Andrew Young Interview: Insights from Martin Luther King Jr's Confidant

thank you very much to be to begin Andy we just want to start a little about your first impressions I know you met dr. King before you worked with him can you talk about meeting him and what drew you to him from New York to come down here at the beginning of the movement we're going to start with a few personal questions well actually I was pastoring a little country church in south Georgia Thomasville and Beach ttyn and I was invited to Talladega college for religious emphasis week we both happen to be members of the same fraternity and they invited him and I said they weren't sure that he might he would come so they invited me as a backup and we both showed up and I don't remember what we talked about but I was just I was a little country preacher with 50 members in two churches and I'd run about a registration drive but I knew about him but and I had actually heard him speaking in in Tallahassee at rubber seals seals Church but so I was in all but we basically talked to college students more or less reflecting on our own ordinary not so special college years and it afterwards my wife Jean was with me and Andrea who was I guess about six months old and they began to talk and she asked about Coretta and I don't know that I would was aware of it and I'm sure he wasn't but they both went to the same high school Marion Alabama Lincoln school and had led pretty much parallel lives because Marian when Coretta was growing up and when Jean was growing up it was a pretty rough place I mean Carretas family had several businesses so did jeans family and they were all destroyed and for no reason just because there was a resentment of successful aggressive black people and they destroyed they burned down the grocery store that Carretas father had formed and they sabotaged the sawmill and a logging company jeans family had little shops downtown her great-grandfather had been a postmaster or something in reconstruction so they owned almost a whole block of property with a grocery store and a shoe shop in a candy store and it was the black business community and somehow they were swindled out of it and jeans grandfather committed suicide and her father became an alcoholic for a while and her mother was fired from her teaching position because she resisted the advances of the superintendent and so during that their early teen years from about 12 to 16 Loretta was a little older so for carotids my than 14 but they had both lived very traumatic lives and they both had had experienced the raw cruelty of racism and segregation and would have been very bitter I think except that a young Quaker couple Fran and Cecil Thomas came down and took an interest in both of them and arrange for Coretta and her sister to go to Antioch College and Jean and her two sisters I went to Manchester College in Indiana now the significance of that is that I think in the 50s 40s those were the only two schools I know of that had a required course in non-violence Jean had taken a course in New Testament non-violence Coretta was a member of the women's strike for peace and I don't know whether we could have found two beautiful intelligent black women who were committed to the values that we were struggling Westers as students now it wasn't as easy I think both Martin and myself grew up a pretty in a privileged circumstance I mean there was all the difference in the world between Atlanta and New Orleans and Marion Alabama Selma Alabama Thomasville beached in Georgia we were protected from racism and segregation pretty much in the big cities and it was well it was there but we were taught to deal with it not to be victims and what taught that that racism was a sickness and it was the white people who were sick not you and you don't get mad with sick people and you don't get upset with they just don't know any better they've been taught that they are better than you but you know that God created all of us in His image God created of one blood all the nations of the earth and for some reason they have a problem with that but that's not our problem and so I think while we had sort of spiritual defenses that were part of our growth growing up we never had them tested whereas our wives had been tested and been through the fire and somehow realized that you could come out without being burned I always say that at that time at talladega I don't know whether I realized it then but that's not just a coincidence and I've learned to say that coincidence is God's Way of remaining anonymous and that but if we had not married these two little country girls who had in the fire built up in their bones to fight racism and segregation and not to fear death walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil they were some courageous women who never tried to hold his back in fact they were always pushing us forward and I don't know whether you would have heard of either of us if we had not married these two women could you skip forward to 61 when you're up in New York and the decision to come South to work with him what do you to that job and how did you make that decision to come and become an advisor well there again I was working with the National Council of Churches I had been in Thomasville and beached in Georgia and I went down to Florida in 1956-57 to do Bible study at an interracial church conference and I was offered a job in New York as the associate director of youth work for the National Council of Churches well actually gene did not want to go she wanted to stay in the south I was enjoying myself but at that time they actually said that the young people in the churches black and white need help to go through this difficult period and while you're moving to New York and would be based in New York most of your work will be with young people across the nation but especially in the south and so that was the only way I convinced gene to move north she did not like New York that she hated it and the only good thing about it was that she was able to get a master's degree at Queens College for $16 a semester and but she never really adjusted to New York and we went to New York with me making the commitment that we would only be in New York from four to six years and we'd been there just about four years and had done I enjoyed New York I enjoyed the work with the National Council of Churches and it gave me an exposure to young people all over the nation it also got me involved internationally with the church's movements of liberation movements in Latin America and South Africa or Southern Africa and was was a particularly good experience for me she had been - Jean had been to Germany in a work camp with the Church of the brother and back in 53 and I tagged along with her there and worked in Austria so our work with the churches gave us a significant amount of global awareness of what was going on in the world with race and Creed and class and color but we were looking at television put the kids to bed and we just bought a house in Queens and had a fire in the fireplace and was sitting down and the Nashville sit-ins story comes on and we see Ct Vivian and Martin Luther King and diane nash and james Bevel and kelly miller Smith and John Lewis and I think John Lewis particularly was a powerful moving figure that gene immediately related to and when the program went off she said it's time for us to go home I said we just bought this house this is home she said no this is not home it's time for us to go back south I said Waya she says I don't know I said well what do you want me to do she said one you need to quit this job we need to sell this house and then and then what do we do she said I don't know but if we make a commitment to go back the Lord will find a way to use us I said my god what kind of crazy woman did I marry but I did it and she was well she was expecting our third child and her master's thesis was due about the same time and so we were without a house a job and nothing to do I had decided I didn't want to work with in the movement I frankly felt that as a member of the United Church of Christ coming out of a northern liberal denomination even though I had passed that only in the South that I didn't want to get in all of the ego battles with all of these Baptists and Methodists preachers in the south and so I decided I was gonna go to the Highlander Folk School that would make me close enough to the movement but I wouldn't be in the middle of all of the church politics is probably the worst kind and III just I don't don't like I don't even go to church meetings Church politics and university politics and so I was trying to stay away from all of the movement politics then accepted a job at the Hal and the Folk School the household the baby was born Jean got her degree but then the state of Tennessee closed down Highlander Folk School it was interesting because the reason they closed it down was they accused this wonderful woman mrs. septum--ah Clarke who was then in her 60s which I thought was old they accused her of running a moonshine ring and they actually testified that this lady carried 24 gallons of moonshine out in two suitcases to her car well that was the kind of testimony and the septum of Clark that I knew was a good AME in fact she was a member of mother Emanuel Church where the the nine people were killed a few months ago but with the town and the well with Heil and the clothes the foundation Marshall fuel foundation had given a grant that SCLC could not receive because they didn't have tax exempt status and so in trying to get the money to septum--ah I went to the United Church of Christ and they said they would gladly manage the grant if I would come on as the administrator and we had properties that the United Church of Christ had part of the American missionary Association at one time they had as many as 500 schools and colleges across the south so I asked them would they help the movement by helping to restore some of these properties and so between the Quakers and the Congregationalists we had training centers at Penn Center in South Carolina Buford and Dorchester Center in Liberty County Georgia and I I ended up moving to Atlanta and being placed in an office that was right across the hall from Martin Luther King and I was not officially on SCLC staff but Dora McDonald dr. King secretary said to me your your family's in Alabama and you here by yourself maybe I was living at the YMCA maybe you could help with dr. King's mail so I said I'd be glad to try and she brought me a cardboard box you know pack down with all of the people who were writing him letters and I took it over to the YMCA and that's what I did for my orientation I read and answered you know all of his mail without ever meeting him and without ever talking to him anymore but when we met at Talladega and started talking about our wives and our children that's all we talked about and so I'd never had a conversation with him about the civil rights movement but I I think the kind of parallel upbringing and education a Howard University and Morehouse College very similar dr. Mayes had gone to India in 1947 and so did dr. Mordechai Johnson of Howard and every time either one of them spoke they spoke about Mohandas K Gandhi and it well that that was the origin of my understanding of the movement and the fact that well I don't know I was there and there was a job to be done and I did what had to be done it sounds like by by accident coincidence and parallel interests and your wives here you're moving closer toward working with dr. King but when did you first tell yourself okay we're I'm in this with him well I think I knew that I was in the movement because of him it was the organizations that I didn't want to be a part of I didn't mind being a part of him but remember he had been expelled from the Baptist Convention and and it was such a kind of petty religious jealousy and that that's what I didn't want any part of but that was more or less out of Chicago and Reverend Jack not Jesse Jackson Jackson who actually even after dr. King's death when they changed when they they named the street on which his church was Martin Luther King Avenue he moved the address of the church around to a side street and so there was such there was such pettiness and and jealousy that Martin didn't like in fact he quite often made fun of it he he used to joke about being stabbed in Harlem and he said that he had a kind of an out-of-body experience and all of these preachers who were particularly rivals and well not all of them there were people like Gardner Taylor and others that were very supportive of him but there was sort of a mixed group gather around the bed and he was sort of supposed to be in a coma and he said he can remember like he was up in the in the up over afters of the room looking down on them and he said I wanted to tell him don't get too happy brothers I ain't gone yet but he could joke about being stabbed and and the petty jealousies and rivalries and and I think that that served him very well but I think he always knew that each and everything he did could be the last thing that he did and he used to say that if you're really going to be free now you have to overcome the love of wealth and the fear of death and he used that to justify paying us very little he only took $1 a year and he I think six thousand dollars a year was the top salary and and he felt that that was enough and his idea was that if you're going to work with poor people you've got a you can't live way above them it was the exact opposite of some of the prosperity ministry that we see right now so as I mentioned the film focuses on Selmer forward from that Nobel lecture about racism war in poverty and non-violence as a weapon against all three that lecture is not widely known but you were there and he insisted on going straight to Selma what do you remember about the commitment was that a surprise was I I assumed the lecture itself was not a surprise the breadth of his actually the idea of redeeming the soul of America from the triple evils of racism war and poverty was actually out of the first SCLC gathering in 1957 in New Orleans and so that had always been a theme that we probably didn't use until it's surfaced in his Nobel Prize lecture we came back from the Nobel Prize lecture and we went to New York we were met at the Harlem Armory by Governor Rockefeller Nelson Rockefeller and Malcolm X and Malcolm was there to congratulate Martin but he said I think it's important for us to keep our work separate but I want you to know that I have a great deal of admiration and respect for everything you're trying to do and anything I can do I'll be glad to do to help you but I I don't think it's good for us to be seen or work together so he left the armory when dr. King got up to speak governor rockefeller when Martin decided to give the money of the Nobel Prize to the 6th civil rights organization divided evenly Governor Rockefeller decided to to match it so the amount doubles and he offered us his plane to fly us down to Washington to meet President Johnson well when we got there we were taken to the Justice Department to meet with the Attorney General katzenback and vice president Hubert Humphrey and the president was busy for our four o'clock appointment and we really didn't get over the until almost seven o'clock we found out later much later that what was on his mind what he was dealing with was that was one of the first efforts of Secretary of Defense McNamara to get President Johnson more involved in a war in Vietnam and so he and it seems Richard Russell senator from Georgia were in an extended meeting so when we finally got to meet with him the president was well he had been in the midst of an argument where his his Secretary of Defense suggesting that they get involved in Vietnam and his mentor Senator Richard Russell from Georgia saying I'd have nothing to do with that stay away from Vietnam in fact when he realized we were the next appointment he said if you want my advice don't get interested and involved in any one of these causes so when we got there the president was in the midst of a of a very heavy burden war and domestically and so we made our case that we really needed voting rights it and he agreed and said that he wanted to do a lot more on poverty and and also voting rights and I think the only difference was that I think he was more concerned about going into poverty first and he felt that it was less divisive and President Johnson's notions of poverty were not just black poverty his experiences with poverty were from the hills of East Texas and and he had taught children which he knew were coming to school with no food for breakfast and we were pushing voting rights and we would make a case that dr. King would make a case and President Johnson would agree but he'd always end with saying that look I just got a bill through Congress six months ago on civil rights and public accommodations I just don't have the power to go back to the Congress for Voting Rights Act in this session of Congress and dr. King kept pressing the case and President Johnson kept agreeing with him but saying I you're right but I don't have the power and it was a President Johnson's a commitment to end poverty and to do as much as he could for the poor of America you know would deep-seated part of his faith and government's ability to change the world and but he really he really did feel powerless and we did not know the conflict but neither that we know how much we were getting into it because when we left and I asked dr. King well what do you think his answer was very I thought he was joking he said well we got to figure out how to get this president some power and so come on now you gonna get the President of the United States and power and I the school rivalry Howard and Morehouse us and that you Morehouse men we always say you can tell him Morehouse man but you can't tell him much but this is the this is this is a new level of arrogance from you you gonna get the President of the United States and power and and he was serious he said look I'm not I'm not being flippant he said we just have to find a way to get this president's empower and when I realized he was serious but he didn't have a clue of where the power would come from and how it would come about I didn't realize it then but I think that he had already come to be aware from the combination of his death threats and stabbing in Montgomery I mean in New York and the midnight ride and the jailing in solitary confinement in Georgia that I think he had already come to grips with death and that his view of the movement was never and I don't know exactly where it happened but somewhere between Montgomery and Selma the movement cease to be political for him it was spiritual and I was still thinking politics but he was not thinking politically and when we got back I think this was I think we met with the president I think it was the 18th of December because we just come back from Oslo and New York and came down to Washington and [Music] we left went back to Atlanta two days later mrs. Amelia Boynton of Selma comes to visit us with no appointment she and Reverend Reese and O Baptist preacher Williams I think but anyway there was a Baptist preacher AME preacher and mrs. Amelia Boynton and they came over to visit us without an appointment they just drove and into the office and mrs. Boynton who had gone to Selma as a 19 year old working for George Washington Carver and the reason I remember this is that she turned 21 in 1932 and registered to vote and I was born in 1932 and so those dates are kind of locked in she had been in Selma Alabama working first for George Washington Carver and a kind of New Deal program to help [Music] sharecropper the families and their wives she married an attorney I think in and and had been involved in Social Work and political activities and in Alabama throughout her life she actually not only well she led a get-out-the-vote drive for Barack Obama in 2008 when she was I think 102 by that time something and so he was one of the real saints of the south MS Boynton actually came over to Atlanta to explain to us what was going on in Selma I always tell young people when they and whenever they say that things are worse off now than they ever were before I want to you know well I want to say something really crude but I usually say you just don't know the amazing thing was that we both had wives who grew up 30 miles from Selma we were back and forth between Marion and Selma and Atlanta all our lives we did not realize nor did it come to the newspapers that Jim Clark had kind of shut down any kind of protest and was refusing to allow people to have any kind of voter registration or political meetings in the churches and he said the churches in Selma and in Dallas County were not allowed to have politics in fact his Boynton's husband died and he had his stormtroopers as I say blocked the church and wouldn't let his Jim Clark wouldn't let MS Boynton's husband be buried in his own church and so they had held the funeral in the middle of the street because he said he was too political and he didn't allow politics so that when we realized that he'd also had an injunction that he that prevented more than two people from walking down the street together I was an attempt to prevent demonstrations but even two or three high school kids who walking home from school together the police would break him up and if there were three or four people they couldn't walk together and he'd established a kind of police state which even in Atlanta 200 miles away we didn't know about and so I think Martin accepted that as a challenge now I don't know what we would do and we didn't even take the time to discuss it but it was just before Christmas and mrs. Boynton was concerned about the n-double-a-cp emancipation proclaimation meeting that we normally have around the 1st of January the 1st of January was on a Sunday so dr. King never missed the first Sunday in his church and so we decided we would go to Birmingham I mean go to Selma Monday night the 2nd of January and we would have our emancipation service in spite of Jim Clark's embargo or well whatever his police state rules were we would challenge them by having that Emancipation Day service and so we went there almost looking for trouble and we knew the trouble was there and that they could not deal with it alone and so Martin was almost deliberately inserting himself in between the people of Selma and racist society at the beginning of Selma which we don't have time to I mean very historic movement I know after the after it was over dr. King and President Johnson had one telephone conversation in which Johnson said that was about the best thing that ever happened you turned out all those people in Selma that allowed me President Johnson to go before Congress and call for the Voting Rights Act but we want to skip to the right after the Voting Rights Act was signed you're having the SCLC convention and I believe you gave an award to diane nash and james Bevel for at that convention but the Watts riot broke out the middle of it you have memories of how the Watts riot affected you and dr. King coming at after that peak and Selma well can I just take a minute to say that how we got out of so low and what what happened there was was a series of accidents one we didn't know what we were doing and we were moving ahead on faith but the incidents one it was the 2nd of January and not the first which meant in that year of the Sunday's you know a little different but the events that preceded that that went on in Selma all that us into things Jimmie Lee Jackson being killed and our marching from to his foot his his body the breasts and that was where we started talking about marching to - from Selma to Montgomery and they ended up marching on the wrong day and we didn't have any idea what was happening but I was just thinking that if dr. King had been there leading that March I doubt that the Justice Department would have allowed him to be beaten in public that way and it was the fact that the people from Lowndes County and Perry County in Dallas County came on the wrong Sunday that maybe made it possible so that was one of the accidents that seemed to be a kind of spiritual empowerment of the movement that did give President Johnson the power and so I think that by that time Martin had decided that anything he did would be but well everyday could be his last and and yet he pressed on and let's see how did we get to the Watts Riots all I remember about the rods were eyes Wars that I had jets led down and I had a terrible migraine headache and he called me early in the morning Sunday morning saying that there's a riot and watch we've got to go to Los Angeles and I was feeling very very ill and there were a couple of points of disagreement that it was one of the things I think I argued with him about learn a few things that what businesses of ours did people riot in watts and I think Robert Kennedy the Attorney General in part of his analysis of what was going on in the north I've said that the that black leaders had neglected the North Sea and that made me mad I said wait a minute we got no more than 50 people we have a half a million dollars a year I think it was only at Selma that we raised that the annual budget of SCLC exceeded a half a million dollars 500,000 we went up to almost 600,000 I said it's all we can do to take care of the south he's got the FBI the National Guard the Congress and the whole federal treasure the North is none of our business and I think that SCLC kind of became divided then and Martin feeling that we had to prove that non-violence was relevant in the north and but at the same time not having the resources financial or political or human but one of the things that made the difference was that Los Angeles had had probably the largest fundraiser that had ever been been held for SCLC the whole Coliseum there and at USC 60,000 people showed up and I think Martin felt that he had a debt to those people and so we ended up traipsing out to to watts Martin always said that he didn't want to be the fireman called in to put out the fire he said usually the things that cause these problems we know months and years ahead of time and we had to find a way to get into these northern cities before the riots occurred and in his mind that's where he made the decision to that was that the problems in the north were primarily economic and he was dealing with racism but he was dealing with racism that was complicated by my unemployment unprepared migrants moving from the south to the north the slowdown of the economy after World War Two and [Music] the issues were far more complex than black and white as they had been in the south and so will the same staff and the same amount of money we he made a commitment that we had to find a way to address the problems of northern cities this led to Chicago and I take it that the staff was divided about going to Chicago well when we left selma diane nash and james Bevel moved to chicago with Bernard Lafayette and they were working with the American Friends Service Committee and the Confederation of a Council of federated organizations COFA or something in in Chicago and they came and invited us to come to Chicago well again they're more black people in Chicago than they are in the whole state of Alabama and we were comfortable in Birmingham and Selma and Marian our staff knew that but we had very few people from the north and well you know the only place I was scared I never got scared in the south I knew the dangers but when he moved into Chicago and we moved into an apartment I think 16th and Hamelin walk-up apartment and with no lights no heat and I realized we were in a different movement and yeah I was prepared to get killed in the south but I wasn't ready to you know to have a junkie stick a knife in me in the middle of the night coming into that apartment for maybe fifteen or twenty dollars that I had in my pocket and there was it took quite an adjustment but the first week we moved in temperature dropped to about 16 degrees below zero and people came to us to complain that they had no heat and so Martin took up all the money he could and we had almost a spontaneous rent strike they had been talking about rent strikes but to find babies wrapped in newspaper and no heat in 16 degrees below zero we had to start fire the furnaces so we got all the money we could and we got enough coal to get all of the buildings that we were able to get two furnaces work and there was a lawyer by the name of councillor Bill Kunstler that that had a theory about rent strikes and so that was the first economic issue and we call the movement in Chicago the movement to end slums and we defined a slum as an area where there was more money taken out of the community than was put in the community in most communities money comes from without and cycles through and goes back and forth in the slum whatever money is in the slum is taken out of the slum and nobody reinvest in those properties nobody reinvest in those schools in fact I think in Chicago they were spending about two hundred and fifty dollars a year on each black child's education whereas in the suburbs it was $900 a year and so you had an economic disparity causing an educational disparity and it it plunged us into several issues one was the area of poor housing the other was the area of quality education and that you couldn't expect black students to compete with white students when the white students you know had five times as much invested in them and they already had a better family background unemployment we we went to we started a jobs training program that would just prepare people and the people who were in Chicago many of whom were veterans coming back from the war there were people coming up from the south and so we needed a kind of jobs training program we actually got cooperation from Mayor Daley and President Johnson on the jobs training program so we had several programs that were becoming successful fine I mean eventually the slumlords gave up the slum property we bought it and we converted those slum apartments into condominiums with a federal program helping the renovate it and people were able to own a condominium that was you know had heat and central eating and and plumbing and up-to-date modern apartment and their condo fees and their notes were less than their rent had been and they were they they became home owners so all of those programs seemed to work for us at least we demonstrated that they could work the area that the TRO that that Chicago insisted on getting into was open housing and we started marching into communities and Chicago is probably the most segregated city I know he's not only segregated black and white but the Irish the Italians the Polish the Jewish community almost everybody lives in its own Enclave in Chicago and so we were challenging the way Chicago was structured simply by marching people into the middle of the slums at the same time we were still being pulled back to the south in james Meredith decided to have a march in Mississippi and Martin felt we had to divide what we were doing in in Chicago and we could not ignore what was happening in Mississippi so we had a Mississippi March and a Chicago movement and they worked out fairly well together one of the things we did was we took a lot of the gang leaders who were very you know macho big shots in Chicago and we put them on Greyhound buses and we brought them with us down to Mississippi and they didn't have nearly the confidence they they were scared to death in Mississippi and they suddenly began to look at us with a new sense of appreciation because we were much more comfortable with southern segregation and it was a new experience for them but the problem was we also had Martin being pulled by the the student left into the war in Vietnam and so you had almost three things coming together in Chicago pulling the same 50 people with the same half a million dollars and the same leadership in three or four different directions it's it's in an odd place in history I know that dr. King lost a lot of media support and and money support maybe white liberal support going into Chicago because believe it or not a lot of people thought that racism was confined just to the south why were they in Chicago and and so the question is did you lose white liberal support and what was that like and how did you you Chicago to what degree was at a disappointment and to what degree did you feel it was a success when you came out when you well one of the things that guided us and particularly dr. King was and I think bevel was the one that kind of constantly sounded that alarm that Gandhi's biography was experiments with truth my experiments with truth and so that tended to put we knew that fifty guys and a half a million dollars couldn't change everything but we could show that it could be changed and that it could be changed without violence and so our success marker was not in terms of public support or or money but can we demonstrate that these problems can be solved without violence and I think by that standard we we were successful I remember marching through a gage Park and the difference in the South you had maybe a couple hundred at most the riffraff the Klan you know but in Chicago it was ten thousand I mean everybody came out and they we were protected by the police and it put Matt Daly in an awkward position because he was determined to protect our right to march but we were marching into communities of his constituents and they didn't like their idea of ethnic neighborhoods being challenged but so you see cherry bombs and the film's the crowds were far more unruly and I remember this one young lady came up to dr. King just almost spitting in his face causing him all kinds of names and he said you know you're much too beautiful to be so mean and she stopped and she went off on the side and but when we came back through there she came out on the crowd again and went up to him and shook his hand and apologized and said I'm sorry I never should have been so rude but so we had those kinds of things happening that we were challenging age-old traditions but the people weren't bad people and while one group of people were marching against Matt Daly Matt Daley had had maybe the second biggest fundraiser for us at the time of Birmingham a1 was in Los Angeles and Mayor Daley and Mahalia Jackson I had put on a fundraiser for us in Chicago to support our work in Birmingham and Selma and so that was the way non-violence was supposed to work that we were supposed to be able to disagree without being disagreeable and throughout that entire movement we met regularly with Matt Daly and we disagreed but we always kind of came to a new understanding and we remain friends and even supporters because in the Democratic Party Daly was part of the liberal wing I mean after all it was probably the daily machine that help reduce Barack Obama and so we would we never felt enemies like we were were different but we didn't feel that way in the South either the war issue was a problem for everybody and because this was a new constituency for us these were the radical upper-middle class upper class white people mostly who you know I sort of lived life without challenge or dangerous and they wanted to emulate our tactics and and yeah it's it's just a different world when you're a southern sharecropper with no support and when you're you know upper-class privileged kid who's after the demonstrations are over is gonna go into the family business or is guaranteed a life of success and so we were much more comfortable with the poorest of the four then the rich on the left and it was and and of course they were calling us Uncle Tom's and they were making fun of us because we weren't radical enough and we understood their positions but we never became anti-american dr. King would never if you read his Nobel Prize he never said anything critical of the United States of America anywhere we went we went to Vienna to meet with a North Vietnamese and we were much more informed about what was going on there we had a direct relationship with the Buddhist monk thich not Hahn who continually well we still have a relationship with his movement and he invited me to come to join a fast in New York at 9/11 and so there was a spiritual connectivity between all of these movements that we were comfortable with but there were radical elements of violence and anti-american in all of the movements as well and so we were also living at a time when Nelson Mandela was at the top of the terrorist lists you know and we knew Nelson Mandela to be the saint that people who soon discovered he was but back then I remember 60 minutes really tearing into the National Council of Churches for supporting the National Council of Churches of South Africa which was Bishop Desmond Tutu and so we've always been in the middle of a complicated world and I think part of dr. King's genius was that he never forgot that we were all on the same side he didn't have any enemies we had people with whom we differed and I think that actually Jimmy Carter was a part of that movement also and and much of what was happening in Jimmy Carter's life later as he became president he was very much of that same spirit coming at it from the position not only of a Georgia peanut farmer in one of the most racist areas of the state and not being racist but he was also a nuclear engineer who helped Admiral rickover develop the nuclear Navy and I think because of his awareness of the horrors of of nuclear war was determined that he was going to not start a war as president and and and came very close but to our movement when he was governor which was about the same time okay we would like to have just a couple of questions about the Meredith March and because you're marching through Mississippi and Stokely proclaims the black power and it intoxicates the media and precipitates an argument as you're marching along what Stokely told me was that he was trying to he said he was using dr. King and but that he was tired of being nonviolent and he and he thought why did America admire non-violence only in black people and dr. King argued that it was a leadership dr. doctrine and that it was a head of white people so anyway I was his take I'm just he also said that that's when he felt he and dr. King became friends beneath the media portrayal that they were bitter enemy so what do you remember about black power and and the relationship between dr. King and the young snake students on that March well my recollection of the dynamics of the movement at that time one not so much snick and SCLC there was northern and southern there was never any tension between Martin Luther King and John Lewis for instance a me and John Lewis and actually the Black Power movement was more an attempt to take snick from a southerners than it was to challenge well it was also to challenge Martin Luther King's leadership but what I find is that there's a complete difference in the way we were brought up in the south and they were brought up in the north one there was a far more Christian attitude and we never viewed this as black against white and we were trying to redeem the soul of America and there were good people and bad people but it could have been reversed in fact I remember dr. King saying one time too one of a bit of young men who was saying he couldn't forgive white people in this idea for all this and Martin said well I'm sure glad that you're not white you know and he said because you know that we have to deal with people with different backgrounds and differing attitudes and for us this these were always human problems and probably more related to sin in an old-fashioned Christian sense that it was the willfulness and pride of man against the will of God and we would not we never felt that we could sold a claim I always get uncomfortable when we would sing God is on our side that always offends me we have to be on God's side and I think Martin kept that perspective but it was never black and white it was rich and poor young and old it was you know those who were willing to stand up for what was right regardless of how they were born and those who you know could not appreciate and love others who are different I accused Stokely of being just an angry frustrated young man who would have been against anybody who was reasonable and calm and I remember when we were tear gassed in Canton I think he cracked up and started screaming and I was having to calm him down I got tear gas too but I was I was well I was older but the thing about teargas is it reminds you of the fact that you are totally helpless and it frustrates the hell out of you because you can't breathe and you can't talk and you're crying and I mean you humiliated and he kind of cracked up there that that sort of settled the whole argument now that's important for today because with a group of young people just last week it was it suddenly hit me that what's the difference between those of us who are left around and those who had died what happened to the angry young men the Black Panthers I mean the militants of the South who I mean they did and my father taught me when I was four years old and the Nazi Party was on the corner of my house you don't let this racial sickness get you upset this is not your problem this is their problem you don't get mad if you get angry and frustrated in a fight you lose your edge don't get mad get smart say and so I think the ability not to internalize your anger and frustration but to objectify it and deal with it rationally was something that you taught in the South I mean that I was four years old being lectured about understanding sick white people who were Nazis you know I mean and but I had to go past that corner three four times a day to visit an op that live right behind the the German American Bund right when he said though that the relationship between dr. King and and him on that March when the cameras were turned off at night was totally different than what was projected in the media that well Martin was an amazingly tolerance on standing father figure for all of us and he understood Jose's frustrations he understood stokeley's for frustrations but he and he never took it personally and he made a special effort to invite Stokely to come to church and have Coretta when he came had Coretta bring him to his home to dinner and that was the way we sort of dealt with that's the way we dealt with the Blackstone Rangers and you know and the invaders in Mississippi we we embrace them and we tried to give them an understanding of our understanding of their situation we would never judge we were never judging them and it was necessary I think one of the keys to non-violence is you have to find a no-fault solution and a win-win way out and the rivalries between us in SCLC Oh what just as strong as it was between us and snikt in fact sometimes it was stronger and the only time dr. King cussed me out was when I just didn't feel like arguing and they said something very militant and stupid and I said okay let's go if you're not scared I'm not scared and he stopped a meeting and he took me off on the side he said look he said you know that most of us are certifiably insane and he said when people get irrational and emotional like that your job is to kind of be cool and calm things down I said I get tired of being the Uncle Tom he said that's your role he said you have to take the discussion as far to the right as you can to give me enough leverage in between so that I can come down he said I don't mind I don't mind risking my life but I don't want to throw it away some foolishness and for me to cut through the emotion he said everybody has a right to be angry everybody has the right to be frustrated but if you give in to your anger and your frustrations you know you're gonna lose that was a message he got from his father I got from my father as a baby kids don't get that nowadays kids from the north are not prepared for discrimination and they want to blame somebody on it at four we had to take responsibility for dealing with segregation in our own neighborhoods and that was a difference in southern upbringing we also we also dr. King would also say look in order to be segregated this long we had to cooperate with it and a man can't ride your back if you don't bend down and let him and when you straighten up your back he falls to his feet and he becomes possible for you to be brothers but if you're gonna bend over and let him ride your back he's surely gonna do it now Stokely never had those kind of lessons see and he had lived in Harlem he didn't know as many many white people in fact the frustration comes about because people really don't know each other and in the south we knew each other there's nobody that had a more cruel childhood and upbringing than james Bevel awful Zaire Williams a battle never got mad Jose would get mad but he'd come to his senses and [Music] the young people in snick from the north came south thinking they were going to change Mississippi in a summer and they got frustrated when it didn't change we knew that freedom is a constant struggle it's not a sprint it's a marathon it's a lifetime commitment to doing the right thing to make the world a better place and that psychological difference and the ability to kind of try to stay smart and not get mad I mean Ct Vivian was the earliest of the freedom fighters he was he was beaten up and demonstrating and demonstrating in Peoria Illinois in 1947 Ct is 95 and he still I mean he still takes all his lickings with a smile and he's very philosophical about it he's one of the most loving understanding human beings I know and anger eats away at your own soul and it hurts you we started seeing the young Stokely had a heart attack very young and it was his inability to control his anger and frustration so you're killing yourself when you get mad that's why my daddy told me over and over again don't get mad get smart can he slap me in the face like that and and he expected me to duck and dodge but if I got angry and fought back he'd give me a good whop he said when you lose you lose your temper you lose your head you know and I mean that that was lessons beaten into me before kindergarten and kids from the north and kids in the 21st century don't have that and so they think they have a right to be angry being angry is being stupid and they get mad with me when I say that but I'd like to shift talking about dr. King and anger but not not anger there were times when he was given to depression there was a story I believe you told me about him getting depressed in Grenada Mississippi not long after Chicago and that summer September of 66 where he wouldn't get out of bed and I don't know whether it was because of the war or the black power March or Chicago or what but and dr. King and Coretta said that he was conscience driven and some and often given to bouts of depression did did you know what was the pattern and how did you think of that how would how would he get out of it as we hear the truck gone blue do you remember that story in Grenada Mississippi I think Joan Baez had had to go in to sing to him to wake him up I I remember Grenada and I remember his I'd rather say his bouts with conscience I mean as much as he did he always blamed himself for not doing enough and like he was trying to take the blame he led Bobby Kennedy put him on a guilt trip and he was very depressed that that he hadn't been more forceful in his non-violence and that as I wait a minute this is not I mean you not savior the world you know you doing better than anybody else is doing there's no reason for you to feel guilty but he always felt he was not doing enough that he took the burden and blame on himself and [Music] and and those were periods when we he was really just physically exhausted and the only time well actually when he was received word of a Nobel Prize he was in the hospital and there wasn't anything wrong with him except that he got so hopped up and so revved up that you know he couldn't relax at home and the doctor checked him in the hospital basically to slow him down and it was there I think because of his feeling that somehow he wasn't good enough to be the leader so you know he he'd feel guilty about getting a Nobel Prize and that he didn't deserve it and one of the most beautiful scenes I remember was him being in the hospital and Archbishop Hallinan of the Catholic Church coming in to congratulate him on winning the Nobel Prize and I moved away from them and they were talking in Bishop holiday and said well I must be on my way may I give you my blessing and Martin said oh of course and so he made the sign lacrosse and mumbled something in Latin and then he knelt down beside the bed and said may I receive yours I never thought I'd see an archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church getting on his knees to a black Baptist preacher named Martin Luther you know how far have we come I mean and those I think an incident like that would do more to inspire him and rev him up than us trying to convince him that he was alright and he was doing it hurt him when we came out of the meeting with that was probably one of the most despair and times I remember we went to meet with Ambassador Goldberg at the United Nations and Goldberg pretty much agreed with us that the war in Vietnam was not in anybody's interest and when we came out they asked Martin to report on the conversation and he said well we were here at the invitation of Ambassador Goldberg and I think it's more appropriate for him to give the comment on what we discussed and so we started walking away and the guy whom I later had an encounter with that when I was at the UN said whoa did you discuss China and he said no we did and he said well what do you think of China and he said well 800 million people will not disappear because we refused to admit that there is a very simple truth I think the press the next day was the worst we ever had that James Reston in New York Times Washington Post Los Angeles Times Chicago sun-times I mean everybody all of the television stations everybody blasted him he had no business having an opinion about foreign affairs he was a civil rights leader say and his answer was very simple well I'm afraid I can't segregate my life or my conscience but it hurts it hurt him to see people attack him and try to discredit him for a simple honest truth and it was his disappointment in I mean he believed in America these were people he looked up to he admired he had really admired Ralph McGill but when Ralph McGill got brainwashed by Hoover and you know and the war in Vietnam and things like that there was a period when the Ralph McGill would write critical articles about him and his opinions and I think that's what got him depressed he didn't get tired or depressed he sort of got disappointed in America and he took the blame for it that he wasn't good enough he wasn't strong enough and well I think that's sort of what we felt about his determination to go to Memphis mm-hmm that you know that it wasn't necessary the thing I think he had dreamed about from childhood was to be able to Pastor a church like Riverside Church in New York and teach at Union Theological Seminary well I think William Sloane coffin retired and Roux beside Church was vacant for a while and they actually offered him the job as interim pastor when he was about 38 and all of us said look you're entitled to a sabbatical you've been at this for 12 years non-stop and you can take two years as a pastor at Riverside teach anything you want to teach at Union Theological Seminary you come out you just be 40 years old the election will be over and you'd get a new perspective on what you should do with the rest of your life and he wouldn't even consider it he wouldn't even go to him to New York to meet with the selection committee and discuss it although that was what he really wanted to do probably and needed to do we thought people talked often about him saying that he'd like to be Dean of a chapel like Howard Thurman or some like that and dreaming of retiring but what I hear you saying is that that was just a dream that he that the demands of the movement overwhelmed him well that the demands of the movement was so overwhelming but he felt as though there was nobody else that could help him out very much and speaking at the Riverside Church though I mean we can't skip over that speech there was a lot of disagreement within the staff about whether he should give that speech on Vietnam it's not like he hadn't criticized the war but he hadn't come out full-bore the way he did in that in that speech can can you describe the the decision for him to do it why he did it I know there were a lot of people who didn't want him to and then and then that was again when he was disappointed in the media reaction which was as ferocious as it was about that comment on China well all of this happened about the same time that the war in Vietnam heated up we actually have met with Ralph Bunche also and Ralph Bunche had been marching with us in Selma and he said he was sorry he said you're right on Vietnam he said but I'm sorry you came out publicly and he said there's only so much one person can bear and he said the only reason I've survived here is that I've been much more private and I have refused in fact Ralph Bunche tried to turn down the Nobel Prize and give it to the United Nations he didn't want it to be given to him personally and he felt that Martin became far more exposed to enemies by taking on both civil rights and the war issue but he said I cannot segregate my conscience and I can't be for non-violence at home and advocate violence abroad and he said I'm trapped by my own you know beliefs and I refused to give up my beliefs in order to be popular or it was a little riff he used to run about sometimes it's necessary to do things that are neither a popular politic or something that you do it because it's right and and he felt as though he had no no alternative now the difference was that it was a sophisticated difference we didn't want him taking his moral position into an extreme left environment with kids who were kind of anti-american who were communists who were burning American flags and we could not control that and so the argument was not about whether or not he should oppose the war in Vietnam but whether he should allow the Vietnam movement to use him and the compromise that we came to was that if he made his views clear and do it in the context of we started saying Union Theological Seminary and do it with men of statue and eminence and scholars like rabbi Abram as it has all Henry Steele comander noted historian and dr. John Bennett who was president of Union Theological Seminary so we went to them and tried to set up this forum for him with them they insisted that they would support him but people were so interested they moved it from the rivers I mean to the Riverside Church from the Union seminary Chappell and and then he had an opportunity to state his views clearly the difficulty though was that even within our staff we had I don't know what you call it it was sort of righteous indignation there were some people well I don't know how to put it but it showed up in the speech one of the lines was that the United States is the greatest purveyor of islands in the world today well some of us didn't want him to be that hard we didn't want it to be an anti-american speech we wanted to be a pro peace on earth speech and that was the only speech that I think there was much collaboration on and he allowed a number of people to give him drafts and then he put them together ultimately it was all true the question was did he need to be the one who said it and I think that that was one of the things that J Edgar Hoover used to try to turn the government completely against him yeah the young and the reaction within the staff in reaction within the press was was just as harsh as it was the comment about China in a way I mean Ralph Bunche from you that spoke said he agreed with dr. king about the war in private I mean he actually attacked dr. King in public yeah for making that speech after saying the opposite to you in private so it must have been very painful the the harshness of the public response well you know the same guy who asked him that question asked me walking across the street to the UN when I was ambassador he said you don't think South Africa is a legitimate government do you I said that's all I said and he wrote the headline in The Daily News Young says South African government illegitimate and I wouldn't back up but I was I was not and I think that's one of the temptations that we're drawn into and I don't know whether there is well the only ethic in the press it seems is ratings and so the dedication the truth sometimes is slippery and I think I think that's one of the things that's wrong with the country now that we we have people who are fighting to get conflict and and and they're not really seeking truth they're seeking ratings and and Martin probably was one of the first victims of that well he probably wasn't any more of a victim of that and that's what I have to remind myself that he was the same kind of victim that Thomas Jefferson was and that Abraham Lincoln was and that Franklin Roosevelt was that when you'd said something new in fact he used to say remember this is a tenday nation and he said there's a 30-day news cycle the first ten days no matter what you say and no matter how true you I know it to be you're absolutely wrong you're stupid you're crazy you're being bribed a paid for something they said they'll say anything to get against you said but the ten ten second ten days if you keep on saying the same thing they'll say well maybe he's got a point but he's going about it in the wrong way and then the third ten days they'll say well we were gonna do this all along and we would have gotten it done if he hadn't been raising all this fuss so he said you'll never get credit for the truths of your work but we're not doing it for credit we're doing it because it's right and it doesn't matter who gets the credit that's philosophical with it with an edge of humor and could you talk a little bit just before lunch about dr. King's personal side his sense of humor his practical joking preaching about funerals and you know sitting around with the preachers book I know you must have been part of that on many evenings and observing it well I think much of the time I was the victim of the kind of you know humor that he would always try to take I mean if he felt somebody was sensitive he wouldn't pick on them but he would take something that somebody else said and I did and blame it on me or he would talk about people in the distant past but all preachers have a a volume of life experience and stories and people in the past in their lives and one of the ways they entertain themselves is by not in a malicious way but but pointing out the you know the humor in the poverty and suffering that we face and he would make you laugh at your own death and he would say in fact when we went to Birmingham the CBS reporter who had been with us since since Montgomery said and the look I got to keep a camera on Martin he said no you don't like us around with the cameras but if if if he gets shot and I don't have a picture of it I'll lose my job and Martin heard that and he said well I'm not worried about that but somebody's gonna probably have to give their life a Birmingham he said it's probably gonna be one of you guys jumping in the front of the camera trying to get your picture taken that will take the bullet that's meant for me but don't worry I think I can preacher into heaven and then he would start preaching your funeral and he would do a very sadistic caricature of all of your faults and foibles and things that you would never want said about you in public and he'd weave it into a sermon and quite often he'd have a similar demon from the Bible who had the same problems and by the time he got through he had everybody laughing at what was a life in this situation mostly his life and so he was prepared to die but he was also determined that his death and his life would have meaning and I think that's what he was wrestling with with Vietnam and Chicago and you know and the Poor People's Campaign he was really aware of the fact that we had not hardly raised the issue of poverty but the reason was if you talked about economics in the 60s it was automatically something of the case it was automatically assumed that you were talking about the redistribution of wealth and that made you a communist and so we we really didn't talk about money and we didn't talk about we talked about jobs we talked about education we talked about human rights and but it was very hard to raise economic questions also none of us were numbers were much good at economics in fact I would say that even today the greatest dilemma that's facing the world in which we live is that we still have rather nationalistic provincial views of how the money works in the world in a global economy that's basically run by computers and cellphones and not by the Congress I mean III like Bernie Sanders but you can't have socialism and cellphones you know I mean the government cannot control wealth when you can transfer wealth on your cellphone and I mean we have not gotten an economic understanding that is capable of dealing with the complexities of the 21st century technology thank you but that was already true for him and later when I went to Vietnam looking at jobs was it going overseas the truth of it was we did with Vietnam sending letting them make Nikes then we did get in 50,000 Americans killed and [Music] that was not part of the understanding of Cold War we've moved a little beyond that but not much not much ya ask you one more personal question before lunch about dr. King's complex personality because you've talked about you said earlier a nice thing about you have to get over about money and he didn't care about money wasn't worth very much when he died so he was austere even to the point of you know Coretta complaining about it that I'm not taking care of the family and and yet at the same time he was he dressed he was very fastidious about his dress and his use of language and big words so he was kind of a he was austere but he was princely at the same time humble print so how do you put those two things together well actually that's the definition of a good Baptist preacher and you have to be well we got we got him I mean we walked around the rural South Finch suit and tie and snick walked around and the flip-flops blue jeans but people the poorest of the poor in the South wanted they saw it as a lack of respect if a preacher showed up in church without a shirt and died and they would say if you were going to a white church you put on a shirt and I see and so we didn't we were caught in a double standard and the way we lived in the world and if he was going to New York to meet the president when he met with Miss Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi he all addressed the same way see he ought not dressed down to make her feel comfortable she didn't want that and so those were those are the kinds of questions that young people want to be bass sidious and purest about but you know I I always hit him because before when I was still struggling in the Congress and his mayor there were a lot of city kids that went right straight to Wall Street and that was not bad but they had they had already had the educational opportunity they were privileged young people they gave their lives for one summer and then they went back to their trust funds and [Music] but I mean we were committed to this movement for life and it didn't matter what title we had you know we had to be fairly consistent with our own lifestyles but it I mean it carried over I mean Tom Bradley told me that I could bring the Olympics to Atlanta but I couldn't make any money on it and so you know we brought the Olympics we raised two and a half billion dollars but nobody in my family you know could could make any money on it we couldn't be seen to be profiting by the movement but it didn't mean that you had to wear sackcloth and ashes quite like Gandhi but the truth of it was we were great discount shoppers I think we discovered what is now KNG well I would buy suits in New Orleans from the hospital factory the rejects for $15 every time we went to Baltimore dr. Levi Watkins from Johns Hopkins would take Martin to some factory outlet and buy him two or three suits you know so it was I mean it was our friends and people wanting us to be respectable and look good but you know that never became part of the that was not a problem of ours just a couple more things on Vietnam after the Riverside speech there are a couple of references saying that the Vietnam War began to haunt dr. King images and things like that do you have instances of that would you say that that's accurate no I think that the thing that that haunted dr. King was not so much images of the war but the the tragedy that the war was bringing to our country he like Lyndon Johnson and he and Lyndon Johnson had a conversation the week before Lyndon Johnson decided not to run and he was quite surprised that he was not running and it I mean he saw I think the front one of the phrases that was the bombs we drop on Vietnam are exploding will explode at home in unemployment and inflation and I mean he said that quite often but nobody ever picked that up and that was the kind of thing that bothered him that he felt that well we went to Vienna to meet with the North Vietnamese and really all they wanted to do was sit down and talk but they didn't they were not going to give up and you know when I went to Vietnam and realized how little we knew I mean that was the thing that we began to realize that they had no understanding of these people and when I was at the UN I had to intervene in a fight between Vietnam in China in the UN and it it was an indication to me that there was never much that both China China was afraid more afraid of Russia than they were of us Vietnam was more afraid of China than they were of us and we could have had relations with China Vietnam and North Korea if we had just known a little more about the country and the people in the history nobody hardly knows that the North Vietnamese were really educated by Presbyterian missionaries and they fought as a militia against the Japanese in the war with Japan when Japan surrendered we were more comfortable with the surrender Japanese than with this radical militia that they just assumed was Chinese and they drove drove over to China they label them communists but the founder of that movement was basically the son of a Presbyterian missionary and the Presbyterian Church in South Korea is you know totally committed to finding ways for reunification but they can't say that to us and so it's just that we were making decisions in the parts of the world that we didn't know anything about and we were applying these European concepts of Cold War and what did they call it domino theory they just were not true it's you know it's sort of like Bush and Cheney didn't seem to understand that she and suni don't get along and have not gotten along for 1,500 years so we thought we felt and we knew that somebody had gotten us into Wars where we didn't need to be and we were hurting ourselves and destroying any possibility of yeah dr. King was worried that that we were hurting ourselves and that the consequences of the war the returning veterans the inflation unemployment the the the loss of the White House because of the confusion around Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey we felt that we were moving in the right direction but actually that 68 election is that right yeah that 68 election was the beginning of the end of the movements that we were making an effort to lead no we had to regroup and we did regroup a couple years later when I I got to Congress I tried to continue some of those themes both in Vietnam and one of our first votes was to stop the money that was going to bomb Vietnam and that may be led to the peace talks that Kissinger had with China and but I think he was just he was realizing that he was running out of gas that the attacks and the criticisms on him were getting more and more vicious and they will clumsy and they were awkward say and I mean it well he just a couple of years ago I found a wire running into my house you know we put up a fence and we were trying to get the gate program and turned out that the wire was running to a house about six houses down the street from me which is now owned by one of my wife's sorority sisters but whenever they talk really I always have trouble on the line until we find that line was running down there and we suspect that my that might have been a place that the FBI was monitoring our neighborhood from and none of this I mean everything the FBI was doing to hurt us was very clumsy and I think it didn't do so much to it could not stop the movement but it made us question the validity you wonder whether this country was so sick that it couldn't be saved and the country run by j edgar Hoover was too sick to be saved but it's different and I think we have seen we've seen significant differences in the world since then I hate to see the FBI I mean I really liked Comey called me used to take the FBI agents out to the Martin Luther King memorial and I mean here was a guy who really wanted to do right now now he's confused but the confusion really now is the same as it was we still have little or no understanding we have a Cold War mentality in the press and Congress and yet it's probably much better to have Russian money building trumps hotels dollars and then building bombs and and and we have not I mean he shouldn't be doing it as president probably but it's it's such a complex world in which we live and he understood it but the smartest people that he knew didn't want to get it they wanted things to go back to the good old days which we knew was impossible and I think that that kind of frustration worried you took a toll yes how today because of the FBI and so many of those attacks there are still a lot of people who use the FBI's accusations about dr. King's personal life to personal flaws to discredit his work how do you answer that I don't you don't I don't I mean I guess that well you know let him who is without sin cast the first stone and I think that we were never running a program of personal piety we were running a program of social and political and economic justice and I mean we'd be in a whole lot of trouble if you know if we had to judge the teachings of the Catholic Church all Protestant churches by the behavior of its priests and ministers yes while we are yet sinners that Christ died for us and it's one of the things that makes it possible for us to understand the difficulties and weaknesses in other people is that we're aware of them in ourselves and it's being able to love each other when we're unlovable and even in the best of families and best of marriages that's a recurring theme so on a different topic just dr. Kings temperament and I mean did you consider him I know he's incredibly ballast and and and sturdy but did you consider him an emotional person did you see him cry often I never saw him cry at all think I saw him maybe shed a tear when Lyndon Johnson was speaking in Selma but that was nothing emotional I mean it was emotional but he never gave in to his emotions and I guess the the things we used to worry about most was his fatigue and that whenever he'd get really rundown he'd almost have to find an excuse you know to confine him to bed one of the ways he escaped that though was to take a vacation to Jamaica but even there he'd wake up at five or six in the morning and he'd write for two hours before breakfast then he'd have breakfast and he'd go back to work and work to a lunch and he might take a nap for a little while after lunch and work in the afternoon and maybe go out for dinner at night but still come back and do some more and Ralph used to say that he had a war on sleep and that he was a kind of workaholic where he he was never content that he was he was driven by a kind of a need for perfection and he was always feeling that he wasn't doing his best there was one story and during the Poor People's Campaign jumping a little ahead from Mark's Mississippi where that he became over overcome by the poverty of people coming into one of the meetings to recruit for the Poor People's Campaign I don't know that you were there you know when they were hopping around on the plane and there's no marks and some women women came in with malnourished children or something and he was moved by it well I think that he was he was always very sensitive to the pool but I never saw him break down and cry about it he was an extremely disciplined person emotionally and rationally I mean probably the most emotional I might have seen him and he didn't shed any tears then was at the been to the mountaintop speech and we got him out of bed where he was sick with a fever and he came to that church thinking that he was just going to make remarks and he had asked Ralph to give the major speech and then he got up and he gave that speech as though he knew that the end was near I didn't think that was the case because I had heard him give that speech before but it was in always situations where it was in Demopolis Alabama during the time of of Selma and it was in Philadelphia Mississippi during the Mississippi March when we had just had a meeting with the sheriff's and and not a meeting we had a demonstration outside the courthouse where the sheriff's actually had killed the three civil rights workers and a truck tried to run our demonstration off the road and it was I mean he was constantly aware that every day could be his last and the way he dealt with it was proudly to push on harder and not stop and so he was he was always physically run down hmm can you tell us about I believe it was a decision or a debate at airlie house about whether to undertake the poor people what became the Poor People's Campaign or or stick with or launch a larger movement against Vietnam this is in the fall of 67 basically just the origins of the Poor People's Campaign because well actually I don't think there was ever an either/or we had made that he had made the decision really in 65 that he had to be against the war and he made that decision knowing that the board of SCLC was not going to agree with him and so he made that as a personal rather than an institutional opposition so there was never any question about his opposition to the war it was Mary and Edelman brought four sharecroppers to SCLC who convinced us that we had to do something about the war on poverty and what she mean the thing that was that these were four men in their forties and none of them had had a job in 10 or 15 years but they all wanted to work but they couldn't work because the government was paying the landowners not to grow food and fiber and the landowners were using this to drive the sharecroppers off the land and basically in Mississippi remember they were giving people bus tickets to go north and and and he saw that as a challenge that we had to make meet but he we really didn't know how and I think we were still believers in the New Deal but we were already experiencing a backlash against the New Deal that has continued to this day and so we were his speeches were things like everybody's against welfare but only welfare for the poor they don't mind farm subsidies it's all right for big multinational farm companies to get welfare it's all right for the oil companies to have an oil depletion allowance which is a welfare for the oil companies and I mean he had a whole list of contradictions between how we're willing to aid the rich and we talk about the laziness of the poor and the fact that they don't want to work you know and I think he had committed to that what I remember about an early house was I mean his sense of humor because we were up there on that balcony and we were being served iced tea and lemonade by a group of students from University of Virginia in white coats and we were looking out over the land and there was a tract out that more in the grass it's a beautiful scenery and he says you know I can't blame white folks he said this plantation system looks pretty good from up here you know we were rocking back a nicety and he he had a I mean he had a very good sense of humor laughing had things like that and I think that that what got him that I didn't realize was that he was constantly aware of the imminence of death and he used to say that to us all the time you know you gonna die and you can never say what you die I mean how you're gonna die when you're gonna die away you're gonna die your only choice is what you give your life for and I've heard him say that 40 or 50 times in different situations and he was warning us but I think at the same time he was reminding himself that whenever his end came he wanted it to be for the purpose of the least of these guys children and that's why when we tried to stop him from going to Memphis we did not want him to go to Memphis at all there was no need the strike was gonna go on they had a big Union staff running it a number of pastors were supporting them and we wanted him to go on in New York but he got up at 6 o'clock in the morning and we'd had a meeting I think with Harry and John Canas dick Hatcher and myself on how you take the energy of the movement and get it into politics and we broke up about 11:00 11:30 and I told him that you know you need to go ahead and sleep so about noon tomorrow we don't have to be in Washington until you know 6 7 o'clock when we catch it through a black shuttle and have an easy day you need the rest and he said no I'm gonna catch the 6 o'clock flight to Memphis I said but nobody's going with you said Rob is gonna meet me there and Bernard Lee and Martin went by themselves the Memphis to a March that we had nothing to do with no pre-planning and and it got disrupted and it was almost like he walked into a trap that had been set for him that's the March that turned violent on that's the market where loud where the invaders said they had been paid to disrupt the March and when they were angry with the preachers not with him it's a very complicated situation but it's one that I think gave him the end that he wanted I mean if he was going to in the March and in his life he wanted it to be with the likes of the sanitation workers of Memphis because that that aligned him with the for all over the world and that's what we were trying to do and people forget that he was trying to make the Poor People's Campaign a multiracial opportunity we had 23 different ethnic groupings Native American Hispanic two or three different kinds of Hispanic groups poor blacks poor whites up of Appalachian whites whites from big cities White's from down in the swamps Louisiana and it was an attempt to organize the nation to be more sensitive to the poorest of the poor this is not widely known the meeting at the church on I think it was March 14th is this less than a month before he died to try to get those groups that poor people that had never been together together what was that I know there was a lot of staffers when I interviewed Hosea he said he thought it was terrible to take his little budget and give some of it to white people I know there was controversy about it but it's not widely known as a witness to that meeting where he's trying to bring those gorillas is it like it the meeting was not about opposition to giving working with white people Hosea was working with white people Jose the scope project was overwhelmingly white students from the north and and and Jose had probably one of the most integrated staffs in SCLC that was part of the image that he liked to pursue but the problem was that we were tired and we knew he was tired and what we wanted him to do was to accept the job at Riverside Church a sabbatical for him would have been a sabbatical for us we would have had two years to spend time with our families to reassess where we were politically and economically and we knew what we wanted when we went to desegregate the buses desegregate the lunch counters or get the right to vote we had almost 50 years of legal precedent already established by the n-double-a-cp but even as late as last summer one young white people mostly started talking about Occupy Wall Street I said what for what do you want what you know they had no answers we do not yet have a comprehensive answer to how to deal with the question of economic inequity in the on the planet or in these United States I was at a meeting yesterday though that's trying to deal with that it's Operation Hope and Jesse Jackson showed up in Memphis with John Bryant and he said something that was shocking to me he said you know it may be that this is the continuation of our movement operation hope and financial literacy may have some of the answers to poverty and he said it's like the Apostle Paul never got to meet Jesus but he produced half the books in the New Testament and it was almost Jessie blessing the economic movement which up to now has been seen as well not seen as relevant to race but I have always contended and still will contend that Ferguson Missouri is not a race problem it's an economic problem the problem is that st. Louis is in a depression and they move people out of pruitt-igoe housing project in the suburb with no jobs but that's not race that was that's making urban economics work now we did the same thing here we move people out of a downtown project into a southern suburb but we sort of fouling it up with a Porsche appliance and so in the Olympics when we first move people they had a tough time for almost a decade but in the last beginning of 2006 into 2016 that was one of the fastest growing counties in the United States economic economically and because we have we have followed up our urban problems with suburban strategies that help to distribute the wealth and so as we move people out of the cities we don't move them out there and strand them but we try to provide jobs and the people who are coming into the cities are also doing it on their own voluntarily how long that lasts I don't know but we're in a period of technical social and economic upheaval Bernard Lafayette told us about a dr. King went on a mini hunger strike to try to get the staff to be more devoted to the Poor People's Campaign do you remember anything like that well he went on periodic vests but he never made much out of them and I don't quite remember him I mean he was fasting usually to try to make sure that he was doing what his conscience required I don't think he ever fasted to change our minds he did give us a good cussing out about not being supportive of him and it was the only time I saw him angry at the whole staff usually was just me that he got upset with and but this is during Memphis this was in between the first March and now going back to Memphis right you've forgotten the simple truths of witness or something like that he just went off on people mm-hmm he did and was in his office at Ebenezer and he he cussed us out got up and walked out and we went behind him trying to reassure him and but he just he just went on off but again I was not apologetic I mean I thought that it was wrong to take on another movement in the case state we win say and that we could not save the world ourselves by ourselves and I think I had gotten to the point where I really thought we will beyond the dangers he'd already been stabbed and jailed and beaten and everything I'm and he'd won a Nobel Prize and other than J Edgar Hoover we were you know doing extremely well with almost everybody on the planet and and so I didn't see the urgency minute I thought it was okay to take a sabbatical when you're 38 years old you don't have to die at 39 you know wait till 45 say or 55 but it was sort of I think he never he used to say that some of us are not gonna see it lived to be 50 so you better live good now and live a righteous life and he was constantly and it was almost as though he saw death as an escape and that he could not escape the way we wanted him to escape he couldn't put it off he couldn't run from it and it's I mean it was more for me like Jesus disciples trying to keep him from going to Jerusalem and you know could you talk about your your testimony in court on on the last day the transcript of that testimony is an awful lot about non-violence you were there all afternoon and then came back for the pillow fight you know I don't remember my testimony I remember being in the courtroom trying to convince a very good court with the help of the Justice Department that we should and could be able to be able to maintain a non-violent March once our staff was there we found that the young men who had disrupted the March were very repentant and they were willing to work with us but they didn't have any understanding of what we were trying to do and the kinds of things they asked us to give them for our help we didn't have I mean they wanted something like three cars station wagons to do voter registration we said well you know we bought 10 cars and 65 and I don't think we bought any sense we we find a way to get our own cars but they had a kind of a pimpish mentality that they wanted to get rich helping the war and we said it doesn't work that way but they were coming around and I think we probably could have worked with them and many of them did continue to work in human rights causes but when we won the permission to March and I came back to the Lorraine Motel I hadn't talked to him all day in fact I didn't even talk to him before I went to court I was trying to let him get as much sleep as possible so I got the court you know 8 o'clock in the morning and and I had touch base with him all day but I was on the witness stand most of that day and I really don't remember what it was about except that I think I was able to answer all of the questions that they challenged us with and we got permission to stage the March the next few days and when I got back he was you know childish and giddy and cussed me out to report at me I threw it back he was you know where you been but it was the happiest I had seen him in a long time his brother was there ralph was there you know it was all his in a circle and they had been almost having a Last Supper because somebody had brought in a whole load of catfish and he was just extremely relaxed and comfortable and playful and when he started beating me with the pillow you know I kind of people II fought back but everybody else picked up pillows and they were it was like a bunch of ten year olds and so I felt I ended up down on the floor between the two beds and they piled all the pillows up on me in and then settle back and just about that time Billy Kyle's knocked on the door and said look you all do it my wife sounds about 6 o'clock she's got dinner waiting come on what do you I've been looking for you say and that was and so he jumped up and went upstairs to put on a shirt and tie but his last moments on earth were amongst the happiest that he had had the long time I know you must be asked an awful lot about the last day and your reaction and all of that but what do you carry with you about that last time no well that my first reaction was to be mad with him you got us in all his hell now you go in heaven leaving nothing L what why don't you take those with you and and I realized that he if anybody deserved a rest he did and that was the only way he was gonna get her he could not stop and his last breath was going to be trying to say something about justice mercy and peace on earth and good will to all men women and children but I I was panicked to know how all we followed and it well we were not able to stay together without him and the movement began to fragment and I ended up running for Congress because nobody else wanted to run and it was Harry Belafonte really nobody even asked me I was trying to get him to raise some money for SCLC and he turned around he just ignored me and called his wife and said can you get Sidney Poitier and Lena Horne and maybe Alan King and we're gonna have to do a benefit and I thought it was a benefit for SCLC and he said no and he's running for Congress I said wait a minute I that's not my role he said it is now and but I don't know I have seen the kind of camaraderie in South Africa in Zimbabwe and Nigeria but it always comes with the same same tensions and even Gandhi was killed by one of his own disciples for adopting a Muslim child and so the complexity of good and evil in this world is going to always be with us I don't know that anybody struggle with it anymore or did any better than Martin King in my lifetime and but he always said we've come a long long way but we still got a long way to go thank you you say the movement couldn't stay together without him are these all those people what about the struggle to affirm non-violence in the wake of it because I think the popular perception in the wake of it well that's not true it's not true that non-violence vanished then violence began to adopt different forms Jesse Jackson and bevel and Bernard Lafayette continued to follow up on the slums problems the education problems Jesse introduced operation push which was a a jobs integration of private sector Hosea continued to work on voter registration across the south and I think we probably by the end of that decade we probably had more black elected officials in the Old South than we did in any part of the north and [Music] between our work non-violence and football basketball and business we probably are doing far better in the south than I ever imagined we could this quick I never thought the thing was go this far and that right now I'm almost afraid they've gone too far that I don't want to leave white brothers and sisters behind and I thought of that in the last election when I heard that the Klan was getting out the vote for Donald Trump and I said you know these are the Klan in 1964 was deputized by the sheriff and one of the contributions to my life was to give me a good beating and I said now that was one of the finest days of my life I think that sort of gave me a kind of credential that let me go on to be congressman and mayor and UN and so I look on that day not as a problem but that was a test of my manhood that I passed I said now the problem is that these Klansmen who out here looking for something in Donald Trump which I don't think is there I mean I don't think he's deliberately catering to racism but I think he's I think they're looking to him for help and I hope they don't get betrayed but in case they do get betrayed my foundation has been trying to work on some things that we can work on in the south and in the cities along the Mississippi River that we'll still deal with poverty maybe one family at a time but I think we did a pretty fair job with Atlanta and my running for mayor of Atlanta was to continue to poor people's campaign and we got a lot of people out of poverty growing the economy in Atlanta and we financed it not with government funds but with private funds and we put Atlanta at the center of a global economy through our airport and we financed it from Wall Street and we brought in the Olympics and we had a profitable Olympics with no government and everything we do we have at least 40% minority and female participation in every contract and so I think we've made a contribution toward the eradication of poverty by producing in fact Maynard Jackson and I used to argue about which one of us had generated the most millionaires black and female in our times as mayor and neither one of us was concerned about getting rich but we were concerned about in fact maintenance into poverty that went into politics because Martin Luther King got killed and so we saw politics and I think we saw that as much in Jimmy Carter as we did in Barack Obama and I think Jimmy Carter was far more a product of the civil rights movement and he followed the non-violence and not a single person was killed no soldier was killed by any other soldier no soldier killed anybody during this for four years Barack Obama came out of the Chicago movement and the Harvard University movement and but I think that that that his motivation and the support for him also can be traced back to Martin Luther King and our movement but we still have not been able to get those northern and southern movements together I asked question you've mentioned in a number of speeches about I don't know whether you were quoting King or these are your speeches about wandering in the wilderness as a metaphor for the last years over for the trying to find applications for non-violence or what's your what's the mean no I've seen a for I think that that was dr. King's metaphor for the period of segregation he said we have come out of the slavery of Egypt and we have wandered in the wilderness of separate but equal and we're about to move into the promised land of creative integration and I don't know whether I'll get there but my people will get to the promised land and I think that was his metaphor I think that's appropriate for him a little too apocalyptic to me for me the promised land even for the Israelis has continued to be a place of struggle for peace and prosperity and you know that I got dragged into that against my will by Moshe Dayan and Simone Paris and the Palestinians I was prepared to take on the problems of Africa and but I wanted President Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to keep the Middle East off my platform at the UN I wasn't able to do that but the problems we have that Martin thought about and lived for I'll still with us and I don't think I don't think we I don't even believe that wherever Barton is beyond this place of time and space there's no rest for the wicked and the righteous don't need it and somewhere he's struggling you know beyond this place in time and space and so I just think that life is a a continued creation is continuous and it doesn't stop I have a little globe that somebody gave me on my desk and I liked it because every time I ran back and look at it it's moved from one place to another and it continues to turn very slowly and it reminds me that we will never have well there's no rest for the wicked and the righteous don't need it

Channel: Kunhardt Film Foundation

Views: 126,807

Keywords: Andrew Young Interview, Martin Luther King Jr's Confidant, Andrew Young, martin luther king, martin luther king jr, martin luther king jr., civil rights, many lives of andrew young, andrew young emory university, mayor andrew young, civil rights movement, ambassador young, malcolm x and dr. king, civil rights act, civil rights legacy, dr. martin luther kings, Martin luther king jr written speech

Id: ABK6L8Abr2E

Length: 152min 9sec (9129 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 01 2018