The mayor was intrigued: inner-city kids coming in and demanding funds to put on a conference, with an absolute prohibition of adult input. “We want to have a conference with young people, and let us decide for ourselves what we want to do,” he remembers the students demanding. It was the kind of first impression that fosters long-term relationships and future partnerships. In this first partnership, Andrew gave Mike and his fellow organizers $500 and access to the Thomas B. Murphy Ballroom in the city’s newly constructed World Congress Center.
On the Saturday of the event, the hall was filled with community members and public officials, all listening intently to the next generation of Atlantans articulating their ideas for a better future. And it wasn’t what Andrew and other older Atlantans had anticipated in the social climate of the 1980s, when Black young people were perceived as getting caught up in drugs or gangs. Instead, these Atlanta teens cared about the quality of their education, health care, future employability, and global issues like world hunger.
“Adults thought kids cared about crime and getting beat up, but kids knew where to avoid going to get beat up and robbed,” Mike remembered. “We cared about much more sophisticated, nuanced stuff than adults thought.”
Mike caught the itch for organizing and never looked back.
“If I didn’t have those people in my life to teach me to be an organizer, I would’ve been an aspirational organizer. I would’ve been a complainer. I might’ve popped up at a protest, but to be actively organizing means that on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, you are about plotting, planning, strategizing, organizing, and mobilizing.”
The conference had a lasting impact on the city’s mayor as well. Andrew, who had been a close confidante of Dr. King, opted to attend a world hunger workshop at the conference. He distinctly remembers the leader, a kid who had just been released from jail, sharing an epiphany he had in lockup: He had seen Ethiopian children with their bellies distended and flies on their lips and thought, “Here I am complaining about the food they’re giving us, but I’m getting three meals a day.” Andrew then watched as the teen leaders developed a plan to collect donations by placing UNICEF cans on the countertops of local banks and stores. In the end, they donated roughly $100,000 to the famine in Ethiopia.
“I learned that where there’s a will there’s a way, and that young people can be very effective,” Andrew told me.
The enthusiasm of Black youth is something Andrew sees as special to Atlanta. This is in large part because the city is home to five historically Black colleges and universities—Clark Atlanta University, where the first Black student legally challenged segregation in higher education in the Deep South; Morehouse College, the world’s only HBCU for Black men; Morehouse School of Medicine, the first medical school established at an HBCU in the twentieth century; Spelman College, which boasts distinguished alumni such as Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker; and Morris Brown College, the first educational institution in Georgia to be owned and operated entirely by African Americans. Students from all these institutions were essential to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, regularly attending sit-ins and challenging exclusionary practices.
Andrew’s involvement in Greenwood is very much a reverberation of that time. He had already earned his degree at Howard University when he moved to Atlanta in 1961. He was married and had spent the majority of his post-collegiate career as a pastor, befriending Dr. King along the way. He was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to register Black voters when Fred Shuttlesworth, a minister from Birmingham, Alabama, came to visit.
“He came over and cussed us out,” Andrew remembered. “He said there were sixty-some bombings in less than a year, and they weren’t even getting in the paper in Atlanta. So we promised him we’d come over to Birmingham.”
It was just before Christmas 1962, five months before the historic Birmingham campaign when 1,000 students would march down the main drag of one of the most racially divided cities in the country, when Dr. King approached Andrew.
“Andy, you know any white folks in Birmingham?” Andrew remembers him asking.
“I don’t think I’d even spent a night in Birmingham,” he told me, chuckling a bit at the memory. “But he said I had three months, and I told him I’d find some white folks to negotiate with and settle this.”
Through connections from his pastoral days, Andrew reached out to members of the Episcopal diocese in Birmingham, eventually connecting with Bishop Coadjutor George M. Murray. Andrew pitched a meeting between Bishop Murray and Dr. King. Murray declined a face-to-face but agreed to pen a letter to open the lines of communication. “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” written after his arrest during the Birmingham demonstration, was Dr. King’s response to Murray’s initial correspondence.
“In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure,” Dr. King wrote. “I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.”16
It sounds very strategic and orchestrated. The Birmingham campaign and the correspondence between Dr. King and the clergy directly led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But Andrew sees it as a spiritual journey, the voyage of young men who simply put one foot in front of the other, not knowing where their steps would lead, and trusting the path had been paved by a higher being.
“[King] didn’t know what he was writing,” Andrew said about the letter. “He wrote most of it in the margins of a New York Times and finished it on toilet paper! He didn’t know what it would lead to.
“There’s an unknown in everything I’ve done,” he continued. “It’s the movement of the Spirit through the city of Atlanta.”
Capitalism Ain’t All That Bad
Andrew is more of a galvanizing figure for Greenwood than an active participant in its operations. The gravity of his presence on the board is profound, though, as he’s lived a lifetime of milestones and achievements. Snapshots of these moments surround him in his crowded office at the Andrew Young Foundation, where he spoke to me over Zoom.
He was wearing a bright, Carolina-blue polo shirt, which stood in stark contrast to the dated photos that wallpapered the room. Above his furrowed brow and salt-and-pepper hair was a picture of the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. A separate portrait of the famous orator is close by, his chin resting on interlocked hands, eyes pointing in the direction of Andrew’s chair as if listening to his responses to my questions.
Above Dr. King is a framed picture of Andrew with President Jimmy Carter, who appointed him to be the first African American US ambassador to the United Nations. Carter and Andrew are looking in the opposite direction as Dr. King, at a perpendicular wall lined with black-and-white photos of family and friends. These are hung above an overwhelmed bookcase, with volumes stacked both horizontally and vertically. Resting on the bookcase is Jonathan Alter’s Carter biography His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, as well as a mounted medal, although I can’t make out through the hazy interface whether it’s Andrew’s Presidential Medal of Freedom or his Legion of Honour.
It was an intimidating setup, never mind the fact that he was reluctant to speak with me at all.
“I mean, I really tried my best to get out of this,” he admitted.
Despite all the awards and recognitions, all the larger-than-life figures he’s worked alongside and befriended, Andrew is incredibly humble. He said he’s “not blessed with organizational skills,” even though his strategic maneuvering before the Birmingham campaign was essential to its impact on the civil rights movement. He also told me he didn’t want to talk about Greenwood because he doesn’t know much about it. Of course, I didn’t want to talk about the bank with him. I wanted to talk about the context surrounding the bank: the nature of economic revolution and the decision to fight capitalism by engaging it, rather than eradicating it as most other revolutionary ideas had proposed.
“Capitalism has worked for us,” he said. “Any system is capable of being creative and visionary.”
In 1981, at the urging of Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, Andrew ran for mayor of Atlanta with a “public purpose capitalism” platform. He vowed to develop the city and increase jobs without using taxpayer funds. He proposed new highways and an airport, developments that brought in 1,100 new businesses, $70 billion in private investments, and more than 1 million new jobs by the end of his two terms as mayor.
“We went straight to Wall Street,” he said. “We probably haven’t used a penny of taxpayer money since 1974.”
Andrew also saw the benefits of private funding when he helped bring the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta. Toward the end of his tenure as mayor, he was approached by Billy Payne, a young real estate attorney, about the idea.
“Billy Payne had a dream,” Andrew told me, rather cheekily.
Payne, who has said he was driven by a fear of dying young after suffering a heart attack at twenty-six and needing a triple bypass at thirty-four, had started going to church—enter the Spirit of Atlanta—and watched 16 Days of Glory, a documentary about the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. He wanted the Games in Atlanta. Most of Andrew’s staffers were adamantly against the idea, because recent host cities like Montreal were buried in hundreds of millions of dollars in debt from the event. But Andrew had a sweet spot for the Olympics, recalling memories of his father taking him to see a replay of Jesse Owens’s gold-medal run at the 1936 Games when Andrew was just a boy.
Out of office and free of municipal naysayers, Andrew took on the Olympic campaign alongside Payne. Again he went to the private sector, raising $1.7 billion to fund the games. What money the commission did raise from federal, state, and local contributions (about $500 million) went directly into the community, paying for road improvements, streetscaping, an expansion of the airport, residential rehabilitation and development, and commercial revitalization.
The Atlanta Games prep did have its shortcomings. Months ahead of the Olympics, the city erected a 1,100-bed detention center while simultaneously adopting new policies that criminalized the homeless population. When $5 million of the “revitalization” funds was allotted to Woodruff Park, a longtime safe haven for people experiencing homelessness, the vast majority of the people there were swept into the new city jail, hidden away before the world’s eye focused on Atlanta for the Games. The Atlanta City Detention Center continues to function as a jail, despite ongoing efforts by community organizers to close it.
Andrew still sees securing and producing the Atlanta Games as a glowing example of capitalism gone right. To refute the notion that it was maybe not so good for poor Atlantans, he points to the $19 million profit the Games brought to downtown. This financial boost has allowed organizations like the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership, he said, to build or rehabilitate 1,300 affordable housing units in neighborhoods near the newly constructed venues.17
“What we had left over at the end of the Olympics, we saw to it that minorities and family-owned businesses got 41 percent of everything that we built,” he said.
Andrew brings an echo into the boardroom at Greenwood: an echo from lessons learned during the 1960s campaigns for equality; an echo of Dr. King’s call for nonviolent rebellions; even his mayoral motto “public purpose capitalism” influenced the fifteen-year-old activist who walked into his office all those years ago.
“I practice what I would consider to be ‘compassionate capitalism,’” Killer Mike told me, putting an alliterative spin on Andrew’s mayoral platform. “I don’t want corporations to own all the apartments and multi-units that my wife and I own, because they’re not sensitive to people who are looking for affordable housing. I rent to people who look like me and my sisters when we grew up and were working in the city.”
“I am a capitalist because I don’t want to simply be a victim of capitalism,” he said.
Greenwood’s desire to both embrace capitalism and betray its current application and form is driven by its founders’ visions of “purpose” and “compassion.” These are important caveats, they say, because in a society that’s interpreted capitalism to mean “every person for themselves,” the idea of adding purpose and compassion to the mix does, indeed, seem radical.
Into the Unknown
