Georgia Is Much on His Mind

By GARRY WILLS

In the basement of a church in Macon, Ga., officers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference are holding their annual meeting in mid-June. Joseph Lowery, the organization's president, says, "The S.C.L.C. does not endorse candidates. But I does." Yet Lowery marks several points of disagreement with the man who would be Georgia's Governor -- for example, the candidate's newfound support for capital punishment. Even members of Dr. King's organization, for which Young worked in the glory days of the '60s, will give him only qualified support. The Rev. Mr. Lowery continues, "I support Andrew Young, not because he is colored -- for one thing, he ain't all that colored."

Others laugh more heartily at this than Young does. The exact degree of Young's blackness has always been a matter of debate in and around the S.C.L.C. Nor does Lowery let the matter drop. "We were just over in Cape Town, where they have all these degrees of color -- whites, Indians, coloreds, blacks. I don't know just where I'd put you, Andy" -- with an appraising look at him across the dais -- "somewhere between white and Indian and colored."

But Young is plenty black enough to scare rural whites, as he campaigns in the country towns trying to become the first black Governor elected in the Deep South. His urbane background and contacts, suspect qualities to some black activists, make him even more menacing to poor whites. He is not only "uppity." He is up, while they are still down. As a woman in Baxby, Ga., told a reporter following Young, "I think the coloreds are trying to overpower. That's the way most everyone feels. They're trying to overpower the whites." She is turning against Young the credentials he offers to voters: his success at bringing new business and wealth into Atlanta during his eight years as its mayor.

He takes his Atlanta record with him into parts of the state that consider that metropolis a den of sin and crime. To hear Young speak, he loosed a shower of gold over the city -- 1,000 new companies located there (300 from overseas), $70 billion invested ($11 billion from overseas), 700,000 new jobs created. Yet to critics, Atlanta should be his burden, not his boost. Lester Maddox, the clownish ex-Governor running for his old job, said to Young in a televised debate, "You ran Crime City." FBI statistics show a 50% increase in the crime rate during Young's eight years in office.

Young says he can do for Georgia what he did for Atlanta -- and his foes treat that as a threat. Young talks green while people are still thinking black. He moves about the state in his GMC van, speaking quietly about increased exports of Georgia pecans and carpets. He was accused of absenteeism during his years as mayor -- "Globetrotter Andy," Maddox calls him. But Young says he was using his international contacts to bring jobs into the state or find buyers for its products. "Last summer I took 30 small businessmen to Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados, and we came back with $134 million in contracts.

"I came into office when Reagan was cutting off funds from Washington. But there is always loose capital in the world money markets, and I know where it is, because of my experience as an ambassador and Congressman on the banking committee." Even during the campaign he has flown to London to do work as a consultant for an engineering company, and to Japan for a meeting of the International Olympic Committee. When not crossing one or another ocean, he has raised money from celebrity friends in Hollywood and New York City (Norman Lear welcoming him on the West Coast, Gloria Steinem on the East).

Young, who speaks in the fluting accents of Southern civility, has always had a quiet dignity in his dealings with whites. Even as a young pastor in the 1950s in Thomasville, Ga., he jolted that little community by going to the front doors of white townspeople, not to the side or back entries. He is used to having gates open for him. He grew up in New Orleans, the son of a prosperous light-skinned dentist who liked to stress the family's "Indian blood." When he played with white boys, it was because he owned the ball and bat. When he studied theology, it was not with Southern Baptists but with white Congregationalists in Connecticut. Baffled in his attempt to become a missionary to Africa, he became a New York bureaucrat in the National Council of Churches. Returning to the South in the late '50s, it was with Marshall Field Foundation money to start literacy programs for blacks.

When he joined Dr. King's cause, he became the negotiator with white sheriffs and FBI agents. S.C.L.C. veteran Hosea Williams says, "I would go into a town and rile up the blacks and make the whites say, 'What will these crazy niggers do next?' and then in would come nice little Andy saying, 'There are some points we would like to discuss with you.' " When Williams called Young an Uncle Tom, "he jumped on me physically, right in front of Dr. King."

Young has been an ambassador between different worlds from his childhood on. A Southerner in the North, then a partial outsider in the South, he could talk to all sides. In the 1976 presidential campaign, he convinced Northern liberals that Jimmy Carter was acceptable on racial matters. When Carter asked him to be ambassador to the U.N., Young said Barbara Jordan was better qualified. Carter, according to Young, replied, "You're right. But you have the one thing she doesn't have -- a connection with Dr. King. If we are to be convincing on the matter of human rights around the world, we have to show we take them seriously at home."

If anyone can straddle the differences between white and black in Georgia, between urban sophistication and rural conservatism, Young seems to have the proper credentials. Even after noting his differences with the candidate, the Rev. Mr. Lowery went on at the S.C.L.C. meeting to say, "Never in the history of Georgia has this state had a man offer himself for Governor with the qualifications and the background in government of Andrew Young."

But this may be the toughest assignment Young has taken on in his distinguished career. By his staff's assessment, he needs to get almost all the black vote and 25% of the white vote in the final election. But polls in mid-June on the five-man primary race to be decided on July 17 showed him getting only 65% of the blacks and 12% of the whites for a combined vote of 30%. (Jesse Jackson won 40% in Georgia's 1988 primary.) Young's figures have actually slipped -- from 16% of the white vote in April, and 21% last November. Young blames that slide on the fact that he did not start running television ads till after the poll was taken, while his principal opponent, lieutenant governor Zell Miller, was catching up through a heavy advertising outlay.

Miller and Young were tied at 30% each a month before the primary. If neither gets over 50% in this first election, they go into a runoff race to choose the Democratic nominee on Aug. 7. Jesse Jackson and the A.C.L.U. oppose Southern runoffs, on the grounds that they give the white candidates' supporters a chance to team up against a black candidate. But Young earned the boos of Jackson delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1984 when he supported runoffs as part of the Mondale platform. Young narrowly lost the primary in his first run at the mayoralty but won in the runoff. There is a suit in court against the Georgia runoff this year, but Young is opposed to the suit. He will take his chance on the runoff.

Though the odds are against him, he is hoping for help from Democratic factionalism. Zell Miller, who has been lieutenant governor for 16 years, feuds regularly with the powerful speaker of Georgia's House, Tom Murphy -- most recently over a state lottery proposal backed by Miller and opposed by Murphy. Young has been courting Murphy, praising his wisdom in dealing with Atlanta while Young was mayor. Murphy likes to handpick his candidates for Governor -- he put up the incumbent, Joe Frank Harris, in 1982. But Murphy's candidate this year -- state representative Lauren ("Bubba") McDonald -- got only 6% in the June poll (2 points ahead of Lester Maddox). Young's backers are hoping Murphy, deprived of McDonald in the runoff, will let party insiders know he would like Miller to lose.

But atavistic Democratic ties may make such considerations irrelevant. If it looks as if Young cannot win against a strong Republican, then Democrats will take Miller, or anyone else, rather than surrender a statehouse that has been theirs for 120 years.

Young argues that he can win if his party will only give him its nomination. He has waged a long campaign with the help of Atlanta powers like the Coca- Cola Co. and Turner Broadcasting to win the 1996 Olympics from such contenders as Montreal, Athens and Manchester, England. The Olympic Committee will make its decision on Sept. 18 in Tokyo, with Young present. He hopes to come back from Japan with the promise of another shower of coins over his adopted city, enough to sweep him into office.

With all aspects of his recent career, he places great trust in the effects of economic development. His black critics say he has given up the cause of the poor except as the beneficiaries of trickle-down from Atlanta's wealthy. One weakness in his position is that he hopes blacks will forget their uneasiness about his commitment to them and rally around him because he is black (as the Rev. Mr. Lowery predicts they will do), while he is asking whites to forget such racial matters and vote their pocketbooks.

Young seems to judge everything these days as it might be seen from a corporate executive's window. Even with the S.C.L.C. leaders in Macon he traced his accomplishments in terms of first-class airplane travelers: "There used to be a time when I knew every black flying on an airplane out of Atlanta -- particularly every one in first class. When I get on a plane now, there are a whole lot of black folk flying, even in first class, that I don't even know." It is a tellingly selective measure of social progress. Speaking to a group of teenage athletes at an "Olympic camp" held one Saturday at the Emory University gym, he said, "The Olympics are the one thing that captures the imagination of the entire planet. It engages the loyalties of people like you, and kings and queens and Presidents and the chief executive officers of major corporations."

Nonetheless, Young insists that he is still in politics for the reasons that drew him to office in the first place -- "to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the poor." He arrived at his blackness by way of his religion. Brought up on classical music, he schooled himself in jazz and the blues while preparing for his ministry in the South. He still preaches on Sundays, on the assigned text of Scripture at whatever church invites him. His attitude toward staffers is that of a pastor -- he gives advice more readily than he takes it, but it is the advice of one who cares about the spiritual welfare of those around him. While he rained wealth on Atlanta, none of it stuck to him. He still lives in the modest house he bought on his S.C.L.C. salary.

More than some others, he chose his blackness. He left relative affluence to face death with Dr. King. "Martin always said, 'Don't worry, Andy, I'll preach you the best eulogy you ever heard of.' " There is a toughness in him that came out in his answer to Lowery's careful endorsement in Macon. After thanking Lowery and speaking of his economic hopes for Georgia, Young turned to the subject of color in South Africa, a country he has known well from his seminary days onward. "One of the criteria for deciding between colored, Asians and blacks is the comb test. If the comb can get through your hair without getting interrupted, then you colored. But if the comb gets hung up, then you black. I am now 58 years old, and never have I ever been able to get a comb through my hair without getting a fractured arm." It brought him the only resounding applause of the day. How black is Andy Young? As black as he needs to be.