- [Presenter] This program was funded by the following, Laura and John Beckworth, BP America, Joe Latimer and Joni Hartgraves.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- At four, he took me to the segregated theater to see the 1936 Olympics.

He wanted me to see what Jesse Owens did when Hitler got angry rather than give him his medal after he'd won.

I said, "He's not doing anything."

He said, "Yeah, that's what I want you to see."

White supremacy is Hitler's problem.

It wasn't Jesse's problem.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music fading) (lively music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Martin Luther King Jr said, "Anybody can be great because anybody can serve.

You need only a heartful of grace, a soul generated by love."

He might have been describing Andrew Young, his close confidant and lieutenant in the civil rights movement.

Young was indispensable to the movement's success and would go on to serve our country in key roles in government.

In this episode, I talked to him about his legendary life of public service, including his relationship with Dr. King and his work in the civil rights movement, as well as how he sees America today.

- Ambassador Andrew Young, welcome.

- Thank you for inviting me.

- It's an honor to have you here.

- Well, it's an honor for me to be able to tell the civil rights Lyndon Johnson story at the Lyndon Johnson Library.

(Mark chuckling) - Well, I wanna talk about that story but first talk about your background, which is remarkable.

You come from New Orleans.

- Yeah.

- From a very diverse, eclectic neighborhood.

- It was a wonderful neighborhood for my life.

I was born in the middle of the block.

On one corner was an Irish grocery store, next corner was an Italian bar, the Nazi Party was on the third corner and a Chevrolet dealership around the fourth corner.

And I was smack dab in the middle.

And I started getting race relations education at three and four.

My father is, well, he had a kind of a practical non-violence.

You don't ever let anybody make you mad.

You don't argue with people.

"Don't get mad, get smart" was his mantra.

And the Nazi Party on the corner, he said, "Now, they believe in white supremacy," he said, "but you know that God made of one blood all the nations in the world.

Now, that's their problem with God.

That's not your problem.

You don't have to try to convert them, you don't have to argue with them.

You have your understanding and let God deal with them."

So it was never a burden on me that people disagreed or disliked or said bad things about me.

It was their problem, not mine.

- Your father was a dentist, ambassador, and he wanted you to be a dentist.

- He was determined that I was gonna be a dentist, and that was the hardest thing for me to do, was to tell him that I just didn't want to be in an office.

I didn't wanna be a doctor, I didn't wanna be a lawyer, I didn't wanna be anything, anybody that was cooped up.

And I sort of found my way.

- Well you sure did, by getting swept up in the civil rights movement.

How did that happen?

- I've just been blessed to be in the right place at the right time, and I guess I made the right choices.

- (chuckling) I guess so.

Seems to have worked out for you.

- There was no roadmap.

There was no...

I wasn't interested in civil rights, I read Gandhi and decided that that wouldn't work here in the United States and I was searching.

I met at a conference I went to, Eduardo Mondlane, who led the Freedom Movement in Mozambique.

He was working on a doctorate, I think, at Northwestern.

He was reading Gandhi too.

And he was sure that non-violence would work in Mozambique.

And I was questionable about whether it'd work in Louisiana.

(Andrew chuckling) And when he went back and organized the voter registration drive, everybody got machine guns.

But they didn't, they didn't retaliate.

They had a lot of the Gandhi philosophy in their movement, even though they adopted a policy of defensive violence.

But they never destroyed a school, they never destroyed a railroad, they never did anything to damage.

They always thought of the country as their country.

Well, that sort of before I was 20.

I was meeting all of these people with all of these ideas and ready to lay their life down for them.

And at that point, that was a kind of mysticism that I wasn't ready for.

- Hmm.

How did you come to meet Martin Luther King Jr?

- The first time I met him, I was pastoring a little country church in Thomasville, Georgia.

And he was in Montgomery.

That was 1957.

He was invited to Talladega College to do a Religious Emphasis Week speech.

And we belonged to the same fraternity.

They realized what his schedule was and figured he might have to back out.

So they called me and asked me could I come.

And I was sort of the backup speaker but we ended up being on a panel together.

And turned out that his wife and my wife went to the same high school in Marion, Alabama.

But he would never talk about politics, he would never talk about race relations.

He was only interested in talking about his wife and baby.

But we had similar backgrounds.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- We had similar relationships with our fathers.

But he gave into his.

'Cause he had no intention of being a preacher.

And I had no intention of being a dentist.

(Mark chuckling) When I left Hartford, I went to New York to work with the National Council of Churches.

And I was there for three and a half years.

Which was a blessing to us because my wife got a chance to get her Master's in Education at Queen's College And tuition was something like $18 a semester.

You only had to pay for a registration fee.

And so we couldn't have made it without that.

But she was determined not to stay in New York.

And John Lewis and the Nashville sit-in story came on television.

And we'd just bought this house in Queens and I was comfortable.

But when John Lewis came on, she said after the first intermission, "I'm ready to go home."

And I said, "We are home."

She said, "No, this is New York.

New York will never be my home."

And I said, "Well, what do you want to do?"

She said, "I want you to sell this house and quit your job and let's find something to do down south."

So I was in Atlanta and Dr. King's secretary came over to me.

'Cause Jean was still in Marion, Alabama, with her mother.

And she said, "You're gonna be wandering around here with nothing to do.

Would you mind helping Dr. King with his mail?"

I said, "No, I'd be honored to try but I don't know whether I can."

She said, "Well, it'll at least keep you out of trouble."

(Mark chuckling) And I stayed at the YMCA.

And, at night, you know, I'd stay up and try to answer his mail.

And we hadn't really met except the time that we stopped at his house.

And he said, "How does he know what I'm thinking, what I ought to say?"

And I said, "Well, I went to Hartford U at Boston."

I said, "Your professors were assigning the same books my professors were."

And I was just guessing.

He said, "Well, you're doing very well with it."

So that was my volunteer work.

I was paid to run the literacy program with Septima Clark from South Carolina and Dorothy Cotton.

But in the next six, seven years, we trained about a hundred teachers a year.

- You and I were with Joe Biden yesterday.

And Joe Biden asked you how you stood up to racial tyranny with unyielding courage, without flinching, and yet remained nonviolent.

How did you exercise that kind of restraint?

I know you talked about your parents and the adage that your father offered to you, "Don't get mad, get smart."

But it's one thing to say that and hear it, it's another thing to practice it.

How did you do that?

- Well, I think my daddy taught me that.

I mean, New Orleans is a boxing town and he loved boxing.

This was the time of Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.

And he was fixing a lot of boxers' teeth.

When they'd get cuts, he'd fix them up.

And they never had any money.

And so he said, "The way you can repay me is take my boys to the gym."

And his motto was, "If you know how to have a fight, if you know how to fight, you don't have to fight."

He said, "You'll be confident enough, you know, to stay calm and work your way through it."

And so he made sure we knew how to box and defensively.

But then he would box with us (palm slapping) and just, you know, and just tap us in the face and things like that.

And, if you began to lose your temper and start swinging wild, (palm slapping) he'd give you a good lug but he'd say, "See?

You lose your temper, you lose your head."

And that was sort of beaten into me from four or five years old.

Well, at four, he took me to the segregated theater to see the 1936 Olympics- - Jesse Owens, I'm sure.

Yeah.

- On television.

- That was Jesse Owens and he said he wanted me to see what Jesse Owens did when Hitler got angry rather than give him his medal after he'd won.

Hitler marched out with all of the Nazi storm troopers.

And he said, "Now watch Jesse Owens."

And I said, "He's not doing anything."

He said, "Yeah, that's what I want you to see."

He totally ignored.

That white supremacy is Hitler's problem.

It wasn't Jesse's problem.

Jesse's problem was he had three more races to run.

And he said, "He stayed calm, he stayed cool, and he ended up with four gold medals.

And Hitler's problem was Hitler's problem.

And he took care of his business."

And that was when I was, 1936 and I was four.

And so from that time on, any time he could drill into me, "Don't get mad, get smart," he did.

- So you were eminently prepared for the civil rights movement?

- I was prepared to live in the South.

- Yeah.

- And there were people, I mean, there were people who were racists.

- Yeah.

- But they were nice people, you know.

(chuckling) - Aside from that racism thing.

(laughing) - No but they would say, "You different."

- Yeah.

- 'Cause I didn't get upset and I was... Also, my daddy was a dentist, and probably my parents were the only two people in that neighborhood that were graduates of, had college degrees.

And, I had enough something to build a basketball goal in my backyard.

- Ambassador, you were on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

You witnessed his death.

How did you retain hope after that happened?

- I was close enough to see it in detail.

And the bullet hit the tip of his chin and tore his chin, then severed his spinal cord.

And so I rationalized that he never heard the shot, he never felt the pain.

And then I said, "Now I believe that you can go to heaven in a flaming chariot 'cause I sat here and watched Martin Luther King do it."

And to believe that that is not the end.

But that his spirit was released; where, how, I don't know.

But that his message and his presence has been with us ever since.

I mean, he has not left the movement, you see?

And when I get a crazy idea, I can usually relate it to some experience I had with him.

And I don't say what would Jesus do or what would Martin do?

That's sort of the way I've gotten along.

The last thing he did before he went to Memphis, Harry Belafonte invited us over to his house with John Conyers, congressman from Michigan, Dick Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana, Harry Belafonte and myself.

And the conclusion we reached was that we had to find a way to move the movement into politics.

And I think he had been thinking about this since.

I mean the long meeting with President Johnson where they agreed on everything, and President Johnson just...

He was always on time when we met with him before.

- Let me give context, Mr.

Ambassador.

I think you're talking about when you and Dr. King returned from Oslo, after Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, and you went to the White House before going back down south to Atlanta and visited President Johnson about the issue of voting rights.

The Civil Rights Act had been signed the previous summer and now you were looking on to Voting Rights Act.

I believe that's the meeting that you're talking about.

- And even though, well, we were held up.

Because he was always on time when we had an appointment.

But we were meeting with the Vice President and the Attorney General and they said, "The President hadn't called us yet but you can't leave, you can't leave.

He said he needed to see you."

But we were about an hour and a half late.

And when we got over there, all the Vietnam crowd was McNamara, and our senator, Richard Russell.

I mean all of the people.

And they'd been beating up on him for a couple of hours, evidently.

'Cause it's the first time I ever saw him depressed.

And he didn't argue about anything.

Everything Martin said, he agreed to.

He said, "You're right, Dr.

King."

He said, "I just don't have the power."

And he was feeling really low.

And when we left there, I said, "What are we gonna do?"

I said, "You know, he's right.

He doesn't have the power."

And I said, "And you've been working your behind off for 10 years now without a break except when you got stabbed and you had to take a month or so off healing."

And I said, "We need to take a sabbatical and take six months and go somewhere and forget this and figure out how we're gonna go to the next stage."

And he ignored me.

And he just kept mumbling, "We got to get the President some power."

And I got upset with him.

I said, "Damn!

Here you are, five feet, six inches tall.

You ain't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

(panelists chuckling) A Nobel Peace Prize, which was a $60,000 prize, which was doubled by Rockefeller, and you divided it up amongst all of the civil rights organizations, leaving us about $20,000."

I said, "That won't pay a one month's bills, and you're gonna get the President some power?"

I said, "You need to take a rest and get your head together and decide how we're gonna get to the next stage."

And he just kept saying, "No.

We got to get the President some power."

Well, he was talking about spiritual power.

I was thinking dollars and cents and votes.

And two days after we got back to Atlanta, Ms. Amelia Boynton of Selma showed up with two or three preachers and told how they were being suppressed.

Even Jim Clark wouldn't let them have political meetings in their churches.

And her husband had just died and he wouldn't let her husband's funeral go into the church.

He had horses lined up in front of the church keeping people out.

So she had to bury her husband from the street.

And Martin agreed that we would come to Selma the 2nd of January.

And by the end of March, President Johnson was standing up giving his famous speech where he ended it with, "We shall overcome."

- But really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

(audience clapping) - And you would give him all the power he needed.

- All of the power he needed.

- To enact the voting.

- But, see, that was the mistake I was making.

I was thinking of dollars and cents and votes.

He, and I think President Johnson too, saw a certain spirituality in government decisions.

And I don't think you can be president of this country without realizing there's a connection between the spirituality of humanity and the United States of America.

And the Founding Fathers struggled with that.

How do we run that fine line, keeping a country that's spiritually free and open to the power of God, but still protected from the excesses and greed and ambitions of men?

- Mr.

Ambassador, you've had many roles in your remarkable career.

You were on the front lines of the civil rights movement, which we've been talking about, but you've also been a congressman from your home state of Georgia.

You've been the mayor of Atlanta, you've been the American Ambassador to the United Nations.

What role has given you the greatest fulfillment?

- Well, let me be presumptive and say that I've always thought of this as one role.

And I have never known what I was gonna do.

I don't know what I'm gonna do tomorrow.

And I never knew I was gonna run for Congress until nobody else wanted to run and Harry Belafonte just picked up the phone and said, "Andy's running for Congress."

And I didn't want to leave the Congress.

And nobody in Atlanta wanted me to leave to get to the UN.

And by the time I left the UN, I was broke.

And had four children then, three of them ready for college.

And so, the mayor salary was $50,000 a year and I didn't think I could be mayor.

Till a nice little old lady, who I thought was old 'cause she was in her 80s, and she shook her walking stick about this far from my nose, and said, "Look here, boy, when you came here, you were nothing.

And we done made something out of you.

And now we need you to be the mayor, and you ain't got time for us?

We'd wasted our time on you."

And she stormed out of the room.

Well, what do you do in the front of about a hundred people?

And you couldn't say no.

I've just been in the right place at the right time and the right person has come up with the right idea and I passed it on.

And so, it's presumptive of me but I like to think of this as a vehicle of the spirit.

And how do we get the spirituality of the universe into the administration and governance of our society?

And I still have the Nazis on the corner.

- Mr.

Ambassador, how do you wanna be remembered?

- I don't care.

(panelists laughing) I mean, I really don't.

There's some ideas that I have that I probably won't see realized in my lifetime.

And I just hope that somebody's crazy enough to pick up some of those ideas and try to implement them.

And I've been around long enough to know that the Lord always has a ram and the bull rushers.

(panelists chuckling) - Ambassador Andrew Young, thank you for being with us and thank you for your service to our nation.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music fading) - [Presenter] This program was funded by the following, Laura and John Beckworth, BP America, Joe Latimer and Joni Hartgraves.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(quirky music) (lively music)