An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America - Hardcover

Young, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060173629 ISBN 13: 9780060173623

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

Synopsis

The highly regarded statesman and former mayor of Atlanta provides a thoughtful, insider's perspective on the Civil Rights Movement and plots a course for America's future. 150,000 first printing. $135,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

ANDREW YOUNG is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and a graduate ofHoward University and Hartford Theological Seminary. He was elected to Congress from the Fifth Congressional District of Georgia and in 1977, President Carter named him Ambassador to the United Nations. He served two terms as mayor of Atlanta, where he is currently co-chair of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

Reviews

Young's inspiring and important autobiographical memoir reminds us that social transformation is possible and that the civil rights movement prevailed through the courage, vigilance and persistence of individual men and women. As a minister and moving force of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., endured beatings and arrests and participated in historic civil rights campaigns in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago as well as the Poor People's March on Washington, D.C., in 1968. Born in New Orleans in 1932, Young rebelled against his father's insistence that he follow in his footsteps and become a dentist. Reading Gandhi led to his decision to become a preacher pursuing social change. He provides new details on the FBI's monitoring of the SCLC and of King, and gives a moving, on-the-scene account of King's assassination. Although he says little about his years as mayor of Atlanta or ambassador to the U.N., effectively ending his personal story with his 1972 election to Congress, his analysis of the interconnections among racism, poverty and a militarized economy that, he says, thwarts domestic needs makes his narrative timely and forceful. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

He was there. Not only on the frontlines of the marches and the sit-ins but also right there on the decision-making committees with Martin Luther King. Young's compelling history of the civil-rights movement has the passionate immediacy of eyewitness, participant, and policy maker, as well as the wisdom of hindsight. He began as a minister with the United Church of Christ and then worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as one of King's closest advisers. His accounts of the Birmingham confrontations, of the march from Selma to Montgomery, are intense and dramatic; just as interesting are his reports of internal tensions and arguments in the movement's leadership. There are snapshot views of many of the powerful, including a far-from-saintly picture of Ralph Abernathy. Young usually took the conservative role, and he attacks those who were on a "freedom high" and didn't know when to compromise. Most moving is his intimate account of "Martin," as the clown and tease who could "insult you until the whole room was laughing till they cried." Young writes without ego or rhetoric, reserving his greatest fury for the FBI, whose campaign against King was "outrageous, unconscionable . . . a smear campaign rooted in racism." As elder statesman, looking back now after 30 years, he applauds the defeat of COLORED signs and the gains in voters' rights but sees that today, as then, the greatest fight is against poverty. Always he roots the political in the lives of ordinary people: "Our movement was made up of thousands of individual personal decisions." Hazel Rochman

Former Atlanta mayor Young reflects on his early life as the son of middle-class parents growing up in segregated New Orleans. He also provides insight into the leadership styles of Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent Southern Christian Leadership Conference heads.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060173629
• ISBN 13: 9780060173623
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560