Andrew Young recounts the battles of the ’60s and his hopes for the future

This essay is part of a series—we asked 17 Atlantans to tell us how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has impacted their lives in honor of its 60th anniversary. Read all of the essays here.

At least 60 Black homes and churches were dynamited in and around Birmingham, Alabama, in the years just before passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Big Bethel Baptist Church, under the longtime leadership of a firebrand minister named Fred Shuttlesworth, had become prominent in the fight for integration, and was bombed on December 14, 1962—for the third time. The blast occurred while 12 children were inside practicing for a Christmas play, but they were not hurt, miraculously. The only person harmed was a seven-month-old baby who was showered with splintered glass and received a minor cut.

And so, just a few days before Christmas, the Reverend Shuttlesworth made the drive from “Bombingham” to meet with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference offices on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta.

In retrospect, that was the turning point.

The Reverend Shuttlesworth, a founding member of the SCLC, was a rabble-rouser and did not fully embrace Dr. King’s strategy of nonviolence. His views were well known because he’d long written a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, which was distributed nationally and widely read by Black folks around the country.

“Nonviolence is okay,” Fred told Martin, “but I don’t like passive resistance. We’ve got to be more aggressive in our nonviolence.”

Dr. King agreed to become more aggressive—and to take the movement to Birmingham. He turned to me and asked, “Do you know any people in Birmingham?”

“No,” I responded. “I don’t believe I do. I’ve hardly been to Birmingham at all.”

Then I remembered attending a church conference in Michigan and meeting a delegation of Episcopalians from Alabama. So I picked up the phone to call the diocese and was able to reach one of the women I’d met. “I can arrange for you to sit down with our bishop,” she offered.

That proved to be an invaluable introduction. I drove to Birmingham and asked Bishop C.C.J. Carpenter if he could bring together at least eight White businessmen who would be willing to meet privately with Martin Luther King Jr. and a small group from SCLC, to discuss the civil rights movement coming to Birmingham and what that was going to mean. He agreed.

The meeting that resulted was far more congenial than we had imagined, but I don’t think we were taken very seriously. Nevertheless, we presented a strong case about matters that seemed complicated yet actually were very simple to fix.

For instance, young White ladies from the University of Alabama and Auburn University came to Birmingham to buy clothing at discount prices. The Black women who worked in those stores helped customers find what they wanted and also kept everything in order, but were not allowed to make commissions on sales like their White counterparts. They also had to wear smocks for no good reason.

Members of the city’s Black community gathered in a series of meetings to develop a list of grievances, which came to be called “The Birmingham Manifesto.” It included such things as separate water fountains, difficulty registering to vote, inequalities in public education, and inadequate healthcare because of segregated hospitals.

Dr. King announced that for the next 90 days, the 135,000 Black citizens of Birmingham would buy nothing in White-owned stores but food and medicine. That economic punch caught and kept the attention of the men with whom we were talking.

The world remembers the police dogs and fire hoses unleashed by Bull Connor—but behind the scenes we negotiated quietly with the men we’d come to know. And it didn’t take long for them to agree to many of the things on that list. But we agreed to do it gradually.

We didn’t try to integrate lunch counters right away, but the “Colored” and “White” signs at water fountains were taken down, and nobody noticed or complained. At many workplaces, Black employees were given raises and promoted. One item after another in “The Birmingham Manifesto” was addressed, and, amazingly, there was almost no backlash from the White community.

Birmingham had basically presided over its own desegregation.

We could not have imagined the next year. Dr. King delivered his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech at the historic March on Washington. Just a few months before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy introduced federal legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Immediately after being sworn in as his successor, President Lyndon Johnson exerted considerable political influence to urge its passage, but it met with strong opposition from one of his closest friends, Senator Richard B. Russell Jr. of Georgia, who was leading a determined filibuster by Southern “Dixiecrats.”

And that’s when we went to Florida. It sure wasn’t for a vacation. We were afraid that if any Black person in America committed an act of violence against any White person in America, it would be enough to kill the Civil Rights Act.

Dr. King sent me to shut down a grassroots movement in St. Augustine, where demonstrators had not been trained in nonviolent protest and were in fact marching every night while armed with just about every weapon imaginable, from brass knuckles to guns.
Instead of staying out of trouble, I ended up leading a march through several hundred robed Klansmen and getting myself beaten and kicked in the middle of a street. I’m more than a little proud of that now, but it caused Dr. King to bring the movement to St. Augustine, promising “a long, hot summer.”

St. Augustine proved to be the most violent and dangerous city we ever visited—far worse than Birmingham.

KKK members, deputized by Sheriff L.O. Davis, had brutalized demonstrators for weeks before we arrived, but news coverage was nonexistent, even in the local paper. That suddenly changed, because wherever Martin Luther King Jr. went, cameras were sure to follow. One reporter confided that they couldn’t risk being somewhere else if Dr. King was murdered.

Two incidents stand out in my memory all these years later: A procession of bewildered Klansmen was filmed parading through the Black neighborhood known as Lincolnville, while the Black residents greeted them from each house singing “I Love Everybody.”

And an enraged hotel manager was photographed pouring acid into a swimming pool when it was “integrated” by a few Black students. It ended up on the front page of just about every newspaper in the world, including several that landed on the president’s desk the next day. My friend J.T. Johnson, who still lives in Atlanta, was one of the young people in that pool.

The images of savagery by White supremacists in St. Augustine were shocking, but I like to think it was forgiveness and conciliation from the very people they had been terrorizing that delivered the strongest message to Washington.

President Johnson demanded action, and the filibuster was broken. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, and he signed it into law later that day.

Today, everybody in the South is living better than they’ve ever lived before, and we are much further along than we realize.

The problems that still exist are hard to evaluate—in part because many people who identify as Christians seem to have gotten confused as to which side they’re on. Right now, we have a nation that seems to be completely divided. Yet Bull Connor couldn’t prevail in Birmingham in 1963. We’ll test where we are on November 5.

As for the future, during the movement in St. Augustine, we used to sing, “I’ve got a feeling everything’s gonna be all right.” I really feel good about the future, and I don’t know why. Let’s say that I have an undying faith in God, in this country.
And in most people.

Andrew Young is one of the civil rights movement’s most hallowed leaders. He was the first Black Georgian elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Reconstruction. He is a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as Atlanta’s mayor from 1982 to 1990. He leads the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

This article appears in our June 2024 issue.

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