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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0080, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Andrew Young was the first African American congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction. First elected in 1972, Young was later appointed as ambassador to the United Nations by Jimmy Carter. Prior to his career in politics, Young grew up in New Orleans, was educated at Howard University, and then attended Hartford Seminary in the mid-1950s. Young returned to the South after seminary and became involved in the early civil rights movement in Georgia, where he worked as a minister for several years. In this interview, Young discusses the nature of racial discrimination in the South and describes his involvement in voter registration drives. Throughout the interview, he draws comparisons between race relations within southern states and those between the North and South. According to Young, it was access to political power that ultimately altered the tides of racial prejudice in the South. He cites the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a decisive turning point in race relations. For Young, it was the election of African Americans to positions of power that allowed African Americans to bring to fruition other advances they had made in education, business, and social standing.
Andrew Young, the first African American congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction, describes his involvement in the early civil rights movement. After dedicating much time and energy to voter registration drives as a minister in Georgia, Young later entered politics and was first elected to Congress in 1972. Young cites the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the decisive turning point in race relations and argues that it was this access to political power that allowed African Americans to bring to fruition other advances they had made in education, business, and social standing.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
If twenty years ago, somebody would have told you that in 1974 you'd be introduced by a senator from Mississippi as a congressman from Georgia at a presidential prayer breakfast, what would you have said?
I would have said they were crazy. I mean, that would have been 1954. That was before the Supreme Court decision. And we couldn't even vote very well in the South. It was not long after that that my younger brother came back from the Navy, where he'd been a lieutenant. He's a graduate of Harvard University's dental school. He passed the state dental examination, and went around the corner in the courthouse to register to vote, and they told him he flunked the literacy test. So, I mean, that's what it was like in the South.
Where?
This was in New Orleans.
The progressive city of New Orleans.
Yeah. Now, Atlanta was a little better than that. But in '55, I went to
Thomasville, Georgia, and one of the first things I did there as the
pastor of a little church was try to organize a voter registration
drive. And I guess it was just about '48, in that town, a black man had
tried to register. And he was lassoed on the courthouse steps, and tied
to the back of a pickup truck, and dragged around the black community
until he was dead. And then he was cut loose again in front of a jail
where he was left to die . . . well, he was dead by
There is none.
I suspect one of the reasons is that there were always some white liberals you could trust. And, in the long run, that proved to be a detrimental factor. Because there was always, you know, Frank Graham or Sanford—a long stream of guys that . . . I mean, whereas we were dealing with an early Gene Talmadge, who was really horrible, and Marvin Griffin, and Lester Maddox. Well, that was a long way to answer that question. This is a subject you've got to turn me off on, because that's all I've done in the last . . .
Well, I started in southern politics just about that time, 1955.
Well, that's the basic question we ask everybody. What was the major change in the last twenty-five years? And essentially what comes down, unless you're talking to Republicans, is the removal, in some sense, of the race issue. The change, I mean, in the issue.
You've got to give Republicans some credit, though. You've got to give
the Eisenhower administration some credit for the justices in the South.
Because they appointed . . . the Republicans in the Eisenhower
administration tended to be the liberal southerners. And they were not
tied to the old Democratic machine. So you really got the best trained,
brightest lawyers in the South, quite often, moving into judgeships. For
instance, in Atlanta, you had blacks on the Republican state committee
that were approving and recommending the judges. And there was a strong
Republican Party in Atlanta, that carried Atlanta for Nixon in 1960, in
spite of the fact that Martin Luther King was resident of Atlanta. And
that King incident, you
Who were the judges that stand out in your mind?
Oh, Judge Tuttle, of course. Judge Wisdom in New Orleans. Judge Frank Johnson in Alabama. Who was the judge in Saint Augustine? Jacksonville? He's still there. Can't think of it offhand. Simpson, Bryan Simpson, I think his name is. And those are the ones that immediately come to mind. And that's the basis of the Fifth Circuit. And I would imagine the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most liberal wing of the judiciary in America. For two reasons. One, you've got some of the brightest, independent jurists that were available. But second, they were constantly under pressure to make decisions on human rights cases. And they were almost the victims of their own precedents and their own principles. And one thing led to the next and to the next and to the next, and you could always count on justice in southern courts, where you couldn't count on justice even in the federal courts of Illinois. Because they were interlocked with the Daley machine. I would suspect the same thing would have been true in Washington. Although, who was the judge—Skelly Wright, from New Orleans, who came to Washington—brought that same kind of liberal spirit to the Court of Appeals here in Washington.
If Jack had asked you that first question ten years ago, what would you reply?
Same thing.
So then what is the period where it has changed in that last twenty-five years? The past ten years?
1967. I would say the Voting Rights Act was it, more than anything. I mean, the bus boycott, you'd have to say was an awakening of the black community. And it built up a series of social changes that led right up to the passage, the legalization of those social changes in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But that '64 Civil Rights Act, while it changed traditions and customs, didn't do anything to challenge the power relationships in the South. And in a sense it was far less consequential than the passage of the '65 act, which began to give blacks access to political power.
What made it move so fast? When you think back to 1967, that's seven years, six or seven years ago.
Well, it was ready, you see. What you had is, you had a steady buildup of
a black middle class. I go all the way back to the founding of these
predominantly black colleges across the South. In Atlanta, you had six
of them that were about a hundred years old. You had produced a Nobel
Peace Prize winner out of Atlanta, before you produced a mayor or a
congressman. I mean, the political lid was on, but the talent was
emerging. You produced scholars like W. E. B. DuBois, and John Hope
Franklin. And Horace Mann Bond, Julian's father. I mean, the level of
intellectual achievement in the South had been constantly rising, and it
had expressed itself. I mean, you had a half dozen black millionaires in
Atlanta in 1954. And you had a black bank, four black insurance
companies, black savings and loans. You had a well-developed community
that was denied a political opportunity. And once the law changed with
the '65 Civil Rights Act, and the masses of blacks began voting, that
leadership just began to express itself politically. And that was, it
seems to me, the reason for the tremendous change in
Yet you had the same type of situation, up to a point, say in Durham. Smaller community, but still, relatively speaking, you had the large insurance company, you had the bank, you had the colleges, you've got a solid middle class. And you did have active political participation in Durham, but it didn't spread out. Was it because of the success of the blacks in Durham?
Well, I think you were not surrounded by the hostile environment. I mean, the Klan was at our doorstep in Georgia. I mean, it was right there in Stone Mountain every Saturday night. Whereas the Klan was pretty far removed in North Carolina until just recently. I mean, you never heard much about the Klan until the late '60s in North Carolina. Whereas in the '40s and '50s in Georgia, the Klan was rampant. And they would drive down the middle of the streets in the black community, shooting and stuff. That was as late as '44, '45.
Is that all that explains such a rapid amount of change, social change, that occurs. If you come from the North, if you go down and look at it, it's really astounding that . . .
Another thing happened. I think you had genuine racists in Atlanta, who
were nevertheless intelligent people, making no pretense of liberalism.
And they knew they had a problem to deal with. In Ivan Allen's book, Notes on the Sixties, he tells a story which is
extremely significant to me for that whole community. He says that when
his father, who had established this big business, office supply
company, and who had been president of the Chamber and everything, when
Ivan Allen Jr. took over as president of the Chamber of Commerce, part
of his father's marching orders were, "Look, we've done a good job in
Now, you also had another thing that Durham doesn't have, I think, and
that is Coca-Cola as a corporation doing business all over the world.
And I've always sensed a kind of sophisticated internationalism amongst
Coca-Cola's executives, that you just don't find amongst the average
southern businessman. They've been selling Coke all over Latin America,
Africa, Asia. They've got bottling plants in Russia now. And they're
extremely . . . that lent an extremely cosmopolitan power center to the
Atlanta area. When Ivan Allen took his charge to the Chamber of Commerce
and started talking about integrating Atlanta, you know, everybody was
shocked. And he spells it out in his book. Everybody was shocked, until
Mr. Woodruff of Coca-Cola leaned over and whispered, "Ivan, you're
right." And then it was voted unanimously, you know, just on the basis
of three words from the president of Coca-Cola. He had been to school
with . . . I mean, he and the presidents of three of the five major
banks had been high school buddies. And so when Ivan Allen and Coca-Cola
get together and decide that the white community needs to move, there's
a personal tie with the power structure there, to make things move in
the white community. At least on things like keeping schools open. In
terms of facing up to integration of public accommodations. Of the
acceptance
First election, or second, or both?
Almost both times. They were not against me the first time, either. I mean, I didn't think of them as hostile, or really they just didn't consider me any particular threat the first time.
That explains, perhaps the Atlanta situation. I think one thing that struck us . . . we interviewed John Lewis the day after he came back from the Black Mayor's Conference. The question we asked him, because we wouldn't have thought five years ago (a) of a black mayor, (b) having a conference. It'd be enough to be having a conference. We raised the same question with him. How do you explain such a rapid change all over the South?
Well, that's it. All of these guys, almost every one of them, is third-generation middle class. Their parents and grandparents were college-educated. They come from long lines of doctors and lawyers and businessmen. And they had been allowed to achieve in every other area but politics, see. And all of a sudden, the '65 Civil Rights Act broke down that political barrier. And it was like, you know, a rush of talent that had just been waiting, you know. That's the thing for young blacks to do now. Just like it was . . .
You mean, getting active in politics?
Oh, yes.
Don't most of the blacks still need a significant amount of white support to get elected?
Sure.
Okay, how do you explain that? Where I come from, up in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Detroit, no way could that happen.
Well, that's because white people up there haven't realized they are racists. I mean, they haven't had to confront it. The white person in the South has lived with it and struggled with it all their lives, and to come to some intelligent point of view about life, they had to face up to the fact that their parents had taught them wrong, you know. The conflict, the burden of guilt, of learning something in church, of practicing another thing in your private life. In the South, people were close enough so that just about . . . well, a lot of people in leadership positions had been cared for by black women, where there was not just a servant relationship, but where it was somebody that worked with the family through long years, and they were probably more mother to the people than their own parents were. And you had a complicated set of personal relationships in the white community in the South, that made southern whites very, very guilty about the racial situation. And it seems to me that Martin Luther King's death was something of a turning point, of white people suddenly being willing to come around. I think a lot happened in white America that's never been recorded, in the wake of the death of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was almost as though . . . I sensed then that whites wanted to help, but didn't know how. And, of course, that was also the period when blacks began to express their hostility. And it was even more difficult.
But in spite of all that, the tremendous white turnout for the Poor
People's Campaign. We could not have brought poor people to Washington,
had not we had help from white southerners all along the route. That
mule train
How do you define that southern strategy?
Jack, I want to go back to a former point. He said that the in thing for young blacks now is politics?
Yeah.
Okay. In the North, to get elected as a black, you generally have to have
a black constituency. You don't usually go much beyond that.
Oh, very definitely.
What does that mean for the future, then, say the next ten . . .
What it means is that the South has got a long jump ahead of the North in dealing with race.
As it's manifested in politics, now?
As it's manifested in every way. See, the North was separated
geographically, while the South was separated legally. Now, once the
legal barriers in the South came down, people were fairly comfortable
together. It was amazing to me to see that happen. And we were in Saint
Augustine when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. And the very
same hotel where our waitresses poured hot coffee on us, and where the
manager poured acid on people trying to get in his swimming pool, and, I
mean, just extremely violent reactions. Up to the thirtieth of June—the
second of July Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The
fifth of July we went back to that same restaurant, and those people
were just wonderful. I mean, they were apologetic. They said, "We were
just afraid of losing our businesses. We didn't want to be the only ones
to be integrated. But if everybody's got to do it, we've been ready for
it a long time ago. We're so glad the president signed this law and now
we can be through with these troubles." And so you didn't have that
possibility of immediate change in the North, because people are
geographically separated; they don't know each other. You don't have the
stable leadership patterns in the North. I mean, you had the three
generations of Ivan Allens in Atlanta, and three generations of
Well, Charlie Diggs comes close, but he's second generation.
Charlie is atypical.
Yeah.
Would you suggest in the next ten years that there are going to be more elections of blacks in the South?
Yeah.
Than in other regions of the country?
Well, I'm not sure. I think that there will be more elections of blacks from white majorities in the South than in the North.
Why?
These same reasons, you know, that . . . I mean, it's a nice symbol of
freedom, to be able to go into a voting booth and vote for a black man.
You know, when all your life you've been hung up on such questions as
would you want your daughter to marry a Negro, or would you want your
children bused to a school across town. I mean, the whole society is
burdening you with questions which, no matter how you respond to them,
they can't help but have some kind of burdening effect on your own moral
self-image. And one way of getting free of that is to say, "Look, here's
a good guy. He's probably just as good if not better. I'm going to vote
for him, and that convinces me that I'm capable of overcoming some of
this racism of my past, and make me feel a little
You ever had anybody actually ever tell you that?
No.
You just sense it?
Yes. That's my own . . . just like white folk have always analyzed Negroes. And I'm just taking the privilege.
I think someone suggested that it goes beyond that a little bit. That by electing a black, he's going to be more responsive particularly to lower middle class and middle class kinds of needs. Human needs.
That's part of Howard Lee's theory.
Yes, I would agree with that, that the white intellectual . . .
He's not talking about the white intellectual.
He's talking about the middle class, lower middle class.
I haven't found that . . . well, I'm just beginning to get into that. I mean, like last week, weekend before last, there was an area that had flooded. There was a flash flood across the north side of Atlanta. They had contacted every public official, you know, every elected official in the area, from the governor on down. And when they contacted our office, you know, somebody went out there and made a study of it, and they brought me out there just to walk through the area. And people were just ecstatic. No other elected official has ever come out there to see a lot of us.
This was what type of residential area?
This was . . . actually, I guess you'd have to call that middle class.
White?
Yes. It's surrounded by upper class. I mean, it's one little
Howard's hypothesis—maybe this is the wrong town to compare it with—is that if anybody understands governmental oppression, or governmental inaction or unresponsiveness, it would be blacks. And therefore this, you know, tends to be kind of a class thing.
I don't sense that yet. I mean, I really wish I could. We didn't get the support from the labor unions. We got the support at the top, but we didn't . . . I'm not sure we got the actual vote from the labor unions that we should have gotten.
Your constituency then, basically, is still the old Atlanta coalition.
That's right. The difference is that instead of electing a white liberal, they elected a black.
How is the coalition now working in Atlanta? There was sort of a thesis that it had shifted, during the mayor's race.
Well, I don't think so. I think Sam was just a difficult person.
His first campaign, I mean, not the second one.
I mean, even then, he didn't get along with anybody. The business
community thought that he was not getting along with them, and that he
was anti-business. He appointed me chairman of the Community Relations
Commission, and I think I talked to him three times in two years. And
mostly at my instigation, you know. I mean, he was just a loner that
didn't get along well with people. And I think it's a
All right, how about Maynard?
I think Maynard has . . . I mean, the coalition now is very much intact again.
Yeah. There are a couple of guys, though . . . one difference between this coalition and the old coalition is that there are now black businessmen who sit with the white businessmen before they come to the politicians. Before, it used to be the white businessmen getting together, and then they would come to a meeting with the black politicians, who were usually poor and sort of tied to them out of economic necessity. And a guy like Jesse Hill, president of Atlanta Life Insurance Company, is probably as influential in all that's happened in Atlanta as any other person, including Ivan Allen, Ralph McGill, Martin Luther King. And he's almost completely unknown, but as effective a behind-the-scenes operator as you'd ever meet anywhere. I mean, he did the work that John Wesley Dobbs left undone in voter registration, through the All Citizens Voter Registration Committee. He was the one that helped to get the restaurants integrated. There's just been those kind of people.
Does the black financial community—if I may use that term—provide funds for black politicians, for voter registration, for candidates?
Most of it's been done through outside foundations. And the black power
structure will provide, say, like . . . all the people who work for
Atlanta Life Insurance Company, they will probably produce
Can you tell me a little bit about relationships within Congress? I mean, you can't talk about a black caucus from the South, but suppose ten years from now or twenty years from now there are a significant number of black congressmen. Do you see any problems with working with any of the black congressmen from the North, or what used to be the liberal congressmen, white liberals, from the North?
No, I don't think. I think caucuses of all types are very important in
this body. And I think people accept the fact that every member of the
Black Caucus is also a member of his state caucus. I mean, I'm a member
of the Georgia caucus, the Black Caucus, the Democratic Study Group. I
go to prayer breakfasts. I mean, that's my contact with a lot of the
really arch-Republican conservatives. And it's an important contact for
me, to get to know those guys and know how they think, and let them get
to know me. Those are the guys that swing when you need a vote or two.
If you can change one of those, it means something. And you can. I mean,
we've had a number of people switch on a given vote from time to time.
Just out of personal friendship. When I was trying to get a thing passed
on Portugal, in
How important do you view renewal or extinction of the Voting Rights Act, if it comes back up in '75? How significant is that going to be?
It's going to be very significant, because I'm still subject to the Georgia legislature. And it might be possible for them to . . . well, as they tried to do. See, they drew the original district line one block behind my house. And they would have put me out of Atlanta and down in the district with Noonan, Georgia and Griffin, Georgia. And I could not have. . . . Well, I maybe could win down there, but it'd be much more difficult.
You say it went a block behind your house by coincidence or by design?
Well, I mean, by drawing it that way, you cut me and Maynard and a whole
category of eligible candidates out and put them in other districts. And
there was no question in my mind but that it was deliberate. In fact, we
made the case in court, and the federal court agreed with us. And
without that review provision in the '65 Civil Rights Act, I think we'd
be in trouble, in holding on to these
That's the kind of response or thesis we hear from freshmen, or congressmen just elected in the last four years. You get a completely different kind of response when you talk to somebody who's been here fifteen or twenty years.
They won't be here next time around. I mean, you come back after the next election, and I'll be here. But, I mean, you look at the people who are not running again, and they are these old guys that have lived by certain privileges, and with a certain anonymity. And now the public is smoking hot.
END OF INTERVIEW