Martin Luther King’s last living aide still keeping the dream alive
Sixty years on, Andrew Young recalls Martin Luther King’s historic speech.
“I still don’t know how it happened, but it was meant to be, and it set forth a movement that has changed not only America, but it changed the world,” Young, 91, tells Inquirer in an exclusive interview. “And if there was any disciple that lived out the faith that Gandhi and Jesus expressed in humanity, it was Martin Luther King Jr.”
Young was a confidant of King and they worked together through the 1950s and ’60s in the struggle for civil rights, jobs and an end to poverty. He was with King in Memphis, Tennessee, at the moment when he was shot and killed on April 4, 1968. Young is one of the few surviving members of King’s inner circle of advisers and strategists.
King’s words on August 28, 1963, delivered extemporaneously after discarding a prepared text, continue to reverberate 60 years later. Young remembers King’s speech had not lifted to the lofty heights many had expected. Mahalia Jackson, who sang before he spoke, interjected “tell them about the dream” she had heard him speak of in Detroit months earlier.
“Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” King preached. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
He spoke to the crowd of activists, students and celebrities with the looming presence of Abraham Lincoln seated in his grand memorial behind. Young recalls that “everybody wanted to speak first” and so King was the final speaker. They did not expect his remarks to get much media coverage. Neither could they have imagined sections would be remembered so many years later. “It lifted the crowd to such a crescendo that it really lifted the nation,” Young remembers. “And it went worldwide.”
In 1957, Young was invited to Talladega College in Alabama to speak alongside King. He was then pastoring a Congregational church with fewer than 100 members in rural Thomasville, Georgia. King was well known because of his role in the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, inspired by Rose Parks’s defiance of transit segregation. It made King a national leader.
“He was a third-generation Baptist preacher,” Young says of King. “He went to Montgomery thinking that it was a safe place for him, where he would never have to be involved in any action or controversy, and he was still writing his PhD dissertation … then Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.
“He was genuine. He was humble. He was following in the footsteps of the Lord. You cannot explain or understand Martin Luther King Jr without understanding that he believed in the New Testament and was particularly fond of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. He was also a student of Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman, both of whom were students of Gandhi.”
Growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana, Young was born into segregation. His father, Andrew Jackson Young Sr, took him to watch a newsreel of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Jesse Owens won gold medal after gold medal, and made a mockery of Adolf Hitler’s belief in white supremacy.
“My father said: don’t get upset, don’t get mad, get smart,” Young remembers. “He was also a boxing fan and he said if you learn to fight then you won’t have to fight anybody but once. All they need to know is that you are not afraid to fight.” He adds: “Because of the support we had, the love and lessons from our parents, we were really raised for segregation.”
Ignoring his father’s plea to become a dentist, Young studied theology and first ministered a small church in Marion, Alabama. He worked on youth programs with the National Council of Churches in New York before returning to pastorship at Beachton, Georgia, in 1957. He began working with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, becoming executive director in 1964.
Like King, he became inspired by the non-violent protests of Mohandas Gandhi in India and began putting this approach into action against segregation. “What drove Gandhi was spiritual,” Young explains. “He was totally anti-materialistic. That’s what led me into the ministry. That’s what defined (King’s) ministry.”
The purpose of the SCLC was to redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of racism, war and poverty. The campaigns and demonstrations, including marches and sit-ins and freedom rides, were in support of that effort. Young played a leadership role in the Birmingham, Selma, St Augustine, Atlanta and Memphis campaigns through the 1960s. He was abused, beaten and jailed.
“Non-cooperation with evil leads people to co-operation with the good,” Young says. “Something happens to you spiritually inside when you are rejected because of who you are. We always chose to deal with those crises non-violently. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will soon leave everybody blind and toothless, Martin said.
“We also had to use politics and economics. The boycotts became the first and probably still the most effective method. People decided to stop buying everything but food and medicine. It disrupted the economy through non-participation … the important thing was to keep on keeping on and to keep challenging the evil.”
These crusades, like the March on Washington, began to force change in the corridors of power. John F. Kennedy, initially reluctant to spend political capital on civil rights, made the moral case for action and proposed new legislation. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, used his powers of persuasion and political dealmaking to pass the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965.
But at an Oval Office meeting in December 1964, King and Young failed to persuade Johnson to pursue specific voting rights legislation. “Martin would never confront him,” Young recalls. “Martin spoke to him as a pastor and as a friend, and they never argued.” Johnson told them: “I just don’t have the votes. I don’t have the power.”
When they exited the White House, Young told King that Johnson was right. “He doesn’t have the power and you don’t either,” he said. He advised King to take a break, rest and regroup. “He’d been bombed, he’d been stabbed, he’d been beaten, he’d been jailed,” Young says. “He had lived a rough, difficult life.”
But King did not want to rest. “We can get the president some power,” he responded. He began planning a new campaign in Selma. “I didn’t realise that he wasn’t thinking politically or economically, he was thinking spiritually,” Young says. They marched from Montgomery to Selma and were confronted with violent protests, vividly captured on TV.
Johnson seized the moment. He urged congress to pass voting rights legislation.
“There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma,” Johnson said on March 15, 1965. “There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.”
King and Young watched the speech at Sullivan Jackson’s home in Selma. “It’s the only time I ever saw a tear roll down from his eye,” Young says of King. “He didn’t clap, he didn’t cheer, but he was very quiet.
“He was very moved but he was not a person to express his emotions, you know, flamboyantly.”
In King’s final years, the movement transitioned from one in pursuit of dignity and decency to a broader crusade for equality of opportunity. They campaigned on employment, housing and reducing poverty. He became a critic of the Vietnam War. He was unpopular with politicians, the media and other civil rights leaders. He became more spiritual, motivated to fulfil what God had determined he should do.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was determined to destroy King, convinced he was a communist and a threat to the US. He instructed agents to record King in compromising positions with women and sent these reports to the White House. Young acknowledges King’s flaws, as all are flawed, and says they were not running a program of personal piety but a program of social, political and economic justice.
In April 1968, King travelled to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. At Mason Temple Church, he spoke of climbing “the mountaintop” and seeing “the Promised Land” but added: “I might not get there with you.” It was his final speech. King had overcome an earlier fear of death and instinctively knew he did not have long to live.
“He knew that,” suggests Young. “But I don’t think it was fatalistic. He was really and truly a Christian who believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and who believed in the possibility of his own resurrection. In fact, you know, the happiest I had seen him in a long time was an hour before he was assassinated.”
At the Lorraine Motel, King had been laughing and eating catfish with colleagues. Young had been in court in support of sanitation workers. When he arrived at the motel, King picked up a pillow and playfully threw it at him. “I threw it back,” Young remembers. “Then everybody just jumped on me in a kind of pillow fight, and I got beat down between two beds. But it was the most joyous I had seen him in a long time.”
There was a knock on the door and they were reminded to get ready for dinner. King went upstairs to his room and put on a new shirt and tie. He leaned over the balcony to ask if he should put his coat on. Then a shot rang out from across the street. King collapsed and blood pooled around his head.
“It was almost an immediate death and I don’t even know that he had time or was able to feel any pain,” Young says. “Elijah supposedly went to heaven in a flaming chariot (and) that’s the first thing I thought of when I saw his body laying there. It was almost as though he went directly to heaven in a flaming chariot and did not know what had happened to him.”
In the years after King’s death, the movement he led fractured. Young reveals there has hardly been a key moment in his life when he has not considered what King would have him think and do. “That we are still talking about him 55 years later, and it is every bit as relevant to our situation now as it was then, is because people have bought into his dream for America and the world,” he says.
Young served in the US congress (1973-77), as US ambassador to the UN (1977-79) and mayor of Atlanta (1982-90). These were opportunities to continue the fight for human rights, using the skills and insights that he had gained working alongside King.
He says president Jimmy Carter – now 98 and receiving hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia – was “a definite disciple” of King. The support of Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, he notes, was critical in Carter winning the presidency in 1976. Young pays tribute to Carter’s character and commitment to human rights. “He has lived a very good life,” Young judges. “I wish he had had another four years in the presidency.”
I have always wanted to talk to Young. It was also a privilege to interview John Lewis, the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington, in 2018. Young conveys a similar understated authority and integrity, a warmth, gentleness and affection, and has a powerful way with words that leave a lasting impression.
Young, father of four children and grandfather of nine, is not an eternal optimist but does have faith in humanity. “I think this country is better off than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” he says. Young is reminded of King’s immortal words that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. “Freedom is a constant struggle,” he says.
“It is never going to be easy. As soon as we cross one hurdle, there is going to be another one. But the Earth is in motion, and everything about the universe is in motion, and it hangs together. We don’t know how and why all the time, but we are going to make it.”
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When Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and looked out to a sea of 250,000 people who had gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and gave voice to his dream, Andrew Young was moving among the crowd and looking for any outbreak of violence.