Andrew Young and the New South

Join Andrew Young in conversation, this Saturday at 2pm at the National Portrait Gallery. His portrait will be installed in the exhibition “The Struggle for Justice.”

The 1960s and 1970s were decades in which the American south struggled with problems that had plagued the region from colonial times. First and foremost, the South had never overcome the specter of slavery that haunted it from its beginnings. After the Civil War and emancipation, this problem changed forms and manifested itself as racial intolerance and the denial of basic civil rights to African Americans. However, the second half of the twentieth century was marked by much-needed change. Andrew Young was one of the agents of that change.

Andrew Jackson Young Jr. was born in New Orleans in 1932. Although the country was enduring difficult times in a massive economic depression, Young’s parents were both employed professionals—his mother was a schoolteacher, his father a dentist. Andrew Young completed high school in New Orleans and then received his first college degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C.; he also completed a bachelor’s degree in divinity from Hartford Theological Seminary.

Young worked as a minister for several years before joining the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961 in the throes of the civil rights struggle. He quickly moved into the ranks of its leadership and joined the pantheon of activists whose names are synonymous with the movement. In his autobiography, Martin Luther King Jr. (below) records a resonant moment in the spring of 1963 with Andrew Young and the effort in Birmingham:

Even children too young to march requested and earned a place in our ranks. Once when we sent out a call for volunteers, six tiny youngsters responded. Andy Young told them that they were not old enough to go to jail but that they could go to the library. “You won’t get arrested there,” he said, “but you might learn something” So these six small children marched off to the building in the white district, where, up to two weeks before, they would have been turned away at the door. Shyly but doggedly, they went to the children’s room and sat down, and soon they were lost in their books. In their own way, they had struck a blow for freedom.

Young was with King on April 4, 1968, when King was murdered in Memphis.

As he was needed, Andrew Young continued to serve. He held executive offices for the SCLC—including serving as director—for most of the 1960s. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving the Georgia fifth district for three terms; he resigned his seat in 1977 to serve as United States ambassador to the United Nations, a post he held until 1979.

The American South continued to grow after such painful chapters as King’s death, and many southern cities became centers of industry. Memphis became a distribution and warehousing hub in the mid-1970s, eventually becoming the worldwide headquarters for Federal Express. Cities like Charlotte, Birmingham, and Atlanta, also fractured by segregation and poor black-white relations, became centers of commerce. Atlanta served (and continues to serve) as headquarters for two mighty corporate giants, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines.

Andrew Young was elected mayor of Atlanta in 1981 and held that office until 1990, guiding the city through a period of tremendous growth and preparing for its bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics. In 1996, Young co-founded GoodWorks, International, a think tank whose mission is to promote emerging world markets.

On Saturday, April 30, the National Portrait Gallery will unveil and dedicate a portrait of Andrew Young by Ross R. Rossin, a gift to the museum from NPG commission chairman Jack H. Watson Jr.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery