Andrew Young
On August 20, 2017 Andrew Young was interviewed on NBC News Meet The Press . Here are excerpts verbatim of what he had to say. This is a longish post but worth reading, maybe more than once.
On the Klan types
Well, it’s a week of misunderstandings. We originally sought to redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of race, war and poverty. Most of the issues that we’re dealing with now are related to poverty. But we still want to put everything in a racial context. The problem with the – and the reason I feel uncomfortable condemning the Klan types is – they are almost the poorest of the poor. They are the forgotten Americans. And, um, they have been used and abused and neglected. Instead of giving them affordable health care, they give them black lung jobs, and they’re happy. And that just doesn’t make sense in today’s world. And they see progress in the black community and on television and everywhere and they don’t share it. Now it’s not our fault. We’ve had a struggle from slavery. But black – while they call themselves militants, but they’re not militants, they’re chicken – we never tried to take advantage of anybody else. Our job was not to put down white people. Our job was to lift everybody up together. To come – so that we would learn to live together as brothers and sisters rather than perish together as fools. And that’s been the way I have done it. And everything – as Congress, at the UN, as mayor for eight years. But all the way back in the early sixties, when we were marching with no support and no vote protection and, actually in St. Augustine in ’64, the Klan was deputized by the sheriff and given license to beat us up. And – people still insisted on marching down there every night. And then the Saturday when the Klan wanted to march in the black community, I was a little nervous. But when they marched down spontaneously, the same people that had been beaten, sang “I love everybody, I love everybody in my heart.” And I think the juxtaposition of the violence and the hostility of the Klan and the spirituality and forgiveness of the black community, was the thing that probably broke the filibuster in 1964 and, and gave us the Civil Rights Bill, which offered us a significant number of protections – not everything; we didn’t make everything right – but the answer is to continue to make everything better for everybody.
On the President.
The trap is that he’s still politicking and thinking nationally, as a nationalist, and so is almost everybody else, including those who are trying to think back and blame it on the Civil War, which was hundreds of years ago. But the problem we have is that we’re not living in a nationalist environment. And that’s also his problem, personally, that he’s– his business is all global. His business is in a global economy and he’s trying to the run the country from a national economy. Now Atlanta hasn’t done that. You know, I mean, yea, Ronald Reagan, when he announced his presidency in 1980, went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Civil Rights workers were killed, two white and one black. And so we knew we couldn’t depend on him for any moral authority. But what we did in Atlanta was – ironically, Washington has 20 trillion dollars or 22 trillion dollars or so in debt. Wall Street has seemingly unlimited money. So Atlanta forgot Washington, and we went to Wall Street. And so our airport — we’ve probably gotten 30 billion dollars out of Wall Street over the last 40 years, but that airport is making over 40 billion dollars every year and it’s creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. We didn’t have an expansion and growth in American business, so I went to Germany. And Germany was building things, German and Japan were building things faster than they could sell them. And I said you all have to be in the U.S. market to survive in the 21st century. We now have 2,500 German companies in and around the city of Atlanta and they’re creating jobs; they’re not taking jobs, taking jobs from Germany. But they’re hiring Americans, black and white and Hispanic and Asian. And that’s a long way because I grew up in New Orleans in 1936. I was — the German American Bund and headquarters of the Nazi party was 50 yards from where I was born. So I’ve been dealing with Nazism and white supremacy since I was four years old. And my father said, “Look, that’s a sickness. You don’t ever let them get you upset and don’t ever get angry at sick people. You don’t get mad. You get smart. You don’t want – they cannot help you. But if you can help them, you ought to try.”
On violence
No it’s more like five generations later and there were those who thought violence the was that right way then. And they aren’t around and they weren’t killed by white people. They were killed by their own anger and frustration and their inability to turn down their emotions and turn on their mind. And, from 4-years-old I was always taught–my father use to tap me in the face to try to get me upset and if I swung back at him he would slap me upside my head. He said see, if you start getting emotional in a fight, you’re going to lose the fight. Don‘t get mad, get smart. And that’s been serving–that served me well. And it served me walking in the midst of the Klan alone at night without a gun, without police protection, and the only reason I did it was because the only ones that were courageous enough to go there with me and who insisted that I go were women and children. The men, you know, hide behind militant solutions, but we have to keep our eyes on the prize – and the prize is not vengeance, not getting even, but the prize is redemption. And you cannot forgive -I mean the, the people we should look up to are the members of Mother Emanuel AME Church, who looked at this young man who shot 9 of their members with forgiveness. And what they thought, you know, it didn’t mean bringing the flag down. It meant giving that boy affordable health care – that the mental section– the mental evaluations that should go with an affordable health care would do more to help these angry people, black and white, because the world is in a tremendous strain. It’s not the United States, it’s not racial. This is the 500th anniversary of the Protestant revolution. It was started by the printing press. We had wars from almost 1500, and we didn’t finally get the world together until 1954, I mean 1944, with Franklin Roosevelt, and the United Nations and the World Bank and we made sense of the world, and we created an economy that grew at about 6 percent annually. From the 40s’ right into the 70s when for some reason they broke it up.
On removing Confederate monuments
I remind people what it costs us to take down the Confederate flag. It cost us an election and that election cost us 14.9 billion dollars and 70,000 healthcare jobs that we would have had in Georgia if we had not gotten to foolin’ with that flag. It costs us the perimeter. We had an outer perimeter where we have been collecting land and designing it and it was ready for construction. And the first thing the next governor did was sell all that land to his friends, and every time any Atlantians are caught in traffic or anyone tries to come through there, they need to remember that the flag put them there. They got a Confederate flag, wave the Confederate flag and be happy, while you’re sitting in traffic. We have run this city since the business community in 1960 took out ads saying we are a city too busy to hate and that’s been what brought us far. We were less than half a million people, we’re now 6 and a half million people. We’re growing, prosperous; we got an education environment where anybody who can get a B average can go to college-free. And anything you want you can fight for it in Georgia, but you can’t fight to keep somebody else down or if you want to make somebody else you’re going to lose and you’re going to be abused and you’re going to undo some of the gains we have made and none of these–a lot of these people are as old as me that are now militant. I don’t know where they were back in the 50s’ and 60s’. And now they when it’s safe, when it’s cheap, they want to get over and get loud. They ought to quiet down and get to work. Register some voters, teach some children, treat their wives a little better, and, and learn what it means to be man in the 21st century.
If you want to hear the interview click here.
