LEADing Justice
LEADing Justice
A life of making change, reflections from Ambassador Andrew Young
The LEADing Justice podcast presents one of the great men of our time, Andrew Young, The close confidant and partner of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Ambassador Young has a singularly impactful career in causes of advancing justice and freedom. He reflects on his remarkable life, while giving guidance to navigate these turbulent times and to secure a future of peace and freedom.
Andrew Young was active in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and present at key points in American history, negotiating the Birmingham and Selma, Alabama desegregation agreements, helping to lead the Poor People's Campaign and serving as the the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. He was the mayor of Atlanta from 1982 to 1990 and also co-chaired the committee for the Olympic Games in 1996.
Dr. Janet Dewart Bell • Executive Producer / Host | Chris Neuner • Producer / Editor | Theme Music • First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn
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I am Janet Dewart Bell, the founder and president of Lead Intergenerational Solutions. The leading Justice podcast will tackle the most challenging issues of the day through provocative and informative discussions with singular guests who make a difference in the fight for freedom in America and the world. Securing a just and equitable future requires courage, commitment, compassion, vision and hope.
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Those elements are the themes of the Leading Justice podcast.
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The Leading Justice podcast presents one of the great men of our time, Andrew Young, a close confidant and partner of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ambassador. Young has a singularly impactful career in causes of advancing justice and freedom. He reflects on his remarkable life while giving guidance to navigate these turbulent times and to secure a future of peace and freedom. He is interviewed by guest co-host Carol Jenkins, the legendary journalist, activist, author and host of Black America on CUNY Television. In this timely and timeless interview. We are so honored today to have with us one of the great men of our time, Andrew Young, who has a singularly impactful career in causes of advancing justice and of advancing freedom.
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A close confidant and partner of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Ambassador Young was active in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and present at all of the key points in American history negotiating the Birmingham and Selma, Alabama desegregation agreements, helping to lead the Poor People's Campaign after Dr. King's assassination, being elected congressman being appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the United States ambassador to the United Nations and being elected mayor of Atlanta from 1982 to 1992.
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He also co-chairs a glacier for the Olympic Games in 1996. As we as we all remember, the theologian, Ambassador Young was elected as the 20th president of the National Council of Churches in 2003. His numerous honors include the ACP 1970 Spingarn Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. Georgia State University has named his School of Policy after him. He is co-chair of Goodworks International and a director of the Drum Major Institute.
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Ambassador Young is married to the former Carol Watson. He and his first wife, the late Jean Childs. Young, we remember very fondly, have four children. He is accessible. He is generous, is gracious. We thank you for spending some time with us today.
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I was born with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency in 1932. It means I've lived through. And I started out early. I was born in a neighborhood of lower working class. I think my parents were the only people in the neighborhood that had finished college, but it was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another.
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The Nazi party was on the third corner.
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Wow.
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And I was right in the middle. My father grew up in rural Louisiana, and you had very few you had almost no rights that anybody had respect. You couldn't you had to control the situation. You never acted like you're afraid of anybody, that when policemen come to you address, look them in the eye and address them and say, Good evening, Officer. Good morning, officers. And you can see the name all of them by name.
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And so he taught you. He taught you how to maneuver. You know, that space would say in the Nazis zone, one corner and, you know, and and wanting you to grow up to be an adult. I mean, today you save if if a mother is giving advice to her son about dealing with police in the United States, you know, afraid of her son getting killed, for instance, I don't know whether the advice is look me in the eye, you know, and and see if you can get their name and be gracious.
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My dad is advice was and he was. He made sure we went to the gymnasium, which was about eight or ten blocks from my age. We could run there and he knew a lot of the boxes because he thinks that for free. And and they and they ended up the way they paid him back was teaching my brother and I how to box.
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And one of the things you learn in the boxing ring is you don't get mad and start swinging while you you have to. If you lose your temper in a fight, you lose the fight. And I heard that from the boxes. And I heard that from my father.
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Ambassador. We are definitely in a fight now, some would say. Many would say what? So we're not going to get mad. We're going to plan smartly. How? What do we need to do now? We're in the middle of the pandemic. We're in the middle of a war.
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And we're not going to one we're not going to try to take them on all at a time. We're going to take, as I learned to take life one day at a time. I don't have to solve all the problems. I just have to get through this day and tomorrow, maybe. And talking and going through. Going to my first church, which wasn't in Brooklyn. It was in South Georgia.
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Right. And I was asked to run a voter registration drive. And it read. And this was in 1956. So that was right after the Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott. And we saw we were coming back into town and there were about 200 people, Klansmen in sheets. I had not studied nonviolence yet, but my wife had. She and Coretta King were from the same town.
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Garrido's house was burned down when she was 15 and by the Klan just because her family was successful. Jean's family lost all of their property when she was about 12. And her I mean, her family was so devastated that her grandfather committed suicide. My mother got fired from her job because the superintendent hit on us and she whacked him upside the head with an umbrella.
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And so she couldn't get a job anywhere in the county. But these were women who, from their childhood had been fighting racial battle. And her attitude to me was more Christian than anything I had ever heard before. And she said, I can't win a human being. And I said, But they will burn down this house and with the baby and you and all three of us go up in smoke. And that's the end of it, you said.
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So you preach the cross and the resurrection, the art and the cross, because she would have let me settle on violence or even defensive violence. She made me think. And I said, Well, I'm going to go talk to the mayor. And I talked to the mayor who was the.
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Brand, the hardware store in town. And he.
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Picked up the phone and he called the the two largest employers Sunderland packing company and Flowers Bakery and told them that I was there and that I'd seen the Klan, that I was having a voter registration drive and I didn't want the Klan to fill with anything. And so the the plants, the people who owned the businesses in town said, look, we don't want any violence. You tell that.
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We will tell the sheriff that he can let the Klan. Have their meeting on the courthouse steps, but don't let them go into the black community and arrest white citizens. Now, what she forced me to do was to think and when I started thinking about it, I said, Well, let me see if I can make this government work. That lesson that I learned in 1956. I also applied in 1963 when we went to Birmingham and before we started demonstrating, Dr.
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King said. And it.
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Do you know any white people in Birmingham? I said, I don't know. I don't think so. He said, See if you can meet up. And I said, What for? He said, Before we start demonstrating, we want to start talking to some of the community leaders.
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To tell them why we're demonstrating, what we're going to do and what they could do to bring it to an end. And the way he put it that we were born, we were born black. They were born white. Can't do anything about that. What we can do something about it is that we were born in an unjust relationship. And in order to keep us down, they have to keep one foot down in the gutter to keep us out.
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And why can't. We just stand up together and have a new relationship as brothers.
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Ambassador, I have two questions I want to ask. Number one, in a recent speech, you were talking about the United States of America, the pandemic and the racial strife at all. And I think I read you saying was that you thought that there would have to be a world reorder after we get out of all of this, that the United States will be in need of assistance, will be a date or help. Can you talk to us a little bit about that of of where you are as a country?
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I knew a little bit about the First World War. I wasn't born then, but I knew that they formed the League of Nations. And the League of Nations didn't work because the United States was not a member.
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I think. And Franklin Roosevelt knew that also. And so he planned. And the reason I know so much about it is that a lot of his planning was done through Ralph Bunche. Mm hmm. But. And Black.
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Man.
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Has been a professor at Howard University.
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Right.
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And he took a leave of absence in 1937 and 1939, and he did a study.
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All of Africa and the Middle East. That really turned out to be the basis for the United Nations. Now, almost nobody talks about that, but that's one of the most important events in the history of the planet because Ralph Bunche.
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Conceived of a world along with Franklin Roosevelt, a world where people, instead of fighting wars every 15 or 20 years, that they would meet regularly. And talk over the differences. And that's what the United Nations was designed to do.
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And Ralph Bunche did most of the writing that defined the rules and regulations and bylaws and the committee structure of the United Nations.
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He was a.
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Genius. The world order that Ralph Bunche and Franklin Roosevelt and that every other president almost since then. Some more than others, but none more than Jimmy Carter, understood the importance of the United Nations and realized that America could run the world from the United Nations. And that's why he asked me to go there as the ambassador to the United Nations, because.
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I had been with Martin Luther King, and Martin Luther King was associated with country. He understood the connections from Roosevelt, a bunch, to the civil rights movement to a New World Order.
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Yeah. What about the world that we have now? We need.
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Your show, the world.
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Your advice.
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All the world that we have now is a world that a number of presidents have deliberately trashed. Because they want to think that America first. Right. That they should not have to respect these lesser nations. But if you look at the fires that are blazing, those fires blazing in California didn't just start in California.
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They were blazing. Six months ago, all the way down in Australia, the ice cap in the Arctic has broken and is now flooding down from Melbourne as it moves down from the ice cap. And that's a flood that could flood New York. We don't know what the impact is, but the things that are happening in the world, including the pandemic that's happening because of climate change.
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And there is no nation that can control the entire atmosphere. We can cooperate with the Russians on a space station. And we've been doing that now for 20 years almost.
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Why can't we sit down and talk about.
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How we can reduce the carbon emissions. Well, I'll say. Jimmy. Jimmy.
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Ambassador, don't you need a president who actually believes in science?
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We had a president. We had a president when Jimmy Carter was president. That illustrated with the automobile industry. Right. So that by now, the fleet average for a gallon would be 38 miles to the gallon.
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On all the little cars that are now in action. We wouldn't have the same climate in the atmosphere if we were burning less fossil fuel right now. We elected a president, but he's not the first one.
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Ronald Reagan did. Reagan undid everything that Jimmy Carter did. So you you talk about conditions, but you can't find almost in any of his speeches, you cannot find Luther King calling George Wallace name.
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Not a one.
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Right. Right.
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I mean, we knew that. We knew who the enemies were, but we didn't dignify them. Well, we went to Chicago. People were mad with the Board of Education. They had buttons, and we made them broom away. The problem is the education of our children. To.
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To call his name gets you off target. And so I think that's one of the mistakes that. Well, first of all, all 14 Republicans in the last election made it. They never should have called his name and he would meet president.
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They made him who he is today. And.
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And we're paying a price.
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For trying to personalize things. And actually he is to be.
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You know.
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You wouldn't make fun of a one legged man who couldn't run.
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True. And so it's almost as though when I see somebody, a racist or somebody who is so emotionally insecure that he can't function as a well-balanced human being. I don't make fun of people like that. I tried and I tried to understand them and I tried to try to work with them in some kind of way.
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Ambassador Young, I cannot thank you enough for sharing your experiences, your wisdom with us, the ways that you came about, that wisdom which are are so instructive to all of us. Thank you for I'll say it. Thank you for the contributions that you've made, even though you were just doing it one day at a time and facing problems as opposed to turning your back to them. We really appreciate that. Example, thanks for being with us today.
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Well, thank you for this. It makes another day worth it
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Thank you. Ambassador Young and guest co-host Carol Jenkins for that timely and timeless interview. On the next episode of Leading Justice. I will interview Charles and Will He isn't the president and chief executive officer of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, established to carry on the work of Andrew Goodman. Andy was a college student when he was murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, along with two other young men, James Chaney and Andrew Schwerner.
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Their tragic deaths in 1964 contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Andrew Goodman Foundation works to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy with their vote everywhere, campaign and training youth activists and leaders. Next, leading Justice podcast, the Andrew Goodman Foundation President Charles and Will Hyacinthe join us.
