9 minute read
The Peacemaker
Andrew Young fought racism by reasoning with white leaders. Listen, he told them. I only want to help you.
By Kayleigh Skinner
e can still picture the flag, the swastika
Hbillowing in the wind just blocks from his childhood home in downtown New Orleans.
Minister. Civil rights icon. Congressman. United Nations ambassador. Mayor of Atlanta. Each is a title Young held during his long career as activist, pastor, politician and diplomat.
He marched with Martin Luther King Jr., faced snarling police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, was beaten by the Klu Klux Klan. He negotiated with leaders of nations, helped organize the Atlanta Olympics and runs a successful private foundation. And at every step, he followed a personal philosophy born of his father’s deceptively simple advice: Know the people you are talking to. Listen to them. Help them. Show them a way out of the hole they dug.
Now, at 82, he runs the Andrew Young Foundation, which from a comfortable office on the ninth floor of an Atlanta skyscraper teaches students of all ages his theory of creative nonviolence while at the same time raising and spending millions for good causes.
This life wasn’t always the one Young planned – after he graduated from college his father wanted his son to follow him into dentistry.
But Young felt called to the ministry, becoming a United Church of Christ minister. As black protests stirred to life in the 1950s, Young felt another calling: The movement.
He joined King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, quickly becoming a minister to the ministers who ran the movement. It wasn’t long before he became King’s chief negotiator.
When the SCLC faced a tough town, King sent Young in to talk to the other side. His easygoing, analytical manner helped put white leaders at ease. Time and again, he earned the trust and respect of those who seemed least likely to compromise. It earned him a nickname: “The Peacemaker.”
Then came Birmingham.
In the summer of 1963 it was a city divided. The white community clung fiercely to segregation. The black community was in no mood to take it anymore. Things grew tense. Some called it “Bombingham” because nearly 50 African-American homes were bombed by white supremacists. King took to the streets to push for change, but white leaders pushed right back.
Young, left, in SCLC days with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., center. COPY PHOTO FROM ANDREW YOUNG
Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor was the epitome of a tough Southern cop. He turned highpressure fire hoses on protesters, ripping their clothes off and knocking them off their feet. He let police dogs shred and tear the marchers’ skin and clothing.
While the battle raged on in the streets, Andy Young was talking. He met with white businessmen who were alarmed at what was happening but couldn’t see a way out.
“I met with them regularly trying to help them understand that we could not shop there and give them our money in places where we were not respected,” he said. “We said. ‘All you have to do is show us a little respect, and the business will come back.’”
Young told them African-Americans hated to see only whites working as sales clerks in department stores. When white businessmen claimed they could not find black people qualified to be sales clerks, he showed them a way.
Young suggested they promote maids who had worked in their stores for years. These women were familiar with the products, so customers often approached them with questions anyway. He suggested allowing the women to wear the clothes that were for sale with a nametag, and get a small commission for each sale.
It worked.
Next, Young focused on desegregating Birmingham’s lunch counters. He spoke with owners and asked them if he could send in one African-American couple a day trained in non-violence. A week passed without incident, and so he sent in two couples a day. Then three. Soon the businessmen said, “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“I never argued in a negotiation and I never tried to let them know what my opinion was,” he said. “My thing was, ‘How can I help you get out of this?’”
Over time, what seemed headed for more violence was resolved through talking.
“That negotiation went very easily,” Young said. “All negotiations go easily if you’re not afraid, if you listen to your opponent.”
That philosophy helped whenever the movement called him to Mississippi, a state that resisted integration more violently than any other.
“We would stop at the first grocery store or gas station and go in and sit around and talk to people, buy a few things, ask them about the weather,” Young said. “We put them at ease, and they would never see us as troublemakers.”
Young said he never had any unpleasant incidents in Mississippi. He found that if he asked, most gas station clerks would let him use the restroom. If they said no, he would leave quietly and not buy gas there.
Again and again, he returned to the advice his
Andrew Young in his downtown Atlanta headquarters. PHOTO BY ALEX EDWARDS father gave him in kindergarten. Once, his father took him to see a movie about U.S. Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens. Owens won gold in his first race at the 1936 Olympics in Germany, but Hitler snubbed him, refusing to congratulate a black athlete.
“Jesse didn’t get mad. He just went on and won three more gold medals and broke four world records,” Young’s daddy told him. "Don’t get mad. Get smart. If you lose your temper in a fight, you lose the fight.”
Young always kept his cool, even when Stokely Carmichael shouted “black power” on a march through the Mississippi Delta.
James Meredith had been shot walking down Interstate-55 on his “March Against Fear.” Major civil rights organizations joined forces to finish the march to Jackson. Enroute, in a Greenwood park, Carmichael began his controversial call for “black power.”
Young thought it was silly. "People who really have power, don’t go shouting about it,” he said.
“The Meredith march was a farce to begin with,” he businessmen ever to meet outside their country. said. “Who gives a damn about his fears? … He had kind of “We gave them some of the history of the civil a neurotic streak that I didn’t want to be bothered with.” rights movement,” he said. “Next thing you know, the
Young believed SCLC needed to be in Chicago where money started flowing in. The Dutch had a it was making progress, or preparing for upcoming lot of Saudi money. (They) put $1.5 elections. Instead, they were slogging through the Delta billion into Atlanta in my first term. on a march that threatened to spiral out of control. “That’s what turned our
In Canton, police used tear gas on marchers. fortunes around,” Young said. Carmichael “panicked” and some of his followers He led an expansion of the city’s threatened to charge the police. Young objected. international airport. Since it was "Wait a minute, you know, they’ve got guns,” built with private money, Georgia Young said, grabbing the arm of one angry protester. taxpayers never paid a thing. “They’ve got billy clubs and you’re going to run Young also worked as an unpaid after them with all these women and children? I volunteer on the Atlanta Olympic said, ‘That’s not black power. That’s stupidity.’” Committee. The 1996 Games brought an
In 1972 Young won a seat in Congress. He spent nearly estimated $2.5 billion into the city. six years there before joining the United Nations under At times, it was as if his faith President Jimmy Carter. As U.N. ambassador, he built guided Young’s fortunes. bridges to African and Middle Eastern countries. Then, his “I learned after college that the only world unofficial meeting with a representative of the Palestinian view that made sense to me was, essentially, Liberation Organization blew up into controversy. the religious world view,” he said.
No one in the U.S. government was supposed to meet Indeed, Young sees the hand of God in much of with the PLO until the Palestinian group recognized his life. Christian faith and the black church played a Israel’s right to exist. Young saw no reason to follow critical role in the success of the civil rights movement. strict rules of diplomacy if he had the opportunity How else to explain unarmed men, women and children to negotiate. At the urging of Israeli and Egyptian singing hymns as they faced cops with guns? leaders, he met with the PLO’s U.N. representative, and Black people living under Jim Crow quickly got it transcripts of the meeting were leaked. Young resigned. when King related the biblical story of how God rescued
“There wasn’t anything the Israelites from secret about it,” Young oppression and led them said. “I kept saying I was only doing my job.” His knowledge of international affairs proved helpful during his time as mayor of Atlanta from 1982 to 1989. His contacts and his skill as a negotiator helped him lure almost “All negotiations go easily if you’re not afraid, if you listen to your opponent.” to the Promised Land. “We succeeded because we kept our narrative involved in the biblical narrative,” Young says. “It was, ‘We’ve been through the segregation of Egypt. We’ve wandered $70 billion in private development to the city. – ANDREW YOUNG in the wilderness of separate but equal, the
How does a slavery of Egypt, the Southern pastor go from civil rights leader to politician segregation of 40 years to private developer? Young was never trained in in the wilderness and now we’re on the verge of moving economics or finance, but he knew that foreign into a Promised Land of creative integration.’ Well, investment would benefit Atlanta tremendously. everybody in the South understood that,” he says.
“We found a way to run a city’s economy Faith, Young was saying, carried black people according to a new world economic order through hard times to victory. Even now, when that no one else knows about,” he said. trouble arises, he falls back on a Bible verse
In 1982 Young traveled to Saudi Arabia to (Matthew 6:34) his grandmother taught him: tout Atlanta’s business potential. Soon, a group “Be not anxious for the morrow. Let the day’s of nearly 200 Saudi businessmen flew to Atlanta own trouble be sufficient unto the day thereof.” to check it out, the largest group of Saudi Design by Kim Sanner
ROBERT CLARK
State Rep. Robert Clark helped push through Gov. William Winter’s public kindergarten program and other education reforms. PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
