Andrew Young at 94: The last voice in the room
On Monday, Andrew Young was doing what he does best — being Andrew Young.
About an hour before he was scheduled to take the stage at the Buckhead Theatre to record Coleman Hughes’ podcast alongside Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Jonathan Eig, Young sat in the lobby playfully chatting with anyone who approached him. Some came to tell him a story. Others asked for a selfie.
Young obliged them all.
On the stage to record “Conversations with Coleman,” he dominated the 90-minute conversation with his sharp wit, vivid memory and easy command of history. At one point, he even quoted the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
Afterward, he did two more interviews before heading toward his waiting car — but not before pausing to kiss the hand of a woman who told him they had met years earlier at the opera.
Andrew Young is approaching his birthday this week with the energy of a man half his age. Asked if he ever thinks about slowing down, he waves away the idea.
“Why do you slow down?” he asked. “You slow down when you get tired. I’m not tired.”
Then he began to sing a gospel song that has carried generations through struggle:
“I don’t feel no ways tired. / I’ve come too far from where we started from. / Nobody ever told me that the road would be easy, but I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me.”
On Thursday, Young will turn 94, a milestone that underscores his place as a living bridge to the Civil Rights Movement that reshaped the nation — and as one of the last people who stood inside its most important rooms.
“He’s been an ambassador for civil rights. He was Dr. King’s ambassador in many ways,” Eig said. “And the beautiful thing is that he’s still embracing that role. He still sees his role as being a messenger, and now he has to speak for so many people who are gone. He’s spoken for Dr. King since 1968, and now he’s going to speak for Rev. Jackson. He’s carrying that voice, and he’s still singing loud and strong.”
For his family, the milestone is both personal and historic.
“It’s really a blessing that we’ve had him with us for so many years and that he’s still so involved and engaged in the life of the community,” said Andrea Young, his daughter and executive director of the ACLU of Georgia.
In recent weeks, two of the movement’s most recognizable figures have died.
Jesse Jackson, the longtime civil rights leader who worked closely with King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference before building his own political movement through Operation PUSH and two historic presidential campaigns, died Feb. 17.
Bernard LaFayette Jr., the strategist who helped lead the Nashville sit-ins, was on the Freedom Rides and later helped organize voting rights campaigns across the South, died March 5.
Their deaths underscore a reality: One by one, the voices that once surrounded the King are fading.
“It occurred to me when I heard about Jesse, and then when I heard about Bernard LaFayette,” said Isaac Farris, a nephew of King. “He is the last one standing.”
For years, Young said, he resisted thinking about it that way. But the losses in recent weeks have made the reality harder to ignore.
“I didn’t have to until last week,” Young said quietly.
Age, he admits, brings a heavy rhythm to life — a steady procession of memorials for friends and fellow activists.
Young attended and spoke at Jackson’s memorial service in South Carolina, then traveled to Marion, Alabama, for the funeral of his nephew. Last March, just two days after his 93rd birthday, he lost his daughter Lisa Young Alston.
“The heaviest thing for me is all the people that are dying around me,” he said. “Going to funerals is hard. I hate going to funerals.”
That changing landscape has reframed Young’s place in the history of the movement.
“He’s the last voice of that generation, of that core group,” said Eig, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “King: A Life.” “Their testimony is so important.”
Even as the circle of the movement grows smaller, Young continues to travel, lecture and give interviews about the history he helped shape.
As he did earlier that evening at the Buckhead Theatre, his reflections often move between past and present, the memories vivid and sometimes painful.
He pushes back at the notion he is the “last.”
Instead, he says, “I am the most famous.”
It can be argued that over the past nine decades, few African Americans have had their lives documented in such detail as Andrew Young — from his early upbringing, when his family could afford a camera in the middle of the Great Depression, to his days at Howard University, his ministry as a pastor and his role among King’s closest advisers, and through his years in Congress, at the United Nations, at City Hall, in the White House and in the Olympics, which he helped bring to Atlanta.
Born in 1932, one of his earliest memories was of the American Nazi Party, who had set up a headquarters across the street from his boyhood home in New Orleans. Thirty-two years later, in 1964, he accompanied King to Oslo as King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Four years later, he watched from the Lorraine Motel parking lot as King was gunned down on a motel balcony by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis.
In 1972, when Young was elected to Congress, he became the first African American from Georgia to serve in the House since Reconstruction, and along with Barbara Jordan, they became the first two Black lawmakers elected from the former Confederacy since that era — a milestone that carried forward King’s push for greater Black political representation.
Young said sense of duty — to carry the story of the movement forward — has long guided his work.
“That’s the reason I was in the movement,” he said. “Nobody ever writes down how these things happen. Nobody records them. I just wanted to be in the room and be a part of the discussion so that people who don’t know what was going on would know what really happened.”
For members of the King family, Young is more like kin than the otherwise giant figure from history books.
He became a constant and intentional presence for the family after the 1968 death of King and particularly after the 1974 assassination of family matriarch Alberta King.
Farris, who — like many people in Atlanta — refers to Young as “Uncle Andy,” said he has begun to fully appreciate their relationship.
“If Uncle M.L. were alive today, he would tell you he’s thankful for everything Uncle Andy did for him,” Farris said. “But he would also tell you he’s most grateful for him being there for us after he was gone. I’ve kind of been taking that for granted, but I’m going to be spending as much time as I can with him.”
Andrea Young said the lesson of her father’s long life is not simply longevity, but the importance of learning from the people who lived through history. She said she and her siblings, even as their father nears 94, have resisted the urge to make him cut back.
“I don’t think he should slow down. Life is for living, and we need our elders to be among us, sharing their wisdom, reminding us and giving us hope,” Andrea Young said. “People with that much life experience need to be around to mentor and guide us and inspire those of us who are trying to make life happen. If what he’s doing is fulfilling to him, then he should keep doing it.”
For Young, reflection rarely lasts long anyway. There is usually somewhere else to be.
In the days leading up to his birthday, Young kept to a busy schedule — meetings, phone calls and even a quick stop for a haircut.
During one conversation, he cut short a call with a reporter.
He had to go.
He had a plane to catch.
About the Author
Ernie Suggs is an enterprise reporter covering race and culture for the AJC since 1997. A 1990 graduate of N.C. Central University and a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow, he is also the former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. His obsession with Prince, Spike Lee movies, Hamilton and the New York Yankees is odd.