On this day when Martin Luther King, Jr. is being honored, I've spent some time listening to Andrew Young.
Ordained a minister in his 20s, close to 90 now, Andrew Young has been protege of King, a congressman, President Carter's UN ambassador, and mayor of Atlanta. Recently he spoke on camera with Atlanta rapper and podcast personality "Killer" Mike to remember King and other civil rights figures.
The little old man in his tweed jacket and sweater vest, pudgy and puffy, would seem to have little in common with the large man in red sneakers and Bears shirt, but they reminisced about Mike's time on Mayor Young's Youth Council at age 15. I've heard Mike on the NPR comedy quiz show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, where he was flamboyant and jovial. With Young, he's deferential, encouraging the older man with regular nods and "Yes, sir."
Mike wonders if Young developed more as a persuader than a preacher. Young says he has always struggled to be reasonable and calm, despite practice.
Just because you're good and decent and want to be righteous doesn't mean that you don't have a pot boiling inside you.... There's a streak of violence in everybody, but you've got to know: that's not where your strength is.
Growing up a black boy on a street in New Orleans between Irish and Italian businesses and the Nazi Party HQ, he said he developed his chops for being an ambassador before he knew what that meant. He learned to be "aggressively polite."
In this interview, Young shared one story from his ambassador days, a visit to P. W. Boethe, the face of intransigent white minority rule in South Africa. Boethe pulled Young into his office by the wrist and slammed the door, as if to keep anyone from seeing him in the same room with the black American. Boethe quizzed him on black-white relations in America: How did he get white votes for Congress? How much interracial marriage is there? And, the most telling, How long do you think we whites have before all these black people rise up to kill us all? Young offered President Carter's assistance to begin a process of dismantling apartheid, and Boethe followed up within the month.
Mike asked about Malcolm X. Young knew Malcolm X before he met King. "I never saw Malcolm hate anybody. He was the sweetest, calmest man... he never lost his temper." X was there at the back door to give congratulations when King was awarded the Nobel Prize. He heard X give King "total support" but, "it's best for me not to be seen with you." When Mike expressed surprise that these two weren't at odds, Young said, "People caricatured them" and made differences from nuances.
I loved a story Young tells of a hot day in Savannah when he saw officers locking children under 10 in "the paddy wagon" when they were merely imitating grown-up picketers. The cops threw Young in, too. When Young spoke through the only air vent to ask the cops to please drive them to the jail because the heat was going to bake them, the cops closed the vent. So Young told the kids, "They want us to crack. We won't." He had the kids close their eyes and imagine a slow walk to the beach, slow immersion in the cold water. They were shivering, he laughs. When he led them in singing "Wade in the Water," the police got mad and drove them to jail.
It's what his father told him back on that tough street in New Orleans, and kind of what Jesus says, too: "Stay cool."
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