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"Interview of Mayor Andrew Young"
Mr. David Hardin: As I understand it, your father was a dentist and your mother was a teacher. It appears that you were headed toward dentistry from your early vocational planning and then you veered off into the ministry. What happened?

Mayor Andrew Young: I was very close to my father, and from the time I was eight or ten years old, he had me working in the dental laboratory, and he really wanted me to be a dentist. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t know what I wanted. And then during my last year in college, our church got a new minister, a young man — now in Detroit — the Reverend Nicholas Hood. He had just come from Yale Divinity School, and was just about ten years older than me. He was a very impressive sort of person. He took me under his wing and for the first time, I think, I began to see the happiness, the joy, the positive contribution that could come from somebody whose total life was committed to serving others.

Mr. Hardin: Now you were ordained in the United Church of Christ and you then kind of got into political life. What led you into political life from the ordained ministry?

Mayor Young: Well, it was a long struggle, but I think they were always very closely related. My first pastorate was in Thomasville, Georgia in 1954. And they were looking for somebody to run a voter registration drive. Well, my parents in addition to being good church people were always very active in the NAACP, and the Urban League. They were civic minded although they didn’t get much involved in politics, because black people couldn’t in Louisiana in those days. But I volunteered, and the next thing you know there was a big Klan rally, and I was right in the midst of it. I didn’t even think it was controversial or courageous to run a voter registration drive. The Klan thought otherwise. And that sort of led me into realizing that if I was going to preach to people that they were God’s children on Sunday, and then they go out into a society that tells them that they’re “niggers” and that they can’t work as other men work, but they have to sit in the back of the bus, that if everything about the society is organized to dehumanize them, then my preaching has to do more than just tell them they are God’s children. My preaching had to become incarnate. It had to become flesh. It had to be institutionalized.

Mr. Hardin: You worked with Dr. King for about eight years before his death, and with SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) after that. What was his influence on your life?

Mayor Young: Well, it was enormous. When I met Martin and came to work for him he had already been stabbed in Harlem. And the thing that that did to him was that it made him live his entire life under the threat of death, so he really didn’t think he was going to live long. It meant that every decision was a life-and-death decision for him at any time. And he used to say almost glibly, “If you haven’t found something that you’re willing to die for, you’re probably not fit to live anyway.” I think that was probably the most powerful impact that he forced. me to face death. And when you face death, you can’t be afraid of anything else. Everything else: failure, criticism, various kinds of disappointments, losing jobs — none of that is important if you’re living your life in such a way that you know you might lose it at any time, and you’re willing to do those things that you really and truly believe in. Everything else takes care of itself.

Mr. Hardin: How did being a serious Christian conflict in any way with trying to achieve Civil Rights in that movement at that time? How did it affect what you did?

Mayor Young: Well, I think we thought of ourselves pretty much like the ministry of the Apostle Paul. We saw ourselves taking our ministry out of the church building and from city to city. We saw very clearly that when we were trying to change segregation, it was very consistent with the book of Ephesians — breaking down the dividing wall of hostility. In Ephesians it was what separated Jew from Greek. But for us those dividing walls, a legal segregation, separated black from white. And we saw ourselves as essentially having a ministry that was not limited by the church building. The slogan that Dr. King and the SCLC adopted was “to redeem the soul of America.” And so we saw this as a ministry of redemption. Dr. King used to say that everybody was infected by race and racism. It gave blacks a sense of inferiority and it gave whites a false sense of superiority. We had to develop a new relationship that would enable us to live together as brothers. The first Epistle of John talks about how can you love God whom you have not seen and hate your brother whom you see. If a man says he loves God and hates his brother, he’s a liar. And that’s the condition that we saw America in, particularly in the south which was where our focus was, but it was probably true generally that people didn’t know how to love their brothers. And so no matter how much they prayed and shouted in church and talked about the love of God, if it wasn’t expressed toward the love of their brother, it was a kind of empty Christianity.

Mr. Hardin: What was it like for you on that terrible day of Dr. King’s death? Did you wonder where God was? Take us back to that a little bit.

Mayor Young: Well, it’s very hard for me to talk about it. I’ve tried to write about it and it’s the most difficult thing about the movement to write about because I was very mixed. One, we had always been taught by Dr. King that death was inevitable, and that the only thing that you had control of was not whether or not you were going to die but what you would die for. So in some sense, Martin dying in the midst of a struggle to help garbage workers get organized, to bargain, to get decent wages, was something that he believed in and something he didn’t mind giving his life for. I think I had another reaction and that was that Martin was free. That he was entitled to go on to glory and claim his reward. But then at the same time I got very angry because I knew we were left with a mess. And I didn’t see how we could carry on. And I knew how incomplete his work, was. What I think I didn’t understand then, that I understand now, is that progress in the Christian faith occurs really through the cost, that Martin Luther King was much more powerful in death than he was in life. It was something of the same thing with John Kennedy’s assassination. I don’t think that John Kennedy as a living President could have passed a civil rights bill, but in his death civil rights bills in 1964 and 1965 passed.

It’s still true, I think, that there’s almost no remission of sins without the shedding of innocent blood. You know: no cross — no crown. All of the things we say and sing about in our churches: there’s no resurrection without a crucifixion. And I think you see that in a social context, both in the assassination of John Kennedy and in the assassination of Martin Luther King: job opportunities, the desegregation of the workplace, can all be charted to that year after Martin’s assassination when suddenly people realized that this person was preaching nonviolence, and we didn’t listen. And he was right. Maybe we better do something about it. And I think you saw a broad base of society really implementing Martin’s dream in his death. I always felt that he had earned death. Death was a blessing for him, but I figured my life would be hell. It’s actually turned out a lot better than I ever could have imagined because the power of his life and death has continued to help us.

Mr. Hardin: Let’s go on with that. The next phase of your life was to get into Congress. You ran once and lost, and then you ran a second time and won in a predominately white district. How did being in Congress as a follower of Jesus work? How effective could one be as a Christian in pragmatic politics and what are the conflicts?

Mayor Young: Well, I found no conflict, absolutely none. Because when you stake out a clear sense of direction and principles, you’re never called on to compromise except as you try to see the other side. And that was another thing that Martin taught me to do. It might look like compromise but, for instance, I was in a funny kind of district in a way. I was black in a district that was predominately white. I was representing a city in an area that was predominately rural. So, first of all, I didn’t limit myself, and I was very much involved in the problems of Georgia farmers as well as the problems of city dwellers. I was on the banking committee, but many of my black constituents were quite poor. So I found a kind of unifying ministry in the Congress. And, very frankly, I used to think of the Congress of 435 members as my church, so that when I got up to speak in the floor of the Congress, even though I didn’t take a text, I really felt that it was just like preaching on Sunday mornings, though you had to be shorter.

I also made pastoral calls in the sense that as I wanted to get my point across, if I wanted to get something done with the deacons in my church, I went to visit them and talk with them a lot. So when I got to Congress, I went to Congressmen and talked with them about things.

We had a very active prayer fellowship which cut across party lines and liberal and conservative lines, and we found that even though we disagreed politically, there was a great deal that we had in common in terms of our faith in God and the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Mr. Hardin: You became very popular in this district. At your last election I think you won by 80% and yet you made the decision to end your congressional career and take on the U. N. Ambassadorship which certainly was a spectacular move with a rather short future. What led you to do that?

Mayor Young: I’ve always felt that there is a sense in which God leads my life very practically. And I didn’t expect Jimmy Carter to get elected. I started working with Jimmy Carter because he was a good guy. I figured there would be a southerner on the ticket. It was either going to be Wallace or Carter, and I knew Carter was a lot better than Wallace. So I said I would help him, but I told him that I didn’t think he could get elected, and probably, after the Florida primary, I would support somebody else.

Well, folk began to pick on him and I began to defend him, and because the criticism was unjust, I found myself getting closer and closer to him and having more and more respect for him. Then after his election, I told him that I thought (and I think I was right) that he was going to have the most trouble with the Congress, and that I could probably be more help to him in the Congress than I could anywhere else. His goals and objectives were so noble and so lofty, that I couldn’t say no. It’s very hard to say no to a President of the United States anyway. If he had said, “Go to Zimbabwe,” I’d have probably had to go. Because your patriotism becomes more important than almost anything else.

Mr. Hardin: Mayor Young, since you’ve become mayor, you’ve had a brand new set of challenges and conflicts to look at. How do you get your own spiritual renewal? How do you keep yourself in touch with the Lord through all these pressures?

Mayor Young: Well, one thing, the pressures drive you to your knees and you have to pray, and I do. One thing is that I preach somewhere almost every Sunday and that requires a little more disciplined Bible study. For a period, some of the members of the city council and myself and Mrs. King and the Reverend Joseph Lowery of SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) used to have a Wednesday morning prayer group which was quite helpful, but our schedules broke it up. But it’s something we keep coming back to in difficult times. It’s simply a matter of calling a group of the brothers and sisters together for prayer, and we do that. But I have always been able to integrate my spiritual life with my athletic life in some way. I don’t jog much any more, but I found that in jogging, or swimming, or a long bike ride in the country on a Saturday or Sunday evening, that I get myself pretty much together. But it is something you have to keep working at.

Mr. Hardin: Let me ask you a tough question — it may even be loaded — but in Chicago we have a struggle between our mayor, Harold Washington, and the city council....

Mayor Young: Well, every city has. I think the only difference is that in Chicago it’s a lot more public. I think the nature of government is to have conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch. We just kind of keep ours a little more under wraps. But, also, I think that the community in Atlanta wouldn’t tolerate that. They would get upset. We found that negative politics turns people off. That for me to criticize the council or the reverse — whoever is doing the criticizing — ends up losing out. In the last three or four elections the person who has been the most bitter in his attack on someone else has lost the election, even when they were sometimes the good guy. So, I think that the voting patterns in Georgia have prevented that. But we also find that we have to find a way, and frankly there again, when we get a little too divided, I always go to the business community to bring us together. We have been very fortunate in Atlanta, where for 25 years the business community, black and white, has been meeting regularly. They had to — to go through the race relations period. And so, whenever I have a problem with the council, I go to them, and we get together and we talk it out. Or whenever they sense a problem between the council and me, then they will call us together and try to talk it out. They are Democrats and Republicans, they’re black and white. And essentially they form a little more objective powerblock that we as politicians can’t afford to go up against. I’ve said that to some of your businessmen in Chicago. The five banks can get folk to do almost anything they want to do in Atlanta. I’m sure there are five banks in Chicago that if they said to the key Republican leadership and the key Democratic leadership and the key black leadership and the key white leadership, “Look, let’s sit together and work out some accommodation on some of these differences,” it would happen.

Mr. Hardin: Interesting. Now let’s turn to your family life just for a minute. You have four children. How do you balance the needs of your public life with what you feel is your commitment and the needs of your own family?

Mayor Young: Well, first of all you have to be blessed with a very, very good wife. And I was lucky in that. I’ve let her know that I consider her one of the blessings of God in my life. I depend on her far more than I should to love me and also to love our children. It was easy with the three girls. They are now very successful.

Our oldest daughter is actually working for the United Church of Christ. She is a lawyer who was in foreign affairs with Senator Kennedy’s office. Now she’s the Africa secretary for the United Church of Christ. My second daughter is an engineer with IBM. And my third daughter was teaching as a missionary with Habitat for Humanity in Uganda. She just came back, and after the coup, she can’t return there.

And then we’ve got a little boy who is 12 years old and in the 7th grade. I think what I tried to do was to be there for my children when I was there. I learned something from Danny Kaye in Reader’s Digest when my first child was about two years old. He was talking about the need to come back and get reacquainted with your children, that you just can’t go on a trip and then come back and try to pick up where you left off. You have to give your children a little time to warm up to you, and you have to listen to them. I started trying to listen to each one of my children for five minutes a day. Not preach to them, not tell them what I had been doing, but try to get them to talk to me for five minutes.

There was a very great theologian, a professor in the University of Chicago, Ross Snyder. He used to say, “Love is being present, too,” and I would try to be present to my children and let them decide how the time was to be spent. If they wanted to wrestle, we wrestled. If they wanted to talk, we’d talk — you know, whatever they wanted. I think that has made a big difference, but it really restores and refreshes me because they give so much to me that once you start doing it, you can’t do without it. And your family strengthens you. But in the process of strengthening you, they grow themselves.

Mr. Hardin: I think that’s a great way to end this wonderful interview, and I want to thank you very much for giving us your time and showing us how one can connect with what the Lord tells us to be with what we end up being. Thank you very much, Andy.    

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