In Black America; Civil Rights Icon Andrew J. Young

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. I knew I didn't want to be a dentist, but I didn't have the strength to tell my daddy. I wasn't going to do that. He wanted me to be a baseball player and a dentist, and that's the only sport I mean I resisted both of those because I wanted to be me and I didn't know who I was, but when I left Howard I was going back and we stopped in North Carolina and I ran to the top of a mountain just because I was frustrated and I needed to burn up some energy while my parents were in a meeting and from the top of Kings Mountain North Carolina I looked out in the world just made sense and I realized everything I saw, you know the corn had a purpose, the

sunflower's had a purpose, the pine trees had a purpose, the clouds had a purpose, everything had a purpose and I said whoever made all this couldn't have made me with no purpose. So there's got to be a purpose for me too. The Honorable Andrew J. Young civil rights legend forming you in Ambassador, Congressman and Mayor of Atlanta Georgia. In a 1960 Young helped change this country as a leader in the civil rights movement, his legacy include being a civil activist, elected official, groundbreaking ambassador, social entrepreneur and advisor to presidents, currently he leads the Andrew J. Young Foundation's effort to develop and support new generations of visionary leaders who have created sustainable global approaches to economic development, poverty alleviation and the challenge of hunger. Young was a close confiscont to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a key strategist and negotiated during campaigns that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This past spring, Young was in Austin, Texas to participate in the summit on race in America at the LBJ presidential library on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. I'm Johnny Ohanton Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program and exclusive interview with civil rights legend, the Honorable Andrew J. Young in Black America. Reverend C. T. Bivian was really the first one to have a sit-in. He had a sit-in in Peoria, Illinois in 1947. That was way before Montgomery and Martin Luther King. We go into his 96th birthday next month. He's still with us. He was a freedom writer. He worked with us from beginning to end and he's still on the case.

James Veville. James Veville was a genius, but he was also very eccentric, maybe even crazy. But Dr. King used to say that all of us are certifiably insane because you got to be kind of crazy to think that you can change America with no money, no organization. I mean, we had nothing but the spirit of the Lord moving in our hearts and yet it changed. Well, one speaks with the Honorable Andrew J. Young. You can still see it on his face and hear it in his voice. The passion and commitment he still has for the call for social justice. It's exactly the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1964. He was on the front line doing America's darkest days. Born and raised in the segregated New Orleans, Young first attended Dilett University in

the city, then attended Howard University, and earned a Divinity Degree in 1955 from Harvard Theological Seminary. Working as a young pastor in Thomasville, Georgia, he first became part of the movement when he organized voter registration drives. In 1970, his first attempt to electric politics, he lost, but with a new campaign finance chairman. In 1972, he was elected to Congress, becoming the first African-American represented from the deep south since reconstruction. He was re-elected in 1974 and again in 1976. In 1981, he was elected mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. This past spring, in Black America, sat down with Young, for the exclusive interview during his stay in Austin as a participant in the summit on race in America. Mr. Young, tell us what was New Orleans-like back in the 1940s and 50s? We know strangely enough, it was segregated, but I had the deal with segregation, and I, from four years old on, because the Nazi Party headquarters was 50 years from where I was

born. There was an Irish grocery store and an Italian bar, and I was right in the middle. Then I had to go to Valena C. Jones School, which was a public school and another neighborhood that was called the Bucket of Blood, because there was so much fighting and stuff going on there, and I was younger than everybody and smaller than everybody. My daddy told me, he said, look, you're never going to be big enough to beat everybody. You need to learn to fight, because if you know how to fight, you don't have to fight nearly as much. He said, but you're not going to win many fights. He said, but you probably outrun a lot of people, but you won't feel good running from problems.

I was going to ask you, I read that your father hired a fighter to teach you and your brother how to fight? He was a dentist, and we lived near the Coliseum where the box was trained. When they had need for dental work and no money, he would fix the teeth free, but then he'd make them take us to the gym to teach us how to box. His notion was, you need to know, he said, so that even when you get in a fight, you might get beat, but you need to let them know that they've been in a fight, and you won't have to fight that much. What was some of your favorite subjects in school? I didn't like school, but I liked certain teachers, and whatever they were teaching, I happened to like it, and usually those were teachers that like me, and put up with me, but

school for me was learning to get along with other people. I was, again, I went to school young, and I was small, and ironically, you know, Martin Luther King went to college at 15, and Manage Jackson at 14, I went at 15, and my buddies were just coming back from the military, and so David Dinkins, who became mayor in New York, was sort of one of my mentors, he'd been an officer in the Marines, and came back to go to school after being in the Marine Corps, and he sort of kind of looked out for me, but he was, I was 15, he was about 25, 24.

You went to Dillard for a year, then you transferred to Howard, why the move? Because I grew up on Dillard's campus, my mother and father went to Dillard, and I needed to get out of town, and I needed to get away from there, because everybody thought of me as a little boy there, and I wanted to be a man. You was participating on becoming a dentist, but obviously you got to call. How did you know that you were suited for the ministry? Well, I didn't know I was suited for the ministry, and I still don't know that I'm suited for the ministry. What happened was, I knew I didn't want to be a dentist, but I didn't have the strength to tell my daddy, I wasn't going to do that. He wanted me to be a baseball player and a dentist, and that's the only sport, I mean, I resisted both of those, because I wanted to be me, and I didn't know who I was, but when I left Howard, I was going back, we stopped in North Carolina, and I ran to the top

of a mountain just because I was frustrated, and I needed to burn up some energy while my parents were in a meeting. From the top of King's Mountain, North Carolina, I looked out in the world, just made sense, and I realized everything I saw, the corn had a purpose, the sunflowers had a purpose, the pine trees had a purpose, the clouds had a purpose, everything had a purpose, and I said, whoever made all this, couldn't have made me with no purpose. So there's got to be a purpose for me, too. I didn't know what it was, and I didn't care, but I said, I'm going to just do something that I'm supposed to do in life that nobody else can do. Tell us about the first church you passed it in with Mary and Alabama? Well, I was sent to Mary and Alabama, and I was sent to run a recreation program for

the summer, and I didn't know I was going to have to preach, and they put me in a room in house that was over a jug joint, and all night long, they played Laudie Laudie, Laudie Miss Claude, and one minute, Julie, all night long, and I was trying to think of, you know, what am I going to preach about? I don't know what happened, but I got through, and I think though the being in that small community, which happened to produce the woman I married, but also Dr. King's wife came from that same high school, and Ralph Abinath's wife was born in the same county, and it was a special county, produced some really smart, tough, wonderful women, and they didn't look

too bad either. Why did you develop an interest in Mahatma Gandhi? Because I didn't see any sense in fighting and killing. I mean, I didn't want to get killed, but I didn't want to kill anybody, and Gandhi's method of non-cooperation with evil. We say non-violence, but his message was, you can't cooperate with evil. You must cooperate with the good, and so segregation was evil, and the way we challenge segregation was to refuse the cooperation.

We were segregated because we let ourselves be segregated. We went in the back doors, so we drank from the colored fountain. We spent our money when we let us work, and finally we said, this doesn't make sense. We don't need anything they got, and so in Birmingham, when we finally pulled it off, well, they did it in Montgomery first, they just stopped riding the buses, and then they had to integrate them. In Birmingham, we just said, look, we're not going to spend our money where we can't work, and so for 90 days, 300,000 people, black people, mostly, and some whites, didn't buy anything but food or medicine, well, that shut down the whole economy, and when we explained to the business community, look, as Dr. King put it, I can't help it that I was born black, and you can't help it that you were born white, but that's an unjust situation.

And we're just saying that we're not blaming you for it. We're just saying that if you want our business, we're not going to do business with you in a way that makes us feel inferior. And so when you change the way you market us, when you hire black people to work in your stores, when you take down the signs on the fountains that say black or white or color or white, when you allow us to try on the clothes that we're going to buy, or eat from the lunch counters, like anybody else, then we'll bring our money back, but the 90 days people kept their money in their pocket, and that meant that the whole business community shut down. I refused to think that we're slipping back, and the reason is that we were so close that I was with Dr. King when President Johnson said we shall overcome, and we were sitting

in Selma, and I saw tears dripping down his eyes, because we were almost there, and the next election we lost by one vote per percent, and we've been looking for a message ever since. I think President Johnson was the icing on the cake that Franklin Roosevelt started building, I mean, baking. And then all of a sudden, we slip back, and we slip back politically because it takes 60 percent of the population to make change politically. But medicine is going ahead, technology is making rapid rise. My symbol of the future is an ad, I don't know whether you've been here in Texas, but it's

a cancer cell being eaten up by another cancer cell. And it says how far technology has taken us. Now, we just have not been able to get, well, to keep it from being racial, and I don't want to make it racial, I want it not to be racial. It's all white folks between Brexit and Europe. You know, I mean, that's got nothing to do with race, that is England, well, I don't know what they want, but they can't have it, so it doesn't exist anymore. Now Germany has been different, and we have 4,000 German companies in Georgia, because Germany realized that they were too big for Europe, and one of the things I started working on when I was mayor was getting people who were growing too big for their own countries

to come here. Now that's also true of, I mean, almost everybody here is an immigrant, except us, and maybe we are too coming, you know, and so making sense of this complicated world is going to take a little time, but it's happening, I think, and the thing that messes up the politics is not only the slogans and the needs, but it's, well, well, when I've put all my money into television, somebody advised me that I lost. When I kept the money and started knocking on doors and organizing people blocked by block, I have lost the race since. When you all were engaged in the civil rights movement, was it particularly a focus on

the South, or did you all envision it going national? Well, I wanted it to stay in the South, because that's where I was, and I frankly thought the North was much more integrated than it is. But there weren't, but I think there were about 15 people that were working for Martin Luther King when we started out. We never had more than 50, and we were doing well in the South, in smaller cities. The thing about Chicago was they had more people and black people in Chicago than they had in the whole state of Alabama, and we didn't have any more people, and we ran into different kinds of problems. We solved them, and we worked with them. And there were real problems there that non-violence worked on, but we couldn't sustain it. You mentioned about the individuals working for Dr. King. We know about Hosea William, Ralph Abmanath, and yourself, Dr. King. Who are some of the other individuals we should know about that were part of that group?

Well, CT Vivian, Reverend CT Vivian, was really the first one to have a sit-in. He had a sit-in in Peoria, Illinois, in 1947. That was way before Montgomery and Martin Luther King. We go into his 96th birthday next month, he's still with us. He was a freedom rider. He worked with us from beginning to end, and he's still on the case. James Veville, James Veville was a genius, but he was also very eccentric, maybe even crazy. But Dr. King used to say that all of us are certifiably insane, because you've got to be kind of crazy to think that you can change America with no money, no organization. We had nothing but the spirit of the Lord moving in our hearts, and yet it changed.

When GLC, SCLC in 60, then you became the exact director, I think, two to four years later. What was it about that organization that galvanized the movement? Well, one, we were mostly preachers. We were all born practically in the South, and we had grown up in the South, and we had learned, like I was taught at four years old, don't get mad, get smart, lose your temper in the fight, you're going to lose the fight. And we knew how to, I was not afraid to talk to White Folk. I didn't think there were any other many smarter than me. We disagreed, but I didn't feel inferior, and I wouldn't let anybody how big or how black or how white they were make me feel. And I mean, I got that from my grandma, and if you have to die, you die, but die like

a man. Don't give up, don't back down, don't chicken out, and that's the way I was raised. And one of your comments during this week here in Austin, you mentioned that when you moved to Atlanta, you started answering some of the mail from Dr. King. What kind of letters will he receiving then? Well, most of his mail was congratulating him, asking him questions about things. But he had some hate mail too. And we made it a point to answer all of it, and you didn't have a lot of time to think about it, because there was so many of them. But that gave me a chance to, I think that's the way I got closer to him, that that was what he was worried about, he was worried about getting his mail answered, and I answered his mail.

Why was it important for Dr. King and on the rest of things that you weren't really in favor of him going back to Memphis because you all didn't really know the lay of the land there? Yeah, no. Nobody wanted him to go to Memphis, and the first place he was exhausted, he had taken on too much, and we had run out of time, we were running out of money, and we had enough we thought to get to Washington for the poor people's campaign. But we didn't know why we were taking on another movement. He felt though that he could not pass by the sanitation workers, and it was his call to Jerusalem. I think he knew he was, I think he knew his death was close. You sandwiched in between Maynard Jackson the first time and then Maynard Jackson the second time.

What do you think of your biggest accomplishment as mayor of Atlanta? I think Maynard built the airport. Built it with no government funds, we built it with private Wall Street money, and once it was built, we opened it up in December 1981, and I became mayor in January 1982, so my job to fill it, and so we built an international terminal, and we brought in airlines from all over the world, we expanded the employment there. We made sure that it started out that 25% of every contract was done by a minority contractor. I raised it to 35%, and then 40%. It just, well, then I think we brought the Olympics in. But before the Olympics, I started bringing in international businesses, because there was no money in Washington, and America was in a kind of a slump.

But there was plenty of money in Europe, so we brought German companies in. We now have almost 4,000 German companies in Georgia, and we have almost a thousand Japanese companies, and we have businesses from all over the world, and we've grown from a million in 1961 to 6.5 million now, and we've had the Olympics, which was the biggest Olympics ever. Our Olympics was bigger than China or Russia, and we paid for it privately, and 41% of all of the money went to minority businesses. Before I let you go, Ambassador, tell us about the end to Young Foundation. Well, somebody asked me when I turned 75, did I have a bucket list? And I said, no, I never thought of it that way.

I said, but there's some things that I have sort of in me that I would like to do something about if I got a chance. And somebody said, you ought to list it, and let us know maybe we can help. And so I started listing the things that I was concerned about. One was feeding hungry, we're going to run out of food. Because we're going to run out of water. Only 2% of the water on the earth is fresh water. And you don't grow plants in salt water very well. And so we're going to have to change the way we eat and the way we grow food. And so I've been experimenting with a number of people in a number of universities, both in the US and in Africa, with how we're going to do that. I grew up in New Orleans, and I've been watching the Mississippi River flood all my life. And I thought, after Katrina, I said, why don't people do like we did with the airport?

We didn't wait for Washington to send us some money. We went to New York, and we put together a plan, and we got money and built our own airport. Why don't we, and I decided that we could help the cities along the Mississippi. Two things to prevent flooding. They don't have to just sit here and wait until after the flood. And so we've organized the 83 cities between New Orleans and Minneapolis. It's hard to get them to think outside the box. One thing about Atlanta, and it's probably a result of the fact that you had four first grade colleges, and we had black professors who would help you think in a new way. The Honorable Andrew J. Young, Civil Rights legend, former Union Ambassador, Congressman, and Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions ask your future in Black America programs, email us at inblackamerica at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. Remember to like us on Facebook, and to follow us on Twitter. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessary, those of this station, or other University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org. Until we have the opportunity again for Technical producer David Alvarez, I'm Johnny O'Hanston Jr. Thank you for joining us today, please join us again next week. This has been a production of KUT Radio.