Learning About Andrew Young

It’s a weird time, no? I’m back on campus, going to class in-person, but who knows how long that’ll last? I’m getting used to living in a big city where most things are walkable, but I haven’t yet felt comfortable enough to use Boston’s public transportation. Like, at all.

Anyway, I’m writing this blog post on Sunday, September 26. So, it’s officially autumn (which is a huge step up from the hottest quarter of the year), but the proximity to summer and the record-high temperatures make you forget that you’re much closer to Halloween and Black Friday than you are to Fourth of July cookouts. I’m mostly caught up on my work, and I’ve done some more outreach for The HistoryMakers including one very fruitful conversation with Dr. Richard O’Bryant, director of the African American Institute here at Northeastern.

As a Student Brand Ambassador for The HistoryMakers, this week I was tasked with watching a video on the organization’s YouTube channel titled, “An Evening With Andrew Young” and writing a bit about it. The video is an uploaded copy of an interview filmed in 2006, in which journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault interviews the titular Mr. Young, a civil rights leader and politician. Both Hunter-Gault and Young have their full interviews in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive.

My task was simple and included a lot of wiggle room: I was to watch the video, jot down the names of the people mentioned in it, do some research on them, and write my weekly blog post on the subject.

Here’s who I wrote down as being mentioned in the video. It was mostly a handful of household names and a few new ones: Jesse Owens, W.E.B. DuBois, Emmanuel Latunde Odeku, Jean Childs Young, John Wesley Dobbs, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy. (Another name was that of a certain German fascist dictator who received his just deserts some time in the mid-1940s. But I didn’t research him, for reasons that ought to be obvious.)

If you haven’t heard of Andrew Young himself before, you’re in good company. Because same. However, after reading up a bit on him and watching some of his interview on the Digital Archive, it’s a wonder that his name wasn’t as well-known to me as some of the others on that list.

Andrew Young was born in 1932 and is 89 years old today. He was originally from New Orleans and received degrees from both Howard University in D.C. and Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut. He became a Christian minister and later a close ally to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In the 1970s, Young entered politics. A Democrat, he served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter as well as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979. He became the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1982, and served in that capacity until 1990. I learned a good deal about Young’s life from both the YouTube video and the HistoryMakers archive.

One part of Young’s life that I found particularly interesting was that he served as a negotiator during the civil rights movement, particularly during the campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. It’s just not something I envisioned taking place very often during the civil rights movement. I typically envision something more like: Civil rights protestors cause a ruckus with civil disobedience. White people get mad. White people call the cops. The cops use excessive force on the protestors. It gets caught on camera and put on the 6 o’clock news. Nation sees brutality faced by protestors and is outraged. Civil rights legislation slowly gathers popular support.

While I still think that’s accurate if we’re giving a rushed, bird’s-eye-view of certain events, I also learned that a lot more went into it. For example, in one of the clips from his interview, Young notes that he often played the role of negotiator with white people—in order to keep the peace. This is something I hadn’t thought of, but it makes a great deal of sense.

I came upon a newfound appreciation for the nonviolent ideals espoused of the civil rights movement. Around the 34:30 minute mark of the YouTube video, an actor portraying Young (and presumably quoting him) speaks about the resilience of the civil rights movement’s leaders as well as their famous nonviolent tactics:

“None of us were saints. Saints could not have endured the rigors of the movement, could not have accomplished what we had accomplished in so short of a time. We were flesh-and-blood human beings. Men and women, flawed and imperfect, and we fell far short of the glory of God. But we changed America, and we did it without hurting anyone except ourselves.”

This was a great quote, I thought, and I’m glad to share it with you.