Andrew+Young

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Andrew Jackson Young Jr. was born on March 12, 1932. He was the son of a dentist and a school teacher. His birth town is New Orleans Louisiana. He graduated from Howard University located in Washington D.C. in 1951 with his bachelor degree in biology. After that he got a degree from Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut. He then began to pastor Bethany Congressional Church in Thomasville Georgia in 1955. In 1957 Young joined the staff at the National Council of Churches. 1961 he stopped pasturing and joined the SCLC, under the direction of Martin Luther King Jr.  Young assisted with workshops to teach people nonviolent protest. Eventually King promoted Young to an executive director of the SCLC. Young organized voter registration, and desegregation campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma Alabama, also in Washington D.C. He was also with King when he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee on April 4, 1968.  Young won Georgia’s Fifth District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972. He was the first African-American since reconstruction to be elected to congress in Georgia. He and Barbara Jones who was elected into the House from Texas were the first two black southerners in Congress in the 20th century. While in Congress Young supported the presidency of Jimmy Carter in 1976, and in 1977 Carter made Young the ambassador to the United Nations.  Young was one of the first to call for sanctions to end apartheid in South Africa. In 1981 when he returned back to Atlanta he was elected city mayor. For the first time an African American mayor (Maynard Jackson), handed over the keys to the city to another African American. 1985 Young won reelection but in 1990 primary lost to become Democratic candidate to become governor of Georgia. In March of 1998 Morehouse College changed the name of their Center for International Studies to Andrew Young Center for International Studies.  Young had four children with his first wife Jean Childs, but she died in 1996 because of cancer. He remarried in 1996 to his wife Carolyn.

CITATION

"Andrew Young." __New Georgia Encyclopedia__ 9/26/2007 25 Feb 2009 .