Andrew Young: From SCLC to the United Nations to Atlanta City Hall

Andrew Young was in the room for most of the critical decisions of the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties. He had joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in nineteen sixty-one and became, over time, Martin Luther King Junior's most trusted political strategist. When the Birmingham campaign needed someone to negotiate a settlement with the city's white business establishment in the spring of nineteen sixty-three, Young was the man King sent across the table.

After the assassination in nineteen sixty-eight, Young ran for Congress from Georgia. He lost his first race and won his second, in nineteen seventy-two, becoming one of the first Black congressmen from Georgia since Reconstruction. Jimmy Carter appointed him United States Ambassador to the United Nations in nineteen seventy-seven. He served there until a controversy over an unauthorized meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization forced his resignation in nineteen seventy-nine.

He was elected mayor of Atlanta in nineteen eighty-one and served two terms through nineteen ninety. The Young mayoralty completed what Maynard Jackson had begun: a generation of Black political leadership in a major Southern city that had done its organizing in the movement's front lines. Young brought the nineteen ninety-six Olympic Games to Atlanta. Whether that decision represents the movement's triumph or the movement's accommodation to corporate interests is a question Atlanta has been arguing about since the Centennial Park bomb went off.

What the arc of Young's career documents is something more straightforward: what it looks like when the people who organized Freedom Rides and negotiated Birmingham end up running cities. The instruments change. The work does not.