Happy 90th birthday to Civil Rights lion, Amb. Andrew Young, a role model, a mentor and a treasured family friend
21st March 2022 · 0 Comments
By Marc H. Morial
President/CEO, The National Urban League
On a hot, New Orleans summer day in 1947, Andrew Young was riding his bike along Esplanade Avenue with some other teenagers from the neighborhood when they decided to cool off in the shade of the elm trees nest to Delgado Museum of Art. They had barely stepped onto the grass when a police officer shook his billy club and shouted, “You little n***ers get out of here!”
Young and his friends pedaled their bikes as fast as they could until they were a safe distance from the museum. Worried that his parents would be angry, he swore his friends to secrecy. One of them was my mother, Sybil Haydel Morial, who recounted the traumatic encounter in her memoir, Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment.
“We didn’t say a word about the incident to our parents until years later,” she wrote. “By that time, the morality of the rules, and of breaking then, had a whole new meaning. Jim Crow was on the run.”
Young, who has remained a dear family friend, this week celebrates his 90th birthday and an extraordinary lifetime spent setting Jim Crow on the run.
By the time Young blessed my wife, Michelle Miller, and me by presiding over our wedding in 1999, he was the nation’s most celebrated and accomplished civil rights activist, public servant, and diplomat in the nation. Today, he is “one of the last great lions of the 1960s civil rights movement,” as the New York Times described him. To me, he is family – a role model, a mentor and a treasured friend.
My family and Young’s have been intertwined since before he and my mother were born. As he wrote in the foreword to Witness to Change, “Dr. CC Haydel, Sybil’s father and our family physician, came to my home to deliver me in 1932, before we had hospitals that we could afford our trust. Our mothers played bridge together in a club called ‘The Gloom Chasers.’ In my senior year in high school, I took Sybil as my date to the prom. By then we had become friends, not knowing our paths would cross again many times in the great movement that was only a shadow yet.”
Both Young and my mother were born into families that were relatively affluent – his father was a dentist, and my grandfather was a physician – and though racial segregation was a way of life, New Orleans’ unique history of blended cultures had “softened the edges.” The lower-income white people who were their neighbors and his father’s patients “were prejudiced against us because of race,” while at the same time “my parents had certain class notions against them.”
In a 1964 interview for Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, Young said, “I was almost always getting spanked by my parents for playing with the wrong kids, and I think they were being spanked by their parents for playing with us.”
Young’s rebellion against his parents’ “Black bourgeoisie value system” eventually led him to the ministry and a job in New York City with the Youth Division of the National Council of Churches. The Civil Rights Movement led him back to the South. In 1961 he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, leading their “citizenship schools” where Black southerners studied for the literacy tests required for them to register to vote. He was the key strategist and negotiator in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and became executive director of the SCLC in 1964, helping to usher the Civil Rights Act into law. Over the next few years, he served as trusted advisor and confidante to Martin Luther King, Jr.,
He was standing in the parking lot of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis at 6:05pm on April 4, 1968. The air was cool, and he’d just told King to go back and get an overcoat when a shot rang out.
His first reaction was, “OK, so you’ve gone to Heaven, and you’ve left us here in hell,’” he told ABC News.
He heeded King’s directive to “take the energy and vitality of the civil rights movement and move it into politics,” winning election to Congress in 1972. He made history in 1977 when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to be the first Black Ambassador to the United Nations.
At the urging of Coretta Scott King, he ran successfully for Mayor of Atlanta in 1981. Upon winning a second term in 1985, he said he was “glad to be mayor of this city, where once the mayor had me thrown in jail.”
Since leaving office, he created the Andrew Young Foundation to support and promote education, health, leadership and human rights in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. His other achievements have ranged from university lecturing to co-chairing the Olympic Games. But he still lives in the same Atlanta home he bought in 1966.
“I came to Atlanta before it started growing, so I grew with Atlanta.” He told Atlanta Magazine. “I made a contribution to Atlanta, but Atlanta made one hell of a contribution to me.”
This article originally published in the March 21, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
