Andrew Young was the first African-American ambassador to the UN. Photo courtesy of the National Council of Churches USA
Moments before an assassin’s bullet struck him down, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) was discussing a Memphis trash collectors’ strike with his good friend Andrew Young, then executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Young is immortalized in a photograph showing him and two other witnesses pointing in the direction of the shots.
Drawing upon his decades of experience in ministry, activism, diplomacy, government, and international business, Young comes to Boston University today, November 13, to speak. His topic is Challenges Before a New Generation: Civil and Human Rights in the Global Era. The event, at 5:30 p.m. in Metcalf Hall, is sponsored by the BU NAACP and the Office of the Dean of Students.
“The challenge,” Young says, “is that we demonstrate to the world that democracy and free enterprise can end poverty in our lifetime, in the 21st century.”
Born and raised in New Orleans, Young received two degrees from Howard University in Washington, D.C. His plan was to become a dentist like his father, but in the early 1950s he heard a call to ministry. He attended Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn., receiving a bachelor of divinity degree in 1955, and became a minister in the United Church of Christ.
As a pastor in Jim Crow Alabama, Young became involved in the drive to register black voters and began studying the nonviolent tactics of Mohandas Gandhi. He joined the SCLC, which was led by King, eventually becoming King’s right-hand man, and was jailed for demonstrating in Selma, Ala., and in St. Augustine, Fla. In his memoir An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, Young writes of a motel-room pillow fight with King and another activist — a rare light moment after a morning spent mediating the dispute between the city of Memphis and its garbage workers. King was murdered later that day.
Young, a Democrat, was elected to Congress in 1972, the first African-American to represent Georgia since Reconstruction. He was reelected twice, and in 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed him ambassador to the United Nations, a position he held until 1979.
Some of Young’s public comments have sparked controversy, such as when he criticized Ronald Reagan for launching his presidential candidacy — with a speech about states’ rights — in Philadelphia, Miss., the site of the infamous murder of three civil-rights activists and the subsequent cover-up. “That looks like a code word to me,” Young charged, “that it’s going to be all right to kill niggers when he’s president.”
Young was mayor of Atlanta for two terms, from 1981 to 1989, helping to turn the city around after a recession by bringing in international investment. He also cochaired the committee that brought the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta.
“In Atlanta,” Young says, “we implemented an economic fairness formula that made free enterprise work for everybody, in that we saw to it that minorities had access to contracts, we saw that they had access to the banking system and credited capital, and we’re [teaching] financial literacy in the schools for our young people. And I think that’s a formula that will work anywhere.”
"That’s what we’re trying to make work in Africa and the Caribbean,” Young says, referring to his current position with GoodWorks International, which helps multinational corporations expand into the developing world, especially Africa. Young has run the organization since 1999.
“Africa needs everything that anybody can produce,” Young says, “and it has the resources to pay for it.”
Young also lectures at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
