Resources for Teachers and Students on Andrew Young
Prepare: The Reverend Andrew Young has served as
everything from a pastor to the president of the National
Council of Churches (NCC), from a US congressman to Ambassador
to the United Nations to the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia.
Through it all, he has been one of the leading figures of
the civil rights movement in the United States. His biography
can be found on the NCC website at http://www.ncccusa.org/about/young.html.
Read:
Andrew Young's Architects
of Peace essay is excerpted from his book, An Easy Burden:
The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America.
In it, he examines the deterioration of values in contemporary
society, at the same time criticizing society's willingness
to tolerate poverty.
Explore: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
SCLC, was founded in 1957, with Martin Luther King, Jr.,
as its first president, as an outgrowth of the Montgomery
Bus Boycott. Such civil-rights luminaries as Ralph Abernathy,
Jesse Jackson, and Andrew Young were all participants in
the conference in its early years, with Young serving as
a staff member from 1961-1970. The SCLC still exists, and
is concerned with such issues as voter registration, youth
development, health care, conflict resolution and nonviolence
training. Their website can be found at http://sclcnational.org/nonprofit/sclc/.
Write: In his Architects of Peace essay, Andrew
Young writes, "The young people that marched in Birmingham
had far fewer material comforts than almost any young American
today. But they were far richer in spiritual resources."
Is that true? Would today's youth be capable of political
action at the same level as the young people who were involved
in the civil rights movement of the 1960s? Would they be
capable of the same sort of activism that characterized
the peace movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s? Andrew
Young claims that the youth of the 1960s "believed
they were children of God and that gave them the strength,
courage, and discipline to overturn segregation." Is
it different today? Write a three-to-five page reflection
on these questions, and speculate on what it would take
to mobilize youth politically in today's culture.
Extend: As part of their Oral Histories project,
the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, an affiliate
of the University of Texas, has archived an interview with
Andrew Young. The transcript can be found at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/YoungA/YoungA.asp.
Additional Resource: Andrew Young serves as a public
affairs professor of policy studies at Georgia State University,
where the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies functions
as one of the University's six colleges. The Young School's
research, which covers an array of areas from urban unemployment
through environmental concerns to international studies,
can be reviewed at http://aysps.gsu.edu/research/index.htm.
Biography of Andrew
Young
