ATLANTA. Andrew Young was beaten by white supremacists at a civil rights march in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. And he was there when the killer’s bullet fatally cut the spine of his friend and mentor, the Reverend Dr. Martin. Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968
He subsequently became US Ambassador to the United Nations and later an emerging mayor and leader of modern-day Atlanta, helping the southern city expand its airport, attract international investment, and host the 1996 Olympics. Ahead of his 90th birthday, the city he helped shape hosted a week-long celebration of his life and legacy — with a church service, a gala dinner, a museum exhibition and, Thursday, a downtown peace march.
It comes at a turbulent time when Mr. Young, one of the last great lions of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and a disciple of Gandhian non-violence, has witnessed a resurgence of racial tensions on the home front and threatening nuclear clouds abroad.
However, in an interview this week at his home in Atlanta, Mr. Young argued for his particular optimism.
“Everyone who is black should be optimistic,” he said. “People are giving up. And people despair. But there is nothing in a culture emerging from African slavery that allows people to give up.”
Mr. Young, who turns 90 on Saturday, delivered his argument with a laugh, with a few reminders of the David vs. Goliath character of the civil rights movement he helped lead and a 1961 lyric excerpt from Ike and Tina. Turner said, “Oh dear, I think everything will be fine.”
It was typical of the notorious and garrulous Mr. Young, whose mind remains razor-sharp even though his shaky knees make climbing stairs a chore. These days, Mr. Yang’s lengthy answers to simple questions aren’t entirely meandering, but more stratigraphic, traversing layers of history and life experience, and peppered with references to philosophical influences, political heavyweights, loved ones, and stars.
Tuesday’s conversation touched on Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Mingus, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Arthur Ashe and theologian Paul Tillich. Dr. King was regularly approached and invariably referred to as “Martin”.
Mr. Young’s birthday celebration in Atlanta, where he was mayor from 1982 to 1990, provided an opportunity to amplify one of the last living voices from Dr. King’s inner circle in a moment eerily reminiscent of his era. It is the voice of a cohort that Mr. Young described as “South-born Negro preachers in their 30s” who largely made up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the key driving forces behind the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, co-founded by Dr. King and for a time managed by Mr. Young.
A dedicated minister raised in New Orleans, Mr. Young once described the group as driven by faith in God as well as “the undiminished potential of our country.” activists of the last century, and the present.
On Tuesday, about 24 hours before the sermon on peace and reconciliation, Mr. Young was at home among his books, souvenirs and collection of African art. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, though he didn’t look worried. He was taught from the beginning that preaching, like jazz, works best on the fire of improvisation.
“When I came to this little country church in South Georgia, I was 21,” he said, “and the deacons got me together and said, ‘We know you went to school up north and all that, but you should know that we don’t believe in pulpit paper. If you have paper in the pulpit, very soon no one will go to church.”
But he was getting ready. The night before, he said, he had revisited Tolstoy’s late 19th-century treatise The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which argues that even defensive violence is immoral. He learned this lesson in the civil rights era, as he writes in his 1996 book: “We knew that the freedom we sought could never be achieved by assassination.”
However, in the context of current events, Mr. Yang said he felt it was right for Ukrainians to fight their Russian aggressors. “I mean, I don’t believe in it, but I wouldn’t condemn someone else for defensive violence,” he said.
Atlanta residents, in particular, are familiar with Mr. Young’s involvement in civil affairs and his track record of stirring up controversy, which tends to surmount the place with the near-universal admiration he has earned for his contribution to the American project. For years, he spoke favorably of Robert Mugabe, lauding the late Zimbabwean leader’s role in his country’s independence movement but downplaying his years of repressive and bloody rule. “Robert Mugabe is almost a saint,” Young said on Tuesday.
He said he disagreed with activists who are pushing for the removal of Confederate symbols from public spaces in many southern cities: “I’ve always been more interested in the content than the symbols,” he said in 2017. These days, Mr. Young argues that the long and successful struggle to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag of Georgia has poisoned the political atmosphere in the state and prevented the construction of roads that could alleviate Atlanta’s heartbreaking transportation problem.
“You see what you lost when you got that flag,” he said this week, “and it wasn’t worth it.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for the mayor of a large southern city, Mr. Yang has long valued practical problem solving and building consensus among opposing political forces. But he finds it more difficult at a time when so many Republican leaders have embraced racial grievances and when so much misinformation is being spread by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“For the first time in my life,” Mr. Young said in an interview, “the truth didn’t matter.” But he soon quoted the nineteenth-century American poet William Cullen Bryant: “Truth, crushed to the ground, will rise again.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Young stood at the pulpit of the First Congregational Church in downtown Atlanta, wearing a blue and yellow tie in deference to the people of Ukraine.
His preaching jumped from decade to decade and from place to place. He talked about his childhood in a multicultural New Orleans neighborhood that was far from idyllic, with the headquarters of the Nazi Party on the corner. He described white supremacy as a disease. “And don’t be angry with sick people,” he said. You try to help them.
He talked about his travels in the old Soviet Union and the good people he met there. He spoke about the detention of Dr. King in Birmingham, Alabama. He recalled his hostile reception in St. Augustine and argued that the peaceful reaction of blacks in that city to the attack by white supremacists helped persuade members of Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “They somehow got carried away with what we thought was the love of Jesus.”
He mentioned the work of Tolstoy. He said he would like the Kingdom of God to find its way into Vladimir Putin’s heart and described the challenge of the moment: “To love those who cannot be loved.”