Andrew Young’s work as a pastor, administrator, and voting rights advocate led him to join Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the civil rights struggle. Young, who entered elective politics shortly after King’s assassination, credited King for giving “purpose and sustenance” to his life. “He left his mark on me, both in indelible memories and in the spiritual and practical lessons of our trials and triumphs,” Young recalled. “It is by the quality of those days that I have come to measure my own continuing journey.”
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 12 March 1932 into a middle-class family, Young earned a B.S. degree in pre-med at Howard University before studying to become a minister. In 1955, he earned a divinity degree at Hartford Theological Seminary and was ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ. After serving as a pastor in Marion, Alabama, Young joined the National Council of Churches in New York as associate director of the Youth Division of Christian Education.
Moved by the student movement in Nashville, Young returned to the South in 1961 to run the Highlander citizenship school leadership training program at the Dorchester Center in Georgia. After the program moved its administrative offices to the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, Young joined the SCLC staff and served as an integral member of King’s team throughout the 1960s. Cautious in organizing, he played an important role in developing SCLC’s strategy during the Albany and Birmingham campaigns. Young recalled how King relied on him ‘to ask the hard questions” during their discussions: “He would want somebody to express as radical a view as possible and somebody to express as conservative a view as possible. We kind of did this sort of like a game, and it almost always fell to my lot to express the conservative view. He figured . . . the wider variety of opinions you got, the better chance you had of extracting the truth from that.”
After King’s assassination in 1968, Young helped Ralph Abernathy head the SCLC until resigning in 1970 to run for Congress. Although defeated in his first bid, he ran again in 1972 and represented his Georgia district for three terms before being appointed ambassador to the United Nations by President Jimmy Carter. Controversial for his perceived Third World sympathies, Young was pressured to step down from his post in 1979 after meeting with a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1981, Young was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom by President Carter.
Young served as mayor of Atlanta from 1982 to 1990 before launching an unsuccessful bid for governor of Georgia in 1990. He is currently a professor at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.