. In April 1980, Young attended the independence ceremony, when Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe.

By the time of Zimbabwe’s celebration, however, Young was no longer the UN ambassador, as he had been forced to resign because of his unauthorized meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in New York. Returning to Atlanta, he decided to run for mayor and was elected in October 1981.

In January 1982, Young followed in the footsteps of Maynard Jackson to become the second African American mayor of Atlanta. Young was reelected in 1985. During his eight years in office, he helped globalize the city, expanding the airport and attracting international business. Atlanta hosted the 1988 Democratic Convention, and Young was a key member of the group that successfully lobbied for the 1996 Summer Olympics to be held in Atlanta, in part by emphasizing the city’s proud history of racial progress.

After an unsuccessful run for Georgia governor in 1990, Young retired from politics and joined the private sector, with mixed results. He cofounded a consulting firm, GoodWorks International, that carried out successful projects in the Caribbean and African nations including Angola. He also participated in the 1999 relaunch of the Drum Major Institute, a New York–based progressive think tank focused on issues of poverty and racism. Young has served on the board of several nonprofit organizations dedicated to civil rights, including the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change and the United Nations Foundation. He also took on the role of professor at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. On the other hand, Young’s work for companies such as Nike and Wal-Mart attracted considerable criticism. His personal life also had its sorrows. His wife Jean died of cancer in 1994. A few years later, Young married Carolyn Watson in Cape Town, South Africa. He and Carolyn decided to form the Andrew Young Foundation in 2003. They began to promote the foundation’s mission, advocating health and education among disadvantaged populations in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Significance

Young, a Christian minister like his friend and colleague Martin Luther King, Jr., played a major role in the fight for African American civil rights in the United States. His major contributions were mediating between the Black and White communities in troubled Birmingham and facilitating the crucial march from Selma to Montgomery.

As a congressman, ambassador, and mayor, Young broadened the playing field of US foreign relations, opening the door for religious groups, women, and people of color to influence international affairs. He increased the attention paid to racial issues in foreign relations, and he made the issues of Africa a high priority in the late 1970s. Young received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 and has received more than one hundred honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world.

Bibliography

"Biography Andrew J. Young." Georgia State University, aysps.gsu.edu/andrew-young-biography/. Accessed 19 July 2021.

DeRoche, Andrew. Andrew Young: Civil Rights Ambassador. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Print.

Jones, Bartlett. Flawed Triumphs: Andy Young at the United Nations. Lanham: UP of America, 1996. Print.

Moye, J. Todd. "Andrew Young (b. 1932)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Humanities Council, 6 Jan. 2016. Web. 14 Mar. 2016.

Young, Andrew. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Print.

Young, Andrew, and Kabir Sehgal. Walk in My Shoes: Conversations between a Civil Rights Legend and His Godson on the Journey Ahead. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print.