Civil rights icon Andrew Young shares insights at Kansas Bar Association meeting

Andrew Young appears with Mark Dupree at the Kansas Bar Association’s annual meeting on June 21, 2024, at Washburn University in Topeka, where Young spoke on his experience in the civil rights movement. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — On a Saturday drive home in the late 1950s in Alabama, Andrew Young — then a pastor and future U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, and mayor of Atlanta — found himself surrounded by Ku Klux Klan members.

Fortunately, they didn’t recognize him. The next day, Young and Martin Luther King Jr. were hosting a voter registration drive for African Americans in Young’s church.

That was the first time Young was alone with the KKK. But this instilled a new fear in him — that the klan would show up at his family home. He created a plan. If they showed up, he would go outside and talk to them. He instructed his then wife, Jean Childs Young, to wait in the house, and to watch with a rifle. Shoot if things got bad. She refused.

“I can’t point a gun at another human being,” Childs Young told him. “Don’t you realize that under that sheet is the heart of a child of God?”

Young carried that sentiment into the Civil Rights Movement, where he became a central figure as a strategist and negotiator for Martin Luther King Jr.

Young recalls his time marching, and his people’s response: “The klan coming down into the streets with their guns and their dogs to be received by people saying, ‘I love everybody,’ ” Young said.

Young shared that sentiment with Kansas attorneys Friday at the Kansas Bar Association’s annual meeting at Washburn University in Topeka, where he was the keynote speaker. The theme of this year’s meeting was: Civil Rights: 70 Years of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka … We’ve Come a Long Way

“I think you all are on the right track, depending on the rule of law,” Young said. “I hope we have enough wisdom and power — and despite whatever racial or cultural or economic differences we have on this planet, this is my father’s world.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board decision unanimously declared state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students to be unconstitutional.

Topeka played a unique role in challenging the “separate but equal” standard established under  Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 because Black schools in Topeka were in many ways superior to white schools, said Kansas attorney Pedro Irigonegaray. The teachers at the city’s Black schools were more educated than their white counterparts, for instance. But civil rights attorneys hoped to prove that separate is inherently unequal.

“The question that was most important to resolve was the putting away of Plessy v. Ferguson, Irigonegaray said. “You may recall that the judge in Ferguson said that even if the conductor couldn’t see he could smell a Black person. That’s how offensive Plessy v. Ferguson was. 

Young believes that Brown v. Board was one of the biggest parts of the movement, and everything catapulted after that. 

“That case gave structure and gave emphasis and quite frankly the pathway to bring about the movement,” Mark Dupree, Kansas Bar Association president said. “The lawyers today have the same thing. It’s our job to give avenues and pathways to make sure that justice is seen and is carried out, even in 2024.”

Young said he had a lot of faith in the Supreme Court that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board. He no longer has the same faith in the court.

“This is probably the most crucial time of my years,” Young said. “What happens in the next three months is going to determine the destiny of the planet. Not just in terms of politics and human rights, but in terms of climate change. In terms of what we’re going to live by — our brain, our hearts, our conscience — or whether we’re going to choose some other God that is more powerful and secure in our life. I don’t know what motivates people.”

Last month, one week after Brown v. Board’s 70th anniversary, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas criticized the case. Thomas said the case was not backed by the Constitution or the nation’s “history and tradition.” 

“I’ve never had to give up on anybody,” Young said. “But I’m going to have to give up on Clarence Thomas.”

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