Young: On the Inside This Time : 20 Years Ago in Chicago, He Almost Left the Convention in Despair; Today as Atlanta’s Mayor, He Looks Back More in Awe Than in Anger

ATLANTA —  Sitting in the mayor’s office-- his office--in a Southern city where he once sat in jail, Andrew Young excused himself to take a quick phone call from a Mitsubishi executive ringing him from Japan.

“It’s 8 o’clock at night there,” Young apologized to his visitor. In Atlanta, it was just past 8 a.m. and Mayor Andrew Jackson Young was on his third press interview of the day. Such long-distance interruptions are frequent for Young, the second-term mayor who spent 102 days on the road last year in his continued attempt to make his city the “shopping center for the Third World.”

Focusing on the Mayor

In a matter of hours Young would make welcoming remarks at the Democratic National Convention. And while a good chunk of the 15,000 media representatives were training their sensory powers on divining the psyche of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Young realized that at least part of the focus would spill over onto him--an agreeable happenstance.

The convention gives Young, the “International Mayor,” a chance to show off his growing city (the homeless have been cleared from their makeshift shelters around the convention site) and talk about his growing ambition. Young’s public and private displays of party loyalty, along with a smooth convention, may help bring the 56-year-old mayor the prize he seeks: the Georgia gubernatorial nomination in 1990, or a high post in a Dukakis administration.

Such aspirations did not remotely cross Young’s mind 20 years ago when he arrived at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, deeply depressed over the recent killings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

One of King’s top aides in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Young, then 36, arrived as a delegate, a former supporter of Kennedy prepared to cast his vote for Eugene McCarthy to protest the Vietnam War. In the time it took him to drive his rental car out of the airport, Young heard Chicago Mayor Richard Daly ranting on the radio about the coming demonstrations, “and I got off the expressway, went back to the airport, and turned the car in. I was going home.”

He called the McCarthy camp to say he was leaving and they persuaded him to get back in the car and stay for the convention.

“They said they really needed me and were reserving a room for me,” Young recalled. “I really didn’t have a role. I wasn’t really a part of the McCarthy campaign and neither was I really a part of the demonstrations. Hosea Williams was leading the demonstrations for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but I was sort of moving back and forth between the convention floor and outside in the streets.”

To think that 20 years later Young would be the mayor of a major Southern city hosting a convention where Jesse Jackson would receive more than 1,000 votes for the Presidential nomination--”I couldn’t have conceived of that,” Young said.

Times Have Changed

Young recalled being jailed in Atlanta in the late 1960s during a campaign to organize workers, citing it as an example of how far his city has come--that it could elect a black man it once threw behind bars.

Two decades later, assessing his own progress--elected to Congress in 1972, Ambassador to the United Nations in the Carter Administration (before he was fired for his secret meetings with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization), and now mayor of Atlanta since 1981--Young said, “I’m very pleased. It’s much quicker and it’s much further than I could have imagined.

“There was no way we could have imagined this, being where we were (then),” Young said. “We were not trying to push blacks in the system directly so much as we were serious about the notion of redeeming the soul of America. I could see that as a lifetime struggle in a movement outside the political arena. It was only when the movement outside the political arena bogged down for lack of a strong leader like Martin Luther King that I became afraid that everything that Martin had worked for was going to be undone. That was one of the reasons some of us got into politics.”

Young did not arrive for the 1968 convention donned in a dashiki or tie-dye. “A lot of the young people in the civil rights movement in those days called me an Uncle Tom because I wore a suit and tie,” said Young, who was wearing a blue silk tie dotted with tiny American flags. “I was a minister and in the South, ministers were expected to wear a shirt and tie. There was a confusion that militancy was style rather than substance. Now most of those guys who criticized me, half a dozen of them, are investment bankers.”

It seemed something of a distant dream as Young, now a grandfather, sat in his office stuffed with gifts and memorabilia from his world travels: African wood sculpture, Oriental swords and a soccer ball of indeterminate origin. Admitting that Jackson’s primary showings make this convention “historic,” Young still reserved judgment about what the ripple effect of Jackson’s success would be for aspiring black politicians.

“The problem is, it depends on how it winds up,” said Young, whose lack of rapport with Jackson is said to date back to their days of marching with King, when Jackson was viewed by some as overstating his closeness to the non-violent civil rights leader.

“I think it (Jackson’s candidacy) can contribute to bringing the party together or it can create a lot of tensions and anxieties,” Young said. “The problem we have is that Jesse has been involved really in a moral crusade that I agree with altogether. But it’s like the Beatitudes in the New Testament. I believe in them but I don’t have much hope of living up to them. In the real world, when the Kingdom comes, some of the things Jesse talks about will be able to occur.”

The two talked soon after Jackson arrived in Atlanta, Young indicated.

“He (Jackson) said to me, ‘How do we wind this down and bring it into the fold without letting these people’s hopes and aspirations down?’ He’s tried to define victory not for himself but for his constituents and that’s a very difficult process,” said Young. “I think he will have his name placed in nomination for President and I think he will challenge some of the platform planks. I think that’s very good.”

Good Turnouts

Young is upset with the “assumption that Jackson speaks unilaterally for the black vote and that everybody else is going to be intelligent enough to make their own decisions.” Calling that “a racist analysis by the press,” he pointed out that “Jesse lost in ’84 and still 96% of the black vote went for (Walter) Mondale and there were good turnouts. And I suspect that will happen again. My concern, and I think Michael Dukakis’ concern, is the people who left the party in ’84.

“Unfortunately, to win an election you have to go after the sheep that are lost, in Biblical terms,” Young said. “How do you do that without alienating those who stayed in the party? That’s the current problem.”

Young himself is not without problems as he casts his eyes on the Georgia statehouse. His worldwide travels have helped to bring 1,100 foreign companies to Atlanta and $52 billion in business investments in the last five years. And when critics noted that foreign businesses were not filling the streets’ potholes, Young went out in a hard hat and shoveled a few himself. Still, crime, traffic and homelessness are increasing problems.

But Young is proud of his overall accomplishments and disagrees with skeptics who question whether white rural Georgia would rally around an urban black candidate, especially if the popular ex-Veterans Administration head Max Cleland were to throw his hat in the ring.

“I think the level of racial harmony around Georgia is greater than the level in almost any other state in the union,” said Young. “I think we’ve done a good job of dealing with urban problems. I think the problems of small-town America, the problems of rural America, are all here in Georgia and I’d like to take a shot at it.”