Andrew Young
Former Congressman, UN Ambassador, Mayor, and Civil Rights Leader
“I'm used to living with difference and contradiction and conflict. And they become a challenge for me to resolve, or at least to find a common ground where we can coexist.”
Summary
On this episode of Leadership Matters, Civil Rights icon Andrew Young discusses his long career in public service, friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, and how he sought to use public-purpose capitalism to transform the city of Atlanta.
Ambassador Young says that it is faith, not optimism, that anchors his outlook on the future of the United States. In a wide-ranging conversation with host Alan Fleischmann, he recounted many of the highlights of his career as a minister, congressman, UN ambassador, and mayor to explain the true power that underlies the formulation of “one nation, under God.”
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Andrew Young has built a remarkable legacy as a civic activist, elected official, groundbreaking ambassador, social entrepreneur, and adviser to presidents.
Young attended segregated schools in New Orleans and graduated early from Howard University before attending Hartford Theological Seminary. It was during his time as a pastor in southern Georgia that he became active in the Civil Rights movement. After a few years with the National Council of Churches in New York, he returned to Georgia in 1961 to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s “citizenship schools,” working closely with Dr. King to teach non-violent organizing strategies. He was a key strategist during campaigns that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
In 1972, Young was elected to Congress, becoming the first African-American representative from the Deep South since Reconstruction. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Young to serve as the nation’s first African-American Ambassador to the United Nations. Young was an architect of the first U.S. Africa policy grounded in human rights and he helped negotiate an end to white-minority rule in Namibia and Zimbabwe. Young was elected Mayor of Atlanta in 1981 and re-elected in 1985. The city hosted the Democratic National Convention in 1988. Young also led the successful effort to bring the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta.
Young’s involvement with Africa has continued in the years since his term as ambassador. President Bill Clinton appointed him founding chair of the Southern African Enterprise Development Fund, and in 1996 he co-founded Good Works International, where for more than 15 years he promoted an approach to sustainable economic development in Africa and the Caribbean. Through the Andrew J. Young Foundation and its partnerships with international agencies and the private sector, he continues to focus on expanding educational opportunity as well as innovative approaches to alleviating hunger and poverty in the U.S. and abroad.
Young is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion d’Honneur and has received honorary degrees from more than 100 colleges and universities.
Follow Ambassador Young on Twitter and his website.
Clips from this Episode
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
You're listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. Today on Leadership Matters, it is my privilege to welcome onto the show one of the country's most distinguished public servants. Over the course of his long career, Ambassador Andrew Young has served the United States in many different capacities. First, as a Congregational Minister; then, as Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, member of Congress, US Ambassador to the United Nations, and beloved mayor of Atlanta. A giant of the Civil Rights movement, Ambassador Young played a key role in organizing the Birmingham and Selma marches, and later, helped secure passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965. Through his positions in government, Ambassador Young helped to address issues of civil and international rights, playing a key role during African decolonization in the 1970s. Later, as Mayor of Atlanta, Ambassador Young built the infrastructure needed for the city to blossom into the global hub of commerce and travel that it is today.
It is a personal honor, and a great honor for this show, to have Ambassador Young join us today. Let's dive right in and hear from him directly. Ambassador Young, welcome to Leadership Matters. This is going to be a really special hour for us.
Andrew Young
Well, thank you very much. And you're interviewing me, but I guess I'm trying to figure out the answers to the questions that you're asking. This is this is a mutual quest for understanding and truth.
Alan Fleischmann
One of the things I know about you — which I think is one of the great signs of your leadership — is that anyone who follows you knows that you're a person that will not assume he has all the answers, but will seek to ask the right questions. It's a wonderful way to approach any conversation, but it's also an extraordinary testimony to your leadership. But I wanted to go a little bit into your background, if we could. Certainly where you're from, and then and a little bit of your Civil Rights career, and then we'll dive into some modern-day challenges, which I know you've been grappling with as well.
You were born to a dentist and a schoolteacher in New Orleans, under Jim Crow. You said the past, your family was slightly better off than many of the white families in your neighborhood, a highly unusual situation for that time. What was that like growing up then?
Andrew Young
We were all, economically, in the Depression. But the only difference is, I think that my parents were the only two that had college degrees and beyond. So there was an educational advantage. But economically, we were all poor. And this was the early 1930s. And but the geography of my neighborhood is what makes it interesting. There was an Irish grocery store on one corner, and Italian bar on another. The Nazi Party was on the third corner, the headquarters for the German-American Bund, with a swastika flying. And because there was no air conditioning in the ’30s, the windows were open. So every time I walked by, they were heiling Hitler, singing “Deutschland uber alles.” When I was four years old, in 1936, my father decided to take me to the Berlin Olympics movie, the Movietone News, to see how Jesse Owens dealt with the Hitler. That was 1936. And when Jesse won the 100 meter dash, Hitler was to present him with his medal, but he got angry, and he stormed out and took all of his stormtroopers with him. My father pointed out that this did not bother Jesse Owens. He was not there to be celebrated by Hitler. He was there to win races. And he just kept the course, remained calm and totally unemotional about Hitler's antics. And he won three more gold medals. And my father's motto for life was, “don't get mad, get smart.” He was a very small man around 5’4. He said, “you're not going to be any more than 5’6, 5’7, and you're not going to be able to beat up anybody. But if you remain calm, you can reason with anybody. Your mind is your most valuable asset.” And so, the mantra that he gave me, from when I was four years old, was “don't get mad, get smart.”
Alan Fleischmann
Brilliant.
Andrew Young
And he said, “when you get emotional, when blood rushes from your head to your fists and your feet, you're liable to do something stupid.” He said, “if you stay calm, and keep your brain working, that's your most powerful ally.”
Alan Fleischmann
I guess the other lesson he gave you was to show perseverance and courage. I mean, when you think about Jesse Owens, he didn't blink. He had every reason in the world not to show up in Berlin in 1936. He showed up.
Andrew Young
Yeah. He showed up and he showed out. It's sort of a metaphor for everything in life. Because I lived with it all my life, I understood white supremacy. And my father's interpretation was that white supremacy is a sickness. And you don't get upset with sick people. You help them if you can. And he was in an interesting position, because as he said, "none of my neighbors will come to me in the daytime to get their teeth fixed. But in the middle of the night if their teeth start hurting, they'll come by and knock on the door and want to slip in under the guise of night and will get me to stop the pain." And he said, "I could say no, but that's not my job. My job is to help people, not to judge them." That kind of, you know, live and let live attitude.
Alan Fleischmann
How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Andrew Young
Just one younger brother. And he became a dentist, here in Atlanta now. But we couldn't go to school in our neighborhood, we had to go to an all-Black school about five miles away.
Alan Fleischmann
Five miles is a long way.
Andrew Young
Well it is, but I admit that I got on a bus, a segregated bus. Or, I got a ride with one of my teachers who also lived in my neighborhood. The thing was that, all my life, I've lived in a culturally diverse world.
Alan Fleischmann
Even from the beginning, you were living in an unusually culturally diverse world.
Andrew Young
That's true. And Valena C. Jones had the reputation of being a good school. It had a number of men teachers, and the principal was a member of the same church I went to. So I was living in a world that was just as complex, then, for me, as it is now.
So I'm used to living with difference and contradiction and conflict. And they become a challenge for me to resolve, or at least to find a common ground where we can coexist. And you're not going to change anybody's mind. But you can change their lifestyle and their behavior patterns, so that we grow together as brothers and sisters. Well, I should take that back — because back then, we could grow together as brothers. It was alright for me then to play with the white boys. But the white girls, we didn't we didn't have anything to do with them. Hardly nothing. We didn't even speak.
Alan Fleischmann
And by having the Nazi party on the end of the street, did they create havoc for you as well? Or fear?
Andrew Young
None at all. But in the '30s, the dental supply houses were almost all Jewish. So as they came by my father's office, there was always a conversation about what was going on in Germany. And they couldn't drive to down the street and pass that swastika flying there without raising some question with my father. And I'm always nosy and hanging around. So, I ended up being a of part all of those discussions.
Alan Fleischmann
And asking questions, probably.
Andrew Young
Well, they kind of ignored me. But I learned from their viewpoints. I was basically a listener then.
Alan Fleischmann
I like that as a transition, because you eventually became a pastor of a church in Marion, Alabama. So at some point, you went from being a listener — and you're still listener, I can tell — But from a listener to someone who understood that he had a voice to share.
Andrew Young
Yeah, and that was a long time. Because in 1936 I was what, four years old? So when I became six, I went to public schools. But they didn't put me in first grade, they put me in third grade. Because I had been to a church-related nursery school, where they taught me how to read and write, they let us go at our own speed. And so I was always three to five years younger than the people that I was a class with. I don't know what exactly that meant, but the irony of it is that the same thing was true of Martin Luther King in Atlanta. And Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta. They both went to Morehouse College at 15.
Alan Fleischmann
You went to Howard, right?
Andrew Young
I went to, well, I went to Dillard University in New Orleans, which was right across the street. And then I went to Howard in my second year and I finished from Howard.
Alan Fleischmann
So you had to mature early. I mean, obviously were mature enough early anyway...
Andrew Young
I don't know how mature I was, but I could handle the schoolwork. My challenges were always sports, the girls, and the lifestyle of a college campus. The first two guys that I was friendly with, the three of us ended up scoring well on the entrance exams. I was 15, one was 29, and the other was 31, coming back from the military. David Dinkins, your man there in New York, he was also just 21 or 22 coming back from the Marines. And so those were my friends. And it was... Well, I don't know whether it was good or bad. I enjoyed it. And I survived.
Alan Fleischmann
Had you known you wanted to go to college, and your father and mother were pushing that? And was Howard eventually the choice?
Andrew Young
Well you know, my father graduated from Howard University's dental school in 1921. And they both went to Straight College in New Orleans, which was one of the colleges founded by the American Missionary Association out of New England. It was an outgrowth of Yale Divinity School and the Amistad Rebellion. John Quincy Adams came out of retirement to argue their case before the Supreme Court, and the slaves were set free, I think around 1842, somewhere around there. But all of this was pre-Civil War activity. They couldn't get into the South to start colleges, but they did start meetings in churches that evolved in the colleges.
Part of that group also went to Africa and founded Adams College, named for John Adams, our second president. That college, in Durban, South Africa, is where Tambo, Nelson Mandela, and most of the African National Congress went to school. It was part of that Protestant missionary tradition.
But South Africa in those days was almost like, maybe even better off, than we were. Apartheid was not quite as bad as slavery, I don't think. But that became important to me when when I got to the United Nations, because most of the people in the State Department had no concept of who these people were. They thought of Robert Mugabe a as Marxist terrorist. He was actually a very radical Jesuit. A Jesuit Monsignor came to see me at the United Nations and said that Mugabe is the smartest student he had in 50 years in Africa. Nobody in the US knows it. And he said, "if there is an election in Rhodesia, no matter who runs, he'll win 60% of the vote." And he said, "the United States is making a mistake in not getting to know any of these people."
So when I told that to Jimmy Carter, he said, "well, why don't you go meet him?" And that was not the way the State Department wanted it to go. But it was the first steps toward being able to negotiate a peaceful transition to majority rule in southern Africa.
Alan Fleischmann
Which was a huge moment. How important was it that, in your journey, you yourself had been a pastor? You had been involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When you think about your journey, obviously joining forces with Dr. King, you having that background, I imagine, certainly helped you when you were meeting with Mugabe. When you were meeting folks at the UN, how much of that was a big part of your leadership journey?
Andrew Young
It's been a very big part of my leadership. Because that's the reason President Carter wanted me to go to the UN. He said, "because everybody knows you were with Martin Luther King." And I was trying to convince him that Barbara Jordan would be a much better UN ambassador, because I knew she was thinking about retiring from Congress. And he said, "yeah, she is better than you in every way. She's a better speaker. She's a constitutional lawyer. She's brilliant, and wonderful. But she wasn't with Martin Luther King." And he said, "the fact that you were with Martin Luther King gives you extra credibility in dealing with these issues." Because I was very comfortable in the Congress. And actually, I have enjoyed everything I've done. And I thrive on the challenges.
Alan Fleischmann
How did you get connected to Dr. King originally?
Andrew Young
Well, the way I got connected was, we were both invited to Talladega College. And we happened to be members of the same fraternity, though I was in Washington and he was at Morehouse in Atlanta. But the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity had a religious emphasis week. And I always said that they invited him because he was already on the cover of Time Magazine. But then they started thinking that he might not be able to show up. So they invited me as a backup. And we both showed up. Then we realized that our wives had grown up in the same little town in Marion, Alabama.
Alan Fleischmann
Where you were pastor.
Andrew Young
Where I was a pastor. But they both went to the same high school and were sent to nonviolent colleges. So Jean went to the Church of the Brethren in Indiana, Manchester College. And Corretta went to... oh, I can't think of it now, a college in Ohio. But they were both places where peace studies were being taught and practiced.
Alan Fleischmann
And you were both already married at that point?
Andrew Young
Yeah, we were both married. And we both had just had baby girls.
Alan Fleischmann
And I think, were you thinking of Antioch College?
Andrew Young
Antioch, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
And how quickly did you connect when you met for the first time?
Andrew Young
Well we didn't, because I had just accepted a job in New York. And I went from Thomasville, Georgia, where I was pastoring a little country church and where I had run voter registration drives in the rural, rural South. I went from there to New York. And my job in New York was to work with white churches, mostly, in the South and North, helping to prepare them for desegregation.
But Jean never liked New York. She was a country girl, and she said she didn't want to stay there any more than four or five years. But she was able to go to Queens College and get a master's degree for $16 a semester, with a registration fee. So it was well worth going. Because there was never any money in this. And without her being employed as a teacher... All of us had other ways of making money other than the Civil Rights Movement.
Alan Fleischmann
But you no matter where you took it, you still came back to it. And you moved to Atlanta together, was it 1960?
Andrew Young
'61. And actually, I was hired by the United Church of Christ. And we started a literacy program and voter registration. And they had to do it through them and get me involved, because Dr. King didn't have tax exemption for his organization. So I was not on the staff. But I was right across the hall. My wife had just had our first baby. So she went back to Marion, Alabama, while I tried to find a house. And Dr. King's secretary said, "look, you shouldn't be hanging around Atlanta with nothing to do. An idle mind is the devil's workshop," she said. "Would you mind helping answer some of Dr. King's mail?" And I said, "no, I'd be glad to try." And I thought she'd give me 20 or 30 letters, but she gave me a large egg crate that was packed with letters on different subjects. And I was living in the YMCA. And I just stay up at night and answer his letters as though he were answering them.
Alan Fleischmann
So you did it under his name?
Andrew Young
Yeah, I would answer them, she would type them up, and he would sign them. So after a while, after the first couple hundred, he said, "how does he know so much about what I think?" He liked my answers. And I said, "well, you know, we both went to Theological Seminary in New England, roughly at the same time." He was in a Methodist and I was in a Congregational seminary, mostly. And I said, "we were reading the same books, and I could guess at where your thinking was coming down and I did the best I could." But that's the way we got close. I had no role, my salary was from the church. But he started asking me, if he was going to speak to a group, he'd say, "check them out and learn. Let me know what you think I should talk about now." I never wrote any speeches. There are a lot of people that say they were speech writers, and people could write drafts for him, but I would never even assume to write a draft. I would maybe put a few bullet points of ideas that he could blend into a speech. And that was really all he needed.
Alan Fleischmann
But you had his voice when it came to other forms of correspondence, though.
Andrew Young
I think so. I mean, we grew up in the South. He was in Atlanta. I was in New Orleans. He went to college at 15, I went to college at 15. He was from a middle-class, college-educated family, but all of his friends were poor growing up. So we had very similar backgrounds. I had a more interracial background. There was a large Jewish community in New Orleans, and there was the New Orleans tradition of blending. The French, they were a lot less rigid than the British. And New Orleans was French and Spanish, and it was a seaport town. It was a trading center for the cotton coming down the Mississippi River. So I was shocked when somebody told me that in 1832, the strongest economy in the United States was in Natchez, Mississippi.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow, you would not think that today. But was there something about Dr. King, that you knew immediately after you got to know him, that made him stand out as someone very special? Obviously he was very special, but you got to see him so intimately and in ways that frankly, few have.
Andrew Young
Well, yeah. One, in public, he was very playful and laughing and joking, got along with all kinds of people. But in private, he was always agonizing about something. And he did a lot of reading, and we did a lot of arguing. But he always won the argument, you could never win an argument with him. My job became to sort of provoke him in arguments.
Alan Fleischmann
He obviously saw in you great value as a thought partner and leadership partner, because he probably needed someone to provoke him.
Andrew Young
Well he did, because... Well, I think that there were a few people. Jim Lawson, for instance, approach the Civil Rights Movement intellectually, and theologically. Most mass movements are led by people with emotional involvements. Martin was the bridge with that emotionalism of the street, and translated it, with the help of people like Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, into laws and business practices. That was a difference between us and Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter had the advantage of cellphones. The situation has changed mainly because we all had to watch George Floyd die for 9 minutes and 41 seconds. And 24 hours later, people were protesting in New Zealand, all the way around the back of the world. So there's an emotional movement that gripped the world in all of these public cases.
Young people don't believe it, but things are so much better than they were. I mean, there were far more lynchings and deaths and attacks on people when I was growing up. But we didn't know it. And it didn't get covered by the press. And you heard about it by way of word of mouth. But also, that kind of let you live with it without having to be burdened by it. And you could be more rational, because you knew what you were dealing with. We knew that racism was a sickness.
We knew that, for instance, the same people that wrote the letter condemning Martin in the Birmingham News — that he answered with his Letter from the Birmingham Jail — those were the same people that I was leading negotiations with, to try to resolve this. And even before we had any demonstrations in Montgomery, he came to me one day and said, "Andy, do you know any white folks in Birmingham?" I said, "No, I really don't." I said, "I've very seldom been to Birmingham. I've been to Marion and Tuskegee, but I don't know Birmingham at all." And he said, "see if you can find a way to meet some. Surely there are a few intelligent leaders around here that we could start a negotiations process with." And we did. We started that before we started demonstrations, almost two months before.
Alan Fleischmann
When I think of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — and you were the executive director of SCLC — I think of you as negotiating and bringing white leaders, black leaders together, even beyond leaders. Creating uncommon tables that never normally would have met. So it sounds like what you're talking about was the precursor to that as well.
Andrew Young
That's what it was. And it just so happened that, when I was in New York, I'd been to a conference out of the University of Michigan. And when he asked me if I knew any white people in Birmingham, I remembered that there was a delegation at that University of Michigan conference from Birmingham. And they were Episcopalians, so I took a chance and I call the diocesan house in Birmingham. The lady that answered happened to be the lady that was in Michigan. She was the director of Christian education, and she remembered meeting me in Michigan. And I said, "you know, I'm trying to set up a meeting between Dr. King and and the Episcopal bishop. And I'm wondering if you could set it up." And she said, "Well, let me invite you to meet the bishop. And then you can try to convince him to set it up." And when I met him, he not only agreed to set it up, but he agreed to invite the Birmingham equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce, they called it something else.
So he and four or five business leaders met with Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and myself. And it was really just a friendly conversation, around a table with a cup of coffee. And it was very calm and very reasoned. And Dr. King could say, "you know, we don't mean to do you any harm, but we just want to let you know that we can no longer finance segregation. And so, we will probably be withdrawing our support from your economy about the first of March." And they said, "well, what does that mean?" And he said, "it means that the 80,000 Black people in Birmingham, we hope, will not buy anything but food or medicine for the next 90 days. And we're not trying to hurt your businesses, we're trying to help you to see that you can't get along without us."
And of course, not only did that happen, but the demonstrations meant that their wives and families in the white community didn't do much shopping. So there was a complete shutdown of the Birmingham economy for about 90 days.
And people can get very reasonable. Those discussions used to go on, and Dr. King never raised his voice. Nobody would ever raise their voice or get angry. They would just reason together as brothers, as he used to say it. He said, "look, we don't blame you for being white. And we certainly don't feel any shame about being Black, but we had nothing to do with that. What we do have something to do with is, in order to keep us down, you have to keep one foot in the gutter with us to keep a foot on our neck. Well, what that does is that keeps you in the gutter, too." And he said, "what we want to show you is that you need us. And that we can learn to stand together as brothers and sisters. And that we will be stronger."
I think nothing demonstrates that any more than Alabama's football team. And it was it was actually Bear Bryant that went out to California somewhere and got beaten in the Rose Bowl by Penn State. And when he came back, he said, "we can't continue to play national football if we don't have some of that speed." Now he didn't say we have to have Black people. He said we can't play football without speed. And it ended up that that was the aphorism for Black. And that was the beginning of the desegregation of Alabama's football. It's almost like, the better they integrated the schools, the better the teams got.
Alan Fleischmann
He saw the trajectory. When I think of you, I would say I think of you and Dr. King, and can think of so many other accomplishments as well. But before we move into those, where were you when Dr. King was shot?
Andrew Young
I'd been in a courtroom all day long. And I came back about four o'clock after the court. He was in his brother's room downstairs and had not heard from me all day long, and was very playful and laughing and joking. He was with his brother and Ralph Abernathy, I'd never seen him quite so playful. And when I came in the room he said, "you haven't called me all day long." I said, "I've been in court trying to keep you out of jail." And he said, "oh, you got smart in court." Next thing I know, he was snatching a pillow off the bed and throwing it at me. Well, I threw it back at him and we ended up in a pillow fight like 10 year olds. He was really feeling good. And then he remembered that it was almost six o'clock, and we were supposed to go to dinner at six o'clock. And so he said, let me run upstairs and put on a shirt and tie.
And so he left the downstairs room to go to his room upstairs. That downstairs room, in the corner of the hotel, had been his room originally. The Memphis Police said that somebody called from Atlanta and asked that he be moved upstairs. If he had stayed in the room downstairs, where we originally put him, there was no way anybody could have shot him. Putting him up there, there was a clear shot line between the bushes across the street and where he was standing. And we've always contended that the shot did not come from the bar of the boarding house. It came from the bushes. Because when we came back from the hospital, the Memphis Parks Department was already cutting down those bushes and sweeping that area clean. And we asked them, "why are you doing this? This is where the shot came from." And they said, "the Memphis Police told us to get this done before morning." That alone says to me that this was a very complicated case. And that the Memphis Police are at least guilty of destroying the crime scene.
But in the end, Martin used to talk about his death all the time. And one of the things he said was, look, death is the ultimate democracy. I don't care what color you are, how rich you are, how much education you had. You're gonna die. He said, "You don't have anything to say about when you die or how you die. The only choice you have is, what is it you give your life for." And he'd go immediately into some playful way of saying, "I know there's a bullet with my name on it somewhere." He said, "But you guys are always trying to get your picture in the paper. And you'll probably jump in front of me and take it for me. And now, you know, I will be grateful, and I'll even try to preach you into Heaven." And of course, he always knew us and our faults and problems better than we thought. And he would start preaching your funeral. More like Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor-type comedian, saying all of the embarrassing things about you that you'd never want said, in front of your parents or in church or anything. But he'd make us laugh at our own deaths through his sermons, trying to get us into heaven in spite of what we did. So he constantly made fun of death.
Alan Fleischmann
He understood the urgency and the mortality of the work. So, you've been a member of Congress, you've been an extraordinary mayor of Atlanta, you've been an ambassador to the United Nations. You've done extraordinary philanthropic work through your foundation. Now we're in a pretty extraordinary time yet again, I feel like we've always been. Maybe your point is, the goals and the mission have not changed. But are there things that you're asking about ways that we can bring people together? Frankly, it's not just overcoming the barriers that prevent us from coming together, which is important. It's also what do we do to actually bring us together as communities.
Andrew Young
Throughout the life of this nation, for the most part, that has been the job of the President. We have more or less taken the personality and the philosophy of Roosevelt in the Second World War. I mean, when I grew up it was, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And I read all of the World War II stories as a kid. President Roosevelt used that war to unite the world. And even the Republicans did, because of Eisenhower. And it was the war more than anything else that helped America see that it could not be a white and black and brown nation. It had to be one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
And that was a significant step. And that New Deal coalition also integrated the economy. When I went to Congress, I was on the Banking Committee. Because we were trying to build a mass transit system, and mass transit is under Urban Affairs, and Urban Affairs is under Banking. But I found myself trying to understand how money works in the world. And what happened to me was... George Shultz was secretary treasurer when I was on the Banking Committee. And he said he didn't like to go to these international meetings with an all-white delegation and would I mind going with him? And I said, "no, I'd be thrilled to go with." So I went to several international meetings with him and got to know him pretty well. It didn't matter that I was a Black Democrat, and he was a white Republican. We talked economics, we never talk race. So I was getting prepared for my time as mayor.
Just before I was sworn in as mayor, Jesse Jackson graduated from Chicago University of Theological Seminary, and he wanted me to come up and do his commencement. I did, and they took me in the bookstore, and they said, "you know, are there any books you want? We can't pay you to, so take any books you want." And the first one I picked up was Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations. And Dr. Jacobs' notion was that nations don't build economies, cities do. And that cities have problems, they work together to solve those problems, and then they market the solution to other cities. And that the economy depends on developing cities.
So that that was basically that, plus the fact that I worked on international affairs as part of Banking. I knew that there was a lot of surplus capital in the world that needed a place to invest that was safe, honest, and efficient. So when I became mayor, I said, "we're going to have an environment that's safe, honest, and efficient. And we'll be able to attract money from all over the world." And we very seldom went to Washington for anything except mass transit. What we did was, we went to Wall Street. And we developed what I call public-purpose capitalism.
The airport was a good example. Everybody wanted a new international airport, and I especially wanted an international airport to bring some of that international money in. But we didn't have any money. But we got Delta, Eastern, United, American, you know, all on the tombstone, and we went to Wall Street and we borrowed the money. And I don't know how many billions of dollars we borrowed, but the Atlanta airport is the busiest airport in the world. The last official count, we had 110 million passengers a year. And we were actually bigger than Beijing. Bigger than, you know, LaGuardia and and Kennedy put together in terms of flights and passengers And we did not we don't have any taxpayer money in it.
Alan Fleischmann
You were also revolutionary when the Atlanta hosted the Olympics. Public-private partnerships were an idea that people talked about, but didn't actually do anything with. You actually found ways to bring private industry and CEOs together with government.
Andrew Young
It was easy in Atlanta, because when I came here, most of the CEOs either went to Georgia, Emory, or Georgia Tech. And they all knew each other; they had gone to the same high schools, public or private. It was a conglomerate of families, and they were in the process of adding Black families to that. And so it was Coca-Cola that took the lead and said, "Atlanta needs to be a city too busy to hate." And that became our motto, a city too busy to hate. Nobody talked about the details. We had all the race problems. But we had a commitment from the business community and Black leadership from the historically Black colleges. And we had a Black business class that worked together to make decisions and to make things happen in Atlanta in an organized and rational way.
Alan Fleischmann
It's truly one of your great legacies, how you turned Atlanta in a bold way into not just a prominent place to live and do business in this country, but also as an international city. To your point, you didn't set out to make it one of the great American cities, you set out to be one of the great cities on the globe.
Andrew Young
Well I said, we've got to be the next great international city. It started with it with the Olympics. But even before the Olympics, the eight years I was mayor, we attracted 1,100 companies to Georgia. And that meant about $70 billion in foreign direct investment, into and around a city of which was then 1 million people. And now we're a city of six plus million.
Alan Fleischmann
You're listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I'm here with a legendary leader, truly, an extraordinary public servant, Ambassador, Andrew Young. Former mayor of Atlanta, former UN ambassador for our country, great philanthropist and great thought leader, as well as a great partner to Dr. King during the Civil Rights Movement. You know, we're living in a time where it's so easy for us to be pessimistic. I think of you as a as a person of faith, a person who has been a leader, and Ambassador Young, you're also an optimist. What message would you give to current and aspiring leaders, folks who are listening to this show who want to make a difference? And how optimistic do you want them to feel? You've been through a lot, both the good, bad, and the ugly, but you still remain optimistic. I'm just curious, what advice you'd offer.
Andrew Young
Well, I don't like the term optimism. But I anchor myself in "all men are created equal, and endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights. And amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Now, that's a stretch that's a strong, visionary faith in a nation. And regardless of where I was born in that nation, I was born better off, with all of the problems of this nation, than most of my friends and people I know in other places in the world. I believe in this democracy, and I believe that there's not a problem that we can't solve. The thing that's enabled us to work together, and we see it here in Atlanta specifically, you can always put a date on it. 1990, that's the year we voted for the lottery. Everybody wanted a lottery; I didn't like lotteries, but my grandma played the lottery. So I went with the lottery, but I insisted with my opponent in the governor's race, that we both agree that the economy of the lottery would all be dedicated to education. And we created the Hope Scholarship, so that anybody with a B average could get to go to college.
Well, Georgia State here in Atlanta was a small night school of 400. Thanks to the Hope Scholarship, it's now 53,000. Atlanta has, between Georgia Tech, Emory, and the Atlanta University complex, we're close to half a million college students here. SCAD — the Savannah College of Art and Design — has almost 20,000 students here. Georgia Tech has grown; Georgia Tech graduates more Black engineers and more women engineers, I think, than any school in the world. And so you've had integration and education coming together. And good business practices. Arthur Blank, brought Home Depot here. They came at the time of this boom in international business, which also led to a boom in jobs, which incidentally hasn't stopped here.
I just visited a factory with 4000 jobs for Google, 25 miles south of where I live. And I was surprised that the majority of them are Black. Microsoft is building a city in an old quarry in the northwest part of the city that they have smoothed out. They expect to have between 10,000 and 16,000 new Microsoft workers here. And we see business expanding from the north and from the west for a lot of good reasons. We're produced producing a higher quality of students.
I know from being a trustee of Morehouse College myself, I'm blown away by the caliber of students who come out of Morehouse, Emory, other universities and colleges in the area. I know people that are relocating, now that they can and be on Zooms, they're choosing Atlanta to be a place to live.
Alan Fleischmann
We have a minute left, which is bothering me so much, because we need to have you back on. It is not enough to do an hour with Ambassador Young, we need two hours with you. Is there a kernel of advice that you would give to our listenership, as you think about how we fully meet the promise and expectations of the mortality in which we live our lives?
Andrew Young
I'll close with a Martin Luther King quote. Martin always quoted, "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. And that scaffold sways the future, for behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadows, keeping watch above his own." And that's the basis of my optimism. Well, it's not optimism, it's faith. And it's faith in truth. And it's faith in the Creator of Heaven and Earth. And it is a religious faith. I see it replicated in the religions and religious peoples of the world, regardless of their faith. When we come back, I remember talking with the Chinese minister of cultural minorities. And he told me, he said, "I wish I could keep you with me for a couple of months. We could learn a lot from you, because we have 142 different cultural minorities in China. And most of them don't want to be a part of our government." The strain in China is not external conflict, it's internal conflict. They're spending as much money on their military as we are, but they're spending it to repress their people. And we are far from perfect in this country. But we are committed enough to one nation under God, indivisible, I think, to make it.
Alan Fleischmann
I hope you're right. You've led us on so many levels, you've spoken out and been alone in some of the things that you've stood up for and stood out for over the years. You're a shining example of what it means to have that voice and courage to speak up and speak out. And I just wanna say on behalf of the listenership, those who listen to Leadership Matters on a regular basis, I just want to thank you, Ambassador Young. For all that you continue to do. And I'd love to have you back on for more time with you, because I'd love to get into the questions we're asking of ourselves. And then I really would love to be a laboratory of good ideas. So maybe we can do a part two, where we can come back and talk a little bit more about the questions you're asking of us and of yourself.
Andrew Young
One of the things about being old and retired you don't have enough energy to go, and so you sit and think and read. And I'd love to share some of the... Well, the ideal now is not only to have good ideas, but how do we make those ideas reality?
Alan Fleischmann
That's right. So let's do this. We're going to close on this show today, but I'm going to get right back on your calendar so that we do a part two in the coming weeks, so that we can spend another hour together where we can talk through some of those questions and things that you're thinking about. Because I think that would be something that would do two things. It would level head us a little bit and it might give us some new partners for action, which I think would be a good thing to do as well.
Andrew Young
Well, God bless you and thanks very much for inviting me on this time.
Alan Fleischmann
I will get right back on your calendar for the next one. And I just want to say, thank you for joining us today on Leadership Matters. I'm looking forward to our next. Thank you.
Andrew Young
Thanks a lot.
Alan Fleischmann
Talk to you soon.