Andrew Young: Those who burn for justice should respect torch
ATLANTA -- Andrew Young knows the power of lighting a fire.
In the '60s, as one of the top aides to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he helped spark the protests that brought civil rights to black Americans. In the '80s, as mayor of Atlanta, he helped light the path that brought the Olympics to town in 1996.
One moment, he talks about the honor of working with King. The next moment, he talks about the thrill of watching old newsreels of Jesse Owens dominating the Berlin Olympics -- and humiliating Hitler.
Now protestors are trying not to light a fire but to put one out. Thousands of people upset with China's treatment of Tibet have disrupted the Olympic torch run as it winds toward Beijing for this summer's Games.
Young has spent a lot of time watching the protests.
He is not impressed.
"There's not much required to protest a guy in a wheelchair carrying an Olympic torch," Young says. "I mean, that's a cheap shot. And it's degrading to the nobility of the Tibetan monks who are out there getting beaten."
Young speaks from his office on the 44th floor of an Atlanta office tower, where he works as co-chairman of Good Works International, a consulting firm that tries to start business ventures in Africa and the Caribbean.
He has spent much of the past few weeks talking about his time with King, and especially about the 40th anniversary of that moment on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Young stood in the parking lot and looked up at King on the balcony. Called up to him, saying it was cold and King would need a coat. King lingered a moment. Then came the crack of the assassin's bullet.
Young seems relieved to talk about sports.
He's 76 now -- "a spectator sportsman" -- but he's still plugged in. He worries that the Georgia Bulldogs won't live up to the hype come football season. He wonders how those kids from Memphis could miss all those free throws.
In the middle of our talk, an assistant comes in to say that Hank Aaron called. His mother's funeral is Saturday. He'd like Young to come.
"Absolutely," Young says.
And he turns his attention back to human rights, and to the torch.
The torch run will make its only U.S. visit Wednesday, in San Francisco, and the only safe bet is that it won't be an easy trip. On Sunday in London, 37 protestors were arrested and someone tried to put out the flame with a fire extinguisher. On Monday in Paris, it was worse -- the torch was snuffed out five times, and officials gave up and drove the torch through the last part of the route on a bus.
(The protestors haven't literally put out the Olympic flame. A separate "mother flame," hidden from the public, relights the temporary torches used along the way.)
In San Francisco, activists already have scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to hang "FREE TIBET" banners. China has ruled Tibet since 1959; some human rights groups have declared that China's treatment of Tibetans is genocide.
Young knows all this. But he believes the protestors are fighting one of the few events that can break bonds of injustice instead of cinching them tighter.
In 1980, President Carter decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics because of continuing conflicts with the Soviet Union. Young, who had been Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, wanted to send a U.S. team to expose the Soviets to Americans -- and to beat the Soviets on the field. It was one of the few times Carter and Young ended up on opposite sides.
"There are all kinds of things that we can disagree about, and we should disagree about them, but there ought to be one thing that the whole world can come together on, and for me, that's been the Olympics," Young says. "I've always seen the Olympics as a place where you could act out your differences on the athletic field with a sense of sportsmanship and fairness and mutual respect."
Young doesn't necessarily think the protestors are wrong on the issues. He says it's obvious that China has lagged other countries on human rights. He says he doesn't know enough about Tibet to know what people there want, or the best way to get it.
That's part of the problem with the Olympic protests, he says: They're too general. When he worked with King, they targeted specific injustices. Not segregation as a whole: a lunch counter, or a child's school, or a seat at the front of the bus.
To get the world's full attention, Young says, the Tibet protestors need to narrow their focus. But he says they also don't understand that having the Olympics in Beijing will force China to change for the better.
Part of it is just having so many new people in the country -- not just thousands of journalists, pushing for stories of change, but thousands of fans mingling in the stands and in the streets, making friendships that blur borders.
And part of it is all those Chinese watching all those athletes from all those different cultures competing on an equal field.
Young has seen it happen. In 1974, while South Africa was still living under apartheid, Young went with Arthur Ashe as Ashe played in the South African Open. A few tennis matches did not change the world alone. But in '96, Young watched in Atlanta as Josiah Thugwane won gold in the marathon -- the first black South African to win a gold medal for the country.
Young sees so many things in the flame of the Olympic torch. He sees how his Southern city progressed through the civil rights years and became a place he was proud to show the whole world. He sees how small moments -- a sprint, a basketball game, even a walk through a stadium -- can turn the gears of the world a small click forward.
And he knows the power the torch can hold.
In 1965, civil rights marchers were beaten by police as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. In 1996, Young crossed that same bridge, Olympic torch in hand, as part of the torch run to Atlanta. Selma schoolchildren, black and white, walked by his side.
"So, 1965 to 1996, how many years is that?" he says. "All that progress in that amount of time. That was a powerful symbol. That's what the Olympics is about. That's what the torch means."
Tommy Tomlinson, a columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He can be reached at lmt1915@gmail.com.
