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Ambassador Andrew Young remembered buying his first car and coming to Alabama as a preacher.
“Gas was 21 cents a gallon and I had a little four-cylinder … and 50 cents could take me all the way to Atlanta,” he said. “Now it won’t get you around the corner. But that’s because we don’t vote, and the judgment you give is the judgment you get.”
Young, former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador, returned to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Thursday after first visiting the church in 1963. As a leader with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he served as a strategist and negotiator in the nonviolent campaign against segregation, participating in efforts challenging segregation in Christian worship, and later served on the biracial negotiating committee that helped bring the campaign to a close.
The civil rights leader returned as part of the annual forum of Christian Churches Together. Young urged his audience to be active participants in democracy, not just voting but encouraging others to vote as well.
“We’re going to make the kingdom come, just like we get down on our knees and ask God,” he began. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and let us vote so that the price of gas doesn’t go so high that the farmer can’t buy the diesel engine gas for his tractor … farmers can’t afford that, so food prices are too high. You can’t get to work anymore. You can’t ride a bus. You can’t pay your light bill.
“Democracy has broken down because we have abandoned this,” Young said. “We have not voted. If there had been another 10,000 people voting, we would have a different president now. And the 10,000 people in Atlanta didn’t vote. The 10,000 people here that didn’t vote. If we had practiced the democracy we have been preaching about, and that we have been teaching about, that we were taught in Sunday school and in public schools and in private schools and in Catholic schools. We were taught democracy and it’s working for the United States of America better. I counted 151 countries that I’ve been to and I’ve never been any place any better than right here in Birmingham or Atlanta.”
The 94-year-old told of a man who said he had done a bad job of democracy in the last election and was determined to change that.
“He not only was going to vote, but he was going to take it upon himself to talk to thousands of people about voting,” Young said. “Every day he called 15, 20 different people that he knew, or he went to visit them. He went to barber shops and he worked at democracy.
“None of us have worked hard enough, and everybody goes to beauty salon,” he said. “You get your nails done. You get your hair cut. In my barber shop, they’re all Black and half of them didn’t vote last time. But if the people who didn’t vote in the barber shops alone had voted, we wouldn’t have the situation we have now. When you go to a grocery store, ask the clerk: Don’t forget to vote. When you ask somebody, ‘Can you help me to find the washing powder?’ say, ‘Don’t forget to vote.’ It has to be a committed legion of spirituality that saves this nation from itself and from its own doubts and fears and laziness, or the word my grandma used to use is trifling.”
Young said he learned as a child in New Orleans that he needed to learn to talk to people.
“I’m working on my 95th birthday (and) I’ve got a couple of months to go,” he said. “I grew up with the Nazi party on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner, an Irish grocery store on the third corner and a Chevrolet dealership/repair shop on the fourth corner. Me and my brother and my cousin were the only Black children on the block. We had other Black families in the block, but you know I grew up there.
“My daddy was 5 feet 4 and he said, ‘Look, you’re not going to be big enough to beat anybody. Learn to stay calm,’” Young recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t ever get mad. Get smart. Your mind is the most powerful weapon you have.’
“It’s worked well for 94 years,” the ambassador said. “Not only did it work here, it worked in South Africa. It worked in Haiti. It worked in Russia. It worked with the Olympics, bringing 200 nations to Atlanta, peacefully. And they paid us. We raised $2 billion on the Olympics.”
Young was in Birmingham at the invitation of CCT’s Historic Black Church Family, one of the five church families that make up Christian Churches Together.
CCT’s return to Birmingham continues a conversation that has been central to the organization’s history. In 2011, CCT leaders gathered at 16th Street Baptist Church and read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” asking how the churches had answered the challenge King placed before religious leaders in 1963.
Two years later, CCT issued its 2013 Response to Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ acknowledging the failures of the church and recommitting Christian leaders to work together for justice.
