 "King dream to rid nation of triple evils still just that")
For Andrew Young and other exhausted, young civil rights activists who'd spent most of 1963 battling to desegregate public facilities in Birmingham, Alabama, the March on Washington seemed like a chance to take a couple of days off.
Young, then the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and an aide to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, hadn't planned to attend until King called and insisted, saying: "You won't want to miss this."
After the fire hoses and attack dogs, the mass arrests and the mortgaging of the modest homes of middle-class blacks in Birmingham to finance the movement, the event sounded like "a picnic in the park" to Young. He flew to Washington where he was surprised by the vast crowd spilling out of trains and buses and filling the National Mall.
After 50 years and a varied career that included stints as a congressman, United Nations ambassador and Atlanta mayor, Young recalls most vividly one image from that day: a father walking with his young daughter on his shoulders. It was a day, he thought at the time, that was about families.
"It really took our movement from being a Southern black movement to being a national and international human rights movement. Because everywhere in the world, people saw this," said Young, 81, in an August 22 interview at his home in southwest Atlanta. The images from the march had an impact on the freedom movement in South Africa, he said, and the stirrings that eventually led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
More work
Young will be in Washington again on Wednesday, when America's first black President, Barack Obama, joins former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to speak at the 50th anniversary ceremony commemorating the march. Obama is a confirmation that much progress in race relations has been made in this country since that historic day, he said. Still, he recalled King's slogan for the SCLC: "To redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of racism, war and poverty." Much of that work, he said, is unfinished.
What history has largely missed from King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Young said, was its emphasis on jobs and the economy - the references in King's words to the nation's default on a "promissory note," the "bad cheque" it had written to black citizens, and the minority community's refusal to believe there were "insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation."
Egypt riots
Although the country has made strides in ending discrimination, Young said, the economic inequalities which increasingly concerned King toward the end of his life have taken on a global complexity. While many religious and cultural issues are at play, Young said the riots in Egypt aren't unlike those that gripped northern US cities in the 1960s. At bottom, both are about economic opportunity.
"The troubles in the world have led us to the problem he was trying to address, and that is poverty," Young said. "You've got freedom and dignity and equal opportunity, and in the meantime the economy has grown global, and also electronic. To deal with a global economy in the midst of a global recession requires another vision, and nobody seems to have it."
Before the 1963 demonstration took shape, Young had seen a very different idea for a march.
Exhilarated by their success after a coalition of Alabama businesses agreed to their demands to desegregate, some leaders of the Birmingham campaign argued for a march that would spread the movement's spirit from city to city across the South.
Jailhouse reading
"They had read Gandhi when they were in jail, and read about the Salt March to the Sea and they wanted to do something like that," Young said.
Young, then the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and an aide to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, hadn't planned to attend until King called and insisted, saying: "You won't want to miss this."
After the fire hoses and attack dogs, the mass arrests and the mortgaging of the modest homes of middle-class blacks in Birmingham to finance the movement, the event sounded like "a picnic in the park" to Young. He flew to Washington where he was surprised by the vast crowd spilling out of trains and buses and filling the National Mall.
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"It really took our movement from being a Southern black movement to being a national and international human rights movement. Because everywhere in the world, people saw this," said Young, 81, in an August 22 interview at his home in southwest Atlanta. The images from the march had an impact on the freedom movement in South Africa, he said, and the stirrings that eventually led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
More work
Young will be in Washington again on Wednesday, when America's first black President, Barack Obama, joins former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to speak at the 50th anniversary ceremony commemorating the march. Obama is a confirmation that much progress in race relations has been made in this country since that historic day, he said. Still, he recalled King's slogan for the SCLC: "To redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of racism, war and poverty." Much of that work, he said, is unfinished.
What history has largely missed from King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Young said, was its emphasis on jobs and the economy - the references in King's words to the nation's default on a "promissory note," the "bad cheque" it had written to black citizens, and the minority community's refusal to believe there were "insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation."
Egypt riots
Although the country has made strides in ending discrimination, Young said, the economic inequalities which increasingly concerned King toward the end of his life have taken on a global complexity. While many religious and cultural issues are at play, Young said the riots in Egypt aren't unlike those that gripped northern US cities in the 1960s. At bottom, both are about economic opportunity.
"The troubles in the world have led us to the problem he was trying to address, and that is poverty," Young said. "You've got freedom and dignity and equal opportunity, and in the meantime the economy has grown global, and also electronic. To deal with a global economy in the midst of a global recession requires another vision, and nobody seems to have it."
Before the 1963 demonstration took shape, Young had seen a very different idea for a march.
Exhilarated by their success after a coalition of Alabama businesses agreed to their demands to desegregate, some leaders of the Birmingham campaign argued for a march that would spread the movement's spirit from city to city across the South.
Jailhouse reading
"They had read Gandhi when they were in jail, and read about the Salt March to the Sea and they wanted to do something like that," Young said.