Important New MS-NBC Documentary on Former Congressmember, U.N. Ambassador, and Civil Rights Activist Andrew Young

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched the premiere of a documentary on Andrew Young called Andrew Young: The Dirty Work. Andrew Young was born in New Orleans on March 12, 1932, went to Howard University (the most significant of the historically Black colleges and universities; among its many illustrious graduates were Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris), got a doctorate of divinity from a Northern seminary named Dillard in Connecticut, and was assigned to preach at a church in Marion, Alabama. He’d grown up admiring Jesse Owens and had dreamed of being an Olympic athlete himself, but the leaders of his church told him that either he took the assignment to pastor the church in Marion or they’d have to close it. While in Marion he met his first wife, Jean Childs (they stayed together until she died of cancer in 1994 and he remarried to Carolyn McClain two years later), and became interested in Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of achieving social change without resorting to violence. In 1960 Young joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization formed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to advance the cause of civil rights and equality for African-Americans without violence. Young became a personal assistant to King, and the title of this documentary came from the way King assigned him to do the “dirty work” of keeping the movement going administratively. Young was often criticized for not participating in civil disobedience and getting himself arrested along with King and the other SCLC leaders, to which he responded that someone had to stay outside and be a liaison between the leaders who had been arrested and the supporters outside as well as the media. Young finally lost his arrest virginity in Saint Augustine, Florida, when he tried to intervene between police and a group of Black children who were doing a pretend protest march. The police went ahead and arrested the kids, and took Young into custody as well.

Young was active in the 1963 confrontation in Birmingham, Alabama in which racist police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor turned fire hoses on nonviolent Black protesters and created images that shocked the world. He also took part in the protests in Selma, Alabama in 1965 that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Blacks to participate in the electoral process relatively equally until its gradual step-by-step dismantlement by the radical-Right revolutionary majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court. And Young was with King when he was killed; they’d literally had a pillow fight in King’s room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee just minutes before King stepped out on the balcony and got shot to death. King’s murder derailed his plans for a “Poor People’s Campaign” which involved a mule train traveling by wagon to Washington, D.C. and staging a camp-out to create a so-called “Resurrection City.” This was King’s idea to bring back the Black and white constituencies that had won the great victories of the civil rights movement only to splinter under the influence of so-called “Black Power” activists like Stokely Carmichael (seen here in archival clips), who not only rejected the doctrine of nonviolence but actively discouraged white participation in the movement. They took overly seriously the writing of Martinique-born pan-African activist Frantz Fanon, who said, “The liberation of oppressed people must be the work of the oppressed people themselves.” The Black Power advocates seized on this idea and declared that the liberation of oppressed people must only be the work of oppressed people themselves, which sounded good in theory but ignored the reality that African-Americans are an oppressed minority and their only hope for equality was, among other things, winning the goodwill of sympathetic white people.

As King got older he became convinced that African-American oppression was just a part of a broader system of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, and the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign was to dramatize this and build a coalition of poor people of all colors. After King’s death the Poor People’s Campaign went ahead as scheduled but without his charismatic leadership and appeal to white Americans, and it soon degenerated into a rather squalid campground whose political point was largely lost. (In a way the Poor People’s Campaign was a forerunner of the Occupy movement of the early 2010’s.) After King’s death, Young drifted for a bit until singer and activist Harry Belafonte convinced him that the next logical step for the movement and its staff was to start running for elective office themselves. Accordingly he ran for Congress in 1970 and lost, largely due to a bizarre statement he made on camera that he wouldn’t mind seeing the destruction of Western civilization if that would mean a better replacement that would achieve true equality for all people. He tried again in 1972 and won, serving until 1977 when newly elected President Jimmy Carter appointed Young ambassador to the United Nations. Young helped broker Carter’s effort to get Israel and Egypt to recognize each other and arranged a transfer to Black rule in Zimbabwe, nèe Rhodesia. But he touched the third rail of American politics when in 1979 he met secretly with Zuhdi Labib Terzi, who’d been appointed U.N. representative of a putative Palestinian state, and thereby alienated Israel. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance gave Carter an ultimatum – either Young would resign or Vance would – and Carter, apparently to his later regret, chose Vance over Young. In 1981, on the urging of many of his associates, including Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta, Young ran for Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia on a platform of increasing investment in Atlanta, making the city a banking center, and ensuring that women and people of color were given a fair chance at the income these investments would generate.

In 1990 Young, after losing a Democratic primary for the governorship of Georgia (a story not told in this documentary), headed the Atlanta Olympic Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games, which Atlanta won over the early favorite, Athens, Greece (the sentimental choice because Athens had been the site of the first modern Olympics in 1896, 100 years earlier). Young headed the Olympic Committee and was in that job when a terrorist planted a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park which went off, killing two people and injuring about 100 others. Young had just left Centennial Park when the bomb exploded, along with most of the crowd that had attended a concert there, and the incident became notorious because Richard Jewell, a security guard who had spotted the bomb just before it went off, was accused of planting it. The actual bomber turned out to be Eric Rudolph, a white terrorist who set off three subsequent bombs in Atlanta and Birmingham before he was finally caught in North Carolina in 2003. Former FBI executive Chris Swecker, who participated in the case, recalled that Rudolph’s motives were what’s become the all too typical rag-bag of Right-wing terrorists: “He had borrowed ideas from a lot of different places and formed his own personal ideology. He clearly was anti-government and anti-abortion, anti-Gay, ‘anti’-a lot of things. The bombings really sprang from his own unique biases and prejudices. He had his own way of looking at the world and didn’t get along with a lot of people.”

Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was an unusual documentary about this sort of person because it didn’t feature any talking heads speaking about Young: just a steady narration by Young himself and various archival clips of people who featured prominently in his life, including Martin Luther King. It was divided into two sections; the first hour dealt with his work with King and ended with King’s assassination, and the second started with the 1996 Atlanta bombing and proceeded backwards to tell the story of Young’s political career. It avoided any depiction of what Young did after the 1996 Olympics, including serving as president of the National Council of Churches from 2000 to 2001, and working with a controversial group that attempted to whitewash Wal-Mart’s image and encourage Black people to shop there, Confronted by activists who accused Wal-Mart and other big chains of driving independent stores out of business, Young responded bitterly in a Los Angeles Times interview, “You see those are the people who have been overcharging us, and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, and now it's Arabs.” Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was a well-made documentary even though it told mostly the “white legend” of Young’s career.