 Good evening. My name is Larry Temple and as chairman of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation it is my distinct privilege to welcome you to the Tom Johnson lecture and to tell you a little bit about the man for whom this lecture is named. The Tom Johnson lecture was established by the OBJ Foundation to honor Tom and recognize his 30 years of service as chairman of the OBJ Foundation. Now I've got to tell you in candor in spite of what Tom sometimes says, he retired voluntarily over our protest and I did not push him out. Tom's career epitomizes both the promise and the potential of this great country. He has achieved the highest aspirations of any young woman or young man who wants to be a journalist or in the news medium. Tom Johnson has shown all of us what can be accomplished with a bright mind, a will to succeed and a commitment to work hard. His history is storybook. After getting his journalism degree from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Harvard he was in the very first class of White House Fellows. He worked there for three fairly remarkable people, LBJ, Bill Moyers and George Christian. He later became deputy press secretary to the president and special assistant to the president. When President Johnson came home in 1969 he insisted that Tom come here with him and Tom headed up the executive assistant office for the president. Later got involved in a very series of family businesses with the Johnson family. After President Johnson's death Tom began his climb up the ladder to the pinnacle of news media and journalism success. He first served as publisher and chief executive officer of what was then the Dallas Times Herald and the newspaper was named by Time Magazine as one of the five best newspapers in the South under Tom's leadership. Otis Chandler like LBJ knew talent when he saw it and he recruited Tom to become president and chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Times. Three years later Tom became the first non-chandler family member to take over the top spot, publisher and CEO. What happened under Tom's leadership? The Times reached record levels of circulation, profitability and revenues and received six, six Pulitzer Prizes under Tom's leadership. In 1990 Ted Turner stole him away to become president of CNN. He began his work the same day that Sodom Hussein invaded Kuwait and he brought that whole war to this country through CNN's coverage. People in the government were looking at what was going on in the war through CNN. And he at CNN received virtually every award in broadcast and cable journalism. Tom has received every significant award in recognition his profession can bestow. He was publisher of the year while at the L.A. Times. He was cable news network executive of the year while at CNN. He's received the Walter Cronkite Award for excellence in journalism and the Paul White Award which is the highest honor that the Radio and Television News Director's Association can give. Tom has served on more boards and commissions than I can recount or want to recount but the most important one is that he served for 30 years as chairman of the LBJ Foundation and is still a valued member of our foundation. But I want to say that what I think Tom's most enduring legacy will be and the thing about him for which I am most proud is the cause he has taken up since he left CNN. Tom has courageously, courageously and openly acknowledged his 20 year battle with depression and has devoted much of his life to helping others battle that insidious disease. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has done more than Tom to tell those afflicted that there's no reason to be embarrassed about and hide depression and that modern medicine can now contain and may someday be able to totally cure depression. Tom is a true hero in that fight. The highest accolade we all know that LBJ could pay to anyone is to say that he was a can-do man or she was a can-do woman. Tom Johnson is the ultimate can-do and has done it man. Before we launch tonight's program I want to ask Tom to stand so we can all recognize and salute him. Tom, it is now my distinct honor to present to you the person who will introduce tonight's program. While new to Austin, Shirley Franklin is not new to the public stage or public affairs. Shirley has a litany of firsts in her resume. When she served as mayor of Atlanta from 2002 to 2010 she was the first female to hold that post and she was also the first African American woman to be elected mayor of any major southern city. Prior to being elected mayor Shirley Franklin was the chief administrative officer of Atlanta and was at that time this country's first woman chief administrative officer or city manager of any city. Shirley has been listed as the best or one of the best in myriad categories of public officials by Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, US News and World Report, Esquire, Governing Magazine, American City and County Magazine. Fortunately for us Shirley Franklin has now been enlisted to come to the LBJ School of Public Affairs and she is the first again the first holder of the Barbara Jordan Professor of Ethics and Political Values. Please welcome Shirley Franklin. Thank you and thank you and good evening. It is my pleasure to join with Tom Johnson and Dean Hutchins and all of the faculty, students and friends of the LBJ Library for this wonderful occasion. I met Tom in Atlanta and have valued his counsel and insights on the history of our country and the way forward for a better world. I thank you for the opportunity to participate. This is the first invitation offered me as a newcomer to the school. What a way to start. I have known Andrew Young as a leader since my high school days when he and others sought to rectify the injustices in our country and the movement was recounted in church sermons and at the dinner table and rare school discussions. In those days I knew Andy from media coverage of the civil rights movement. Photographs of him and Dr. King and by Dr. King's side in Ebony magazine and Jet magazine, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Philadelphia Tribune and rare glimpses of him on television. Years later Andy would become my boss and one of my life coaches mentors and good friends. It is with deep respect and a great deal of awe that I offer comments and I introduce Andrew Young. Andrew Young has lived a life full of grace and determination. He has a big and inclusive vision of the world and the people who live everywhere around the globe. He was a confidant of Martin King, a friend in support of Coretta Scott King and countless other civil rights leaders and remains a close friend to hundreds of those who dedicated their lives to the movement. As a member of Congress representing the Fifth District of Georgia he shattered the status quo with his election and then again with his appointment as United States Ambassador to the United Nations by President Carter. He brought his compassion and love of people to bear on the political and policy issues of the time whether economic rights for disenfranchised Americans or US diplomacy in Africa. His choices, his relationships with everyday people are the work that he has done. His award winning Andrew Young presents documentary series tells the stories of triumph over hardship and injustice in the American South from Memphis to St. Augustine, Africa from Rwanda and South Africa to Kenya and also covers the views and his views on Gandhi and King. This film series builds on his photographic work of the 1970s and 80s and 90s and years of observations and experience on the cutting edge of public policy debate and political shifts in America and around the world. Through the Andrew Young Foundation Andy continues his advocacy for justice and fairness for all. The making of the Atlanta Project with Georgia State University, the Leadership Forum series at Morehouse College and multiple partnerships with the King Center and the Congressional Black Caucus. No matter his position or his acclaim, Andrew Young has lived with humility and a clear philosophy passed on to him by his father and mother, enhanced by his education, strengthened by his love and admiration for Martin King and the movement and all the people who contributed to add great peril to themselves. Andy has sought to understand the troubles and aspirations and hopes of others and to serve as their advocate, a bridge between the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and those in need. His influence and contributions span the world, spans careers as a minister of the gospel, as a high-ranking government official and advisor to heads of state, as an elected official, as an activist, as a coach and mentor to hundreds of young aspiring leaders, as a lecturer, an author, a philosopher and more recently as a philanthropist and a filmmaker. His autobiography recounts his deep faith in the goodness of men and women and his willingness to risk failure to uplift others and to advocate for them. No idea is too big for Andy, no problem too complex, no solution too controversial, no person too passionate to gain his interest and his exploration. In a recent interview, when asked what happened early in his life that helped shape his point of view, his philosophy, Andy tells the story of his youth. It's the way I was raised. I was blessed in New Orleans. I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another and the Nazi party on the third. My daddy had to explain to me when I was four years old why people were saying how Hitler 50 yards from my house. It was 1936. There was no air conditioning. The windows were open so you could hear them singing, he said. My daddy told me, you don't get mad in a struggle. You get smart. He said racism and white supremacy is a sickness. You don't let angry, you don't get angry with sick people. You need to understand them and you need to help them understand you. When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. It is this spirit, philosophy, this perspective that has informed Andrew Young's life, his decisions, his career choices, his relationships with everyday people for more than six decades. This evening we'll have the pleasure of having a conversation with Andy. Andrew Young and Mark, up in the loop. Say it again. Up to Grove. Yes, up to Grove. The president of LBJ library. You know, what can I tell you? Please welcome Andrew Young and Mark. Thank you. Welcome, Mr. Ambassador. We are honored to have you here tonight at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Thank you for being with us. Well, it's my pleasure and I have to say that all the troubles we're going to talk about in today's world, they're all Tom Johnson's fault. We used to be able to go to sleep at night and not worry about the rest of the world. And then he goes with Ted Turnin and Ben CNN and all of a sudden we've got to deal with all the troubles of the world every day. And as long as he was doing it and helping us to understand it, it made sense. But now everybody's telling us the troubles of the world, but their political advocates are not educators and formers and newsmen and women. But we miss you, Tom. The world does. You can get it on the right and you can get it on the left, but Tom used to give it to you right down the hill. Well, Mr. Ambassador, you have had a long and distinguished career, but you came to prominence, as Mayor Franklin suggested, in the Civil Rights Movement. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your background and what led you to join the Civil Rights Movement and your youth. I think it was just being born privileged. My grandparents had an education and my parents had an education, both of them. My father was a dentist, my mother was a school teacher. So even in that neighborhood that was racially mixed, my parents were the most educated people there and I had the most opportunities. Even though overwhelmingly it was a poor working-class white neighborhood. To go to school, I had to go to a segregated school about two miles away and there everybody was poor and so, you know, I wasn't white and I wasn't poor. I wasn't rich, but I realized how blessed I was and I had a grandmother who lost a sight when she was about 80 and I had to read the Bible to her every day, the Bible and the newspaper, at her feet from the time I was about 08 to 14, from her 88th birthday and just listening to her and one of the things she'd always say was, look, never forget to them to whom much has been given, of them is much required. It's not suggested, it's not expected, it is required and so you, when you grow up like that, you have no choice. You were an early proponent of using the tactic of non-violence in the movement. Well, it really wasn't, or not. No, because when I went to seminary, it was in the wake of Hitler's March Across Germany. So all that we were studying was Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and it was the era of power politics or real politic and Reinhold Niebuhr used to chastise the Christian church but not taking on Hitler early enough and that was where my education came. Now, I went to a little town in Alabama, Marion, Alabama, 30 miles from Selma and I met a young lady who was studying at Manchester College, a church of the brother-in-college and she had already had a course in New Testament non-violence when I met her. In fact, I went there after my first year in seminary and when I went to her house she was not home yet but there was a Bible that was underlined. There was a senior life-saving certificate on the wall and a basketball letter and I said who's this belong to and the lady who later became my mother-in-law said this is my baby daughter's and I said well I think God sent me here to marry your baby daughter. Providentially, one of the other families that got that kind of education was the Scott family, Coretta Scott, who later married Martin Luther King and there was a Quaker couple that came to marry in Alabama that sent Coretta and her sisters to Antioch College where they started the Women's Strike for Peace and where they were teaching non-violence. Jean went to Manchester College, a church of the brother-in-college, where New Testament non-violence was required and our wives introduced us to non-violence before the movement did. Both of us had read Gandhi. In fact, I can remember reading my first book on Gandhi and I was with at Warromann Lane who ended up bounding the Furlimo movement in Mozambique and he was convinced that this would work in Africa and I was arguing with him it would never work in the South and it was partially because I grew up listening to the Howe Hitlers and the Nuts and I knew the horrors of Nazi Germany and how to reconciling that with non-violence took me a little time. You joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became a trusted aide and friend to Martin Luther King. What was the occasion when you met Dr. King? Well, I went to Talladega College, a little church college outside of, well, not between Atlanta and Birmingham. Well, everybody knows the Talladega racetrack. There's a little college there too. And they invited Martin and me to a Religious Emphasis Week program and I always said he'd already been on the cover of Time Magazine. This was 1957. I was in a little country church in Thomasville and beached in Georgia and I said they invited him and figured he might not show up so they invited me as a backup and both of us showed up and we had a nice conversation but then when he realized that our wives had grown up together he invited us to stop off in Montgomery on our way back to Thomasville and the thing I remember was that I was trying to impress him with how much I knew and all he wanted to talk about was his baby. You know, Yolanda, I mean, Coretta had just given birth and Andrea, who's my daughter with me today, was about three months old and we ended up talking like fathers. But the thing that I think is most significant about that early period in his life is relevant today because this was in the wake of the Second World War and when his home was bombed all of the veterans showed up with their rifles and they were ready to go to war and he said no we've got to find a more excellent way if we an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth just leaves everybody blind and toothless and so he sent them home to put their guns up and and he involved, well they were already involved in a boycott of the buses and and the idea that non-cooperation with evil is as important as his cooperation with good led us into withdrawing our support from segregation but we weren't confronting segregation until 1963 really when when Birmingham Fred Shuttlesworth came to visit us in December and his church had been bombed for the third time in 1962 and there had been 60 unsolved bombings of homes and these were not fancy homes these were homes of young veterans who'd come back from the war gotten education under the GI Bill were getting good jobs and started building nice little frame houses with picket fences and planting as alias and roses and living like they thought Americans had a right to live but there was a clan group that was terribly offended by that so 60 of those homes had been bombed in 1962 and they'd been no word about it anywhere in the press and so Fred Shuttlesworth came over and said look we have to take segregation on directly and we're gonna do it next year whether you come with us or not but we need you and Martin knew and I was soon to learn that the reason they needed him was the threat of his death brought in the national press and I had a very one of the guys that had been with him CBS cameraman who had worked with him in Montgomery and whom we considered a very good friend pulled me on the side as we were going to Montgomery and said Andy look I'm gonna have to keep a camera on Dr. King because if they kill him and I don't get a picture of it I lose my job so I mean it was it was almost I mean everywhere Martin Luther King went he was the Pascal lamb to be sacrificed almost offering himself to be sacrificed what when you met him in 1957 did you did he strike you as the leader that we know today someone who would lead the movement to the point where we would get legal recognition of civil rights in this country you know he was very unimpressive deliberately because he was genuinely humble he laughed and joked and like you could get him to talk about his children you could get him to talk about his wife or his church but you get it you couldn't get him to talk about politics you couldn't get him to talk about theology you know and and I was trying to understand where this faith that he had came from you know and he didn't want to talk about that I mean it was it was it was his calling and but remember by 1957 he had already had his home bombed he'd been sued twice yeah he'd it was the next year that he was stabbed and in 1960 he was arrested in DeKalb County in Atlanta after coming from Montgomery to Atlanta as he'd be safe he was picked up picketing Rich's department store and when they let him go the DeKalb County police picked him up and charged him with violating a probation for having expired driver's license they took him into the jail and in the middle of the night they put him in chains and they took him down from Decatur Georgia to Reedsville which is about a four-hour ride on no expressways back then so he was in chains in the back of the car or the patty wagon I'm not quite sure but there was nothing back there with him but a German Shepherd and he was sure that he was going to his death and he would he always say look death is the easy part everybody's gonna die and you don't have anything to say about how you die or when you die you gonna die he said the only thing you have something to say about is what you die for and the only way you can have something to say about what you die for is devote your life to doing something that if you die it will live on after you and he would talk matter of factly like that about death even you know as a 30 year old and and then he would then if he saw you getting uncomfortable he'd say but you don't have to worry if they get you I can preach you into heaven and then he would start preaching he would start preaching and he'd say every embarrassing thing he could think of you and I mean listening to him preach your funeral was more like Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy than the Martin Luther King that you see I have a dream I mean he had a great sense of humor and other people's expenses we he is Martin Luther King has become part of the national consciousness we saw that last last week when Barack Obama took the oath of office on his and Abraham Lincoln's Bible but with mythology comes the distortion of history what are the greatest misconceptions about dr. King that he was serious though that was true but that that he was I mean every image we have of him has him on a platform before a quarter of a million people saying I have a dream they don't know the young man who struggled every day with death knowing that any morning that he woke up in fact when he was stabbed in New York by a demented woman he used to joke about that he said if you're gonna get stabbed get stabbed in Harlem he said they know how to deal with knife wounds but they they didn't just remove the knife they had to open up his chest but in opening up his chest to because the knife was pressed the it was a letter opener pressed against the mania order of his heart and so that if he had sneezed he would have probably bled to death so carefully they opened his chest and removed the knife but when they sewed him back up he had a cross as a scar and he said look every morning when I brushed my teeth I realized this could be my last and and I have to think about what am I gonna do today that's worth the living and dying for and so he was able to be serious and spiritually deep like that without being modeling and and and using humor and putting it on other people but he always knew well everything we did was photographed and monitored by somebody and that didn't bother us very much because part of what our message was that we wanted everything to be transparent people said we were communists and we wanted people to hear what we were saying and so we knew that our private conversations were bugged we knew that we were infiltrated by people agents of various sorts and he never wanted anybody exposed and he never wanted anybody criticized around the war in Vietnam we we were in in Switzerland together and we were meeting with the North Vietnamese and there were a number of senators there this was the beginning of the time against the war and and he was he was just very very sensitive about it all but he wanted people to know exactly what he was saying and what he was doing and he said he said you know we don't have any we don't take notes we don't write letters the only history we have is probably the FBI is tapping our phone calls and conversations and and we were we were confident of that and too he won the Nobel Prize and and all of a sudden we began to realize that not only were they reporting on us but they were making up stuff right and the you wrote an article last week you posted online around the inauguration in which you invoked the speech that Lyndon Johnson made in March of 1965 on voting rights in which he invoked the phrase we shall overcome to talk if you would about the meaning of that speech to you and and the circumstances under which you watched it well we watched it after James Reeve Viola Luzo and Jimmy Lee Jackson had been killed and we had marched from Selma to Montgomery and there was let me go back to the beginning because it when Martin won the Nobel Prize and came back we wanted to talk to Lyndon Johnson about voting rights and it was kind of hard because Hoover had a propaganda campaign on against Martin and I'm sure that I don't know what he was telling the president but he didn't want the president to meet with Martin Luther King when we landed in New York though Governor Rockefeller met us and Governor Rockefeller went up to Harlem with us and when Martin pledged that he was giving all of the money that he won with a Nobel Prize to the Civil Rights Movement Rockefeller got up and said well if you know if you can do that I can match it now for Rockefeller at that time was probably the leading Republican potential opposition to Lyndon Johnson so it put us it put it it was it was an awkward position because we were really nonpartisan or bipartisan and but we were invited to come down to Washington after meeting with Rockefeller and Rockefeller agreed to fly us down in his plane and but we didn't go straight to the White House we went to see the Attorney General Katzenbach and Vice President Hubert Humphrey and we talked about the importance of protecting voting rights across the nation but especially in the South and after an hour or so at the Attorney General's office we got a call to come on over to the White House well President Johnson had been briefed about what we wanted to talk about so we didn't get to say a lot we thanked him for what he had done in 1964 in the passage of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and we we said we don't think it could have been done without you and that that we will be forever grateful for this but the job's not complete until we can secure the right to vote and he agreed but he went on for the rest almost 50 minutes with all of the difficulties that he was facing with the economy with the Congress with everything and and I mean we had a great deal of sympathy for that situation but I think we saw the right to vote as frankly the only possibility we had of helping him to straighten out the economy and do the things that he wanted to do we felt that we could change the complexion of the Congress politically and socially if not racially with the simple right to vote and I'll never forget that after a very eloquent persuasive you know understanding of what his dilemma was he concluded with the fact you know the president doesn't have the power that people think he has and he thanked us for coming and we left and we were walking down that dark road from the press had gone there was no security back then you could just walk in and out of the White House almost something interrupted but we were going down that dark road from the West Wing and I said to Martin well what'd you think and he said almost flippantly I think we got a final way to get this president some more power you know and you know and we laughed because you know who were we but in less than a week after we got back from the Nobel Prize this was about the middle of December Amelia Boynton and Fred Reese to and another minister whose name I can't remember drove over from Selma to say look and Amelia Boynton had gone to Selma in 1929 as a 19 year old working for George Washington Carver and she voted in 1932 she registered to vote but she had been struggling with voting right since 1932 and now Jim Clark had put an injunction on them they would not even let her bury her husband in a church because churches were off limits for political meetings and there was when a local injunction that prevented anything that looked like a demonstration and no more than two students could walk down the street together coming home from school and it was rigidly and sadistically enforced so when Amelia Boynton laid that out to us we said well maybe this is the way we can give the president a hand and so we agreed that we would go to Selma on the 2nd of January to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation with the NAACP now for us to go there and hold a meeting to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation was against the law in Dallas County Alabama and but we knew that and it was the kind of deliberate civil disobedience that we informed the Justice Department we informed the FBI we even informed the sheriff that this meeting was going to take place and why we thought it was necessary but that began the Selma to Montgomery Movement from the 2nd of January and I think it was the 20th of March the consciousness of the world changed Jimmy Lee Jackson was killed and in carrying his casket to burial in a freezing rain we somebody said we should take this casket to George Wallace and laid on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol and we said no but maybe marching to Selma to Montgomery is not a bad idea actually the judges in Selma and Mobile would would not hear our cases and we felt that if we marched to Montgomery Judge Frank Johnson who had a reputation being tough but fair would at least give us a hearing so the march from Selma to Montgomery had emotional and legal implications and in that march where Ramsey Clark of Good Texan really did a heroic job of moving back and forth between George Wallace Martin Luther King Judge Frank Johnson he had to deal with Hoover in the FBI and the White House and I think he had the kind of trust of President Johnson that that he really did bring the power of the president down to Selma so that everything that was going on down there President Johnson knew about every day and so we were we were not shocked when he called for a joint session of Congress we were shocked when he ended the speech with we shall overcome and I think that's the only time I saw Dr. King cry but that was that was beginning of a kind of change that none of us could have imagined but that's the Lyndon Johnson that we knew that we loved that we worked with and we had very good relationships with the entire Justice Department and of course with Vice President Humphrey but the war in Vietnam began to escalate and that's when the tension began because the civil rights movement divided because we didn't want to weaken the president's position but Martin finally finally said you know I'm against segregation I can't segregate my conscience I can't be for non-violence at home and and believe that there is violence that violence can succeed abroad and for him as it was with race relations you condemn the sin but you love the sinner and he never spoke a harsh word about president Johnson in fact he was constantly trying to see that here was president Johnson caught between the generals who really some of whom at that time were wanting to drop atomic weapons on Vietnam but we were also getting calls from the Vietnamese Vietnamese monk Trich Nhat Hanh who's still a good friend of mine came down and and and spent a whole day trying to help Dr. King understand what was happening in Vietnam and we were invited to Switzerland to meet with the Vietnamese and we were convinced that the one you just had to stop this war and that once you stopped it well let me jump a little bit because voting rights acts passed I get elected to Congress and I'm at the UN and the whole theory of the voting of the Vietnam War was the domino theory that you didn't want China Russia and China and Vietnam to make the whole Southeast Asia Communist well what the the Vietnamese told us was that they needed America because they had more fear of the Chinese than they did of us and when I became ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter I had to mediate a war between Vietnam and China and I finally got both of them to condemn the fact that they were fighting and to withdraw from their troop from their each other's countries and and we established a kind of secure border but then there was a flood of American business in Vietnam and I later had to go back with Nike to because there were being criticized for their plants and they asked me to do an inspection of their plans so I went pretty much all over everywhere Nike had plants in Vietnam China and Indonesia for almost a half a year and I realized that we had little or no understanding of Asia and that the generals did not know what they were doing and the State Department did not know what it was doing I would have been in the war in Korea I finished in the class of 451 and one of my classmates Dr. Robert Hill your daughter be out here listening and saying amen every now and then because we went ROTC together and if we if we had gone to that war the class of 51 at West Point and everywhere else was killed later on I found out that from Harrison Salisbury and I've done a lot of reading on Vietnam I mean on Korea the Koreans the North Koreans were Presbyterian missionary children and when the State Department came in they had been fighting the Japanese and when the State Department came in they didn't know how to deal with these rebel Presbyterians which is what they really were and so they put the Japanese back in charge because they could control they felt like the Japanese were controllable right and they didn't know who these rebel religious folks were they were the ones that went to China and that Ho Chi Ho Chi, I mean, Mao set to North Korea and according to Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times in his book on the Long March Mao tried for several years to have a conversation with either Roosevelt or Truman to be reassured that the United States would not use Korea as a platform to invade China and the State Department would not let him talk to anybody because we were overwhelmingly pro-Shangkai-shek and at that time you probably too young to remember but I can remember MacArthur being a very very general MacArthur and General Patton with my father's heroes he felt like General Patton shouldn't have stopped in Berlin he should go on right on to Moscow while they down so and and he was anything MacArthur wanted to do in Asia go ahead and straighten it out now why everybody's weak so I mean I come from a good warmongering family but that's the way you get when you grow up on the corner 50 yards from the Nazi party sure yeah and most of his friends were Jews and we knew what was going on back then so but it still didn't mean that we had to it was dumb decisions that led to these wars and so that was sort of what led me in the direction of international non-violence and when doctor I talked to you about sometime just before when I was after that speech just before President Johnson decided not to run right you were talking about a conversation before we came in the ambassador was talking about a conversation that he that Martin Luther King had with LBJ a week before LBJ opted not to run in 1968 and two weeks before Dr. King was assassinated but it was it was a very sympathetic and cordial conversation and one where Dr. King was saying I know well president Johnson was saying I as I heard that the kinds of pressure he was in to escalate the war to do this that the other and and that he didn't know how to get out of this and when Martin got off the phone you know his attitude was golly it really is hard being president of the United States how do you make these kinds of decisions and and it was I mean we were prayerful supporters of his and what were really shocked when he decided not to run and I've always been convinced that because we had been through so much with him in the the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City when he you know continued the nomination and I mean continued the presidency of President Kennedy and and actually fulfill the Kennedy agenda right on up to this and if he had decided to run I think that as chaotic as the nation was that he had a record on which which all of us in the civil rights movement would have ended up supporting now what we were never good we were never good peaceniks because we were never anti-america and I was fortunate enough to serve with Jimmy Carter later on and one of the highlights of that administration was that he remained president for four years and didn't have any wars and didn't get anybody killed and didn't kill anybody and but we had the most aggressive diplomacy that any president has had before or since and I was of the I mean both I always say that Jimmy Carter was sit down with the devil because he believes that ultimately God is merciful and even the devil can be redeemed and you know and with that anybody we needed to talk to I wanted to talk to he said go ahead see what you can do and there was I mean there was so much that we were able to do that I think we learned we learned from some of the the failures right but the most difficult failure I think was not international it was the failure and it wasn't a failure it was the defeat of the great society Lyndon Johnson was a direct descendant of Franklin Roosevelt and he saw Franklin Roosevelt's new deal as really the fulfillment of promise in America for the American middle class but he knew poor people you know he knew poor people he knew I mean immigration was not a I mean he was a Texan he understood the problems he understood black folk and and you didn't have to tell him what the difficulties were and he wanted through the great society I think to fulfill that American dream and but would we lost that election by one percentage point of the vote that began the repeal the attempted repeal of the great society and the new deal they tried to say that the great society was for black folk which is we're not we're there were always many more poor white people in America than they were black or Hispanic and and Lyndon Johnson understood that and was was was was morally bound I think as Dr. King was to the least of these God's children and you know Dr. King would say you know the only thing they're gonna ask you and have they're not gonna ask you about your degrees or your your awards or your bag account it's gonna say did you feed the hungry or did you close the naked did you you know give water to the thirsty and that that Judeo-Christian vision I think was the guide has been the guide of American politics even when you had people like Lincoln who refused to put it in and or even Jefferson put it in Christian and terminology but that's where the vision of America comes from and I think that the Dr. King and Lyndon Johnson president Johnson had shared that vision if either of both of them had lived or served longer we wouldn't be where we are now we are now almost 50 years on after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 next year or marked the 50th anniversary we have an African American in the White House we are seeing gay rights recognized throughout the country increasingly women are breaking through glass ceilings that were a barrier to them earlier what should what battles in social justice should we be waging today in America well I think that the first thing I think of is female trafficking I mean the the the book that I think Nick Kristof and his wife wrote on half the sky right suggests that in the height of the slave trade there were 50 to 100 million Africans that were brought here as slaves but if you look at the enslavement of women around the world of a planet of six and a half to seven billion people there probably two billion women that are in in a condition that we would consider enslavement whether it's child marriage or female mutilation or rape is an act of war or sex trafficking and and I mean and and that that is a global human rights problem that I think can't be addressed until we addressed well till we pick up what president Johnson was trying to do for America was in poverty now as Tom Johnson's fault we know about the poverty and problems all over the world right and I think the dilemma that faces America now is that Tip O'Neill was right all politics is local but we live in an age when all economics is global now more money is transferred every night electronically than existed in the world that Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King lived in right and so we don't we don't have a clue we don't have a value system we don't have a structure and so the fact the color of the president doesn't make a whole lot of difference in the dilemma of a global economy and you have a whole lot of really brainy kids I mean I can keep a whole Congressional Library in my coat pocket you know and and and I can download I can Google anything and anywhere and and and the world is so complex technically the technology is about hope not but it's almost like it's a half century ahead of global ethics and and that we don't I mean well I've spent a not a lot but enough time in China and India to realize that if they do not remain stable and if we cannot stabilize the Arab world reasonably then it undermines the economic fabric of the whole planet that whether we like it or not all these tornadoes and things didn't used to happen it it didn't used to be summertime in January in Atlanta but that's what we've been having you know and and I mean thing the whole planet requires a new vision and I I support Barack Obama because I think he has the intellectual capability of providing that vision but he can't get away from the day-to-day difficulties of I mean who gives a damn about a debt ceiling I mean it's it's not an issue so money is an abstraction and you know and and it'll work out but that's what the and you got a Congress that's all very young I doubt that half of them have passports they don't know I mean a majority leader like Lyndon Johnson would I mean I don't but maybe he could handle the Senate but the present leadership can't well it's a problem because because they don't have the relationships sure so I mean the relationship that he had with with Richard Russell who they disagreed violently but they were friends so and and they they were able to do what they believed it was in the best interest of the country we don't have that anymore we don't have a Congress I mean I was was saying that I used to sit I mean Barbara Jordan used to sit between me and Charlie Wilson and you know and and I mean it was it was a I mean Congress was fun and and you learned a lot and people would come up to you and and I mean I learned more in the cloakroom at Congress than I learned in college but people don't talk to each other anymore it might have started out telling dirty jokes but it ended up being building a relationship where you could go to somebody as a friend and you could be honest and well I think one of the big successes I had was getting Newt Gingrich and and Jack Kemp to be the lead signers of the boycott of South Africa and I said look you guys say you're not racist you're conservative South Africa wants to be a democracy and we can help them be a democracy but I couldn't get the Democrats to go first but when I got and and I like Jack Kemp because I said Jack how did you learn to deal with race he said Andy he said there were five big burly black guys that stood between me and destruction every Sunday 50 times a game his offensive line yeah and he said if I had a racist thought all they had to do was turn one shoulder and I'd get clobbered and and and and but we we had we had a good bipartisan kind of climate that we've lost you could hear in Barack Obama's speech last week him drawing the battle lines for his the second term in office but Lyndon Johnson said that after when a president gets elected he's a giraffe for six months and thereafter he's a worm what should Barack Obama do while he's a giraffe how should he spend his political capital well I think he's responding to the the crisis that are presented by the people and I think you almost have to do that but the problem is not guns so the problem is jobs and you got six to seven billion people if you define a job as 30 hours a week year-round according to Gallup and Jim Clifton's little book the war coming jobs war we have 1.2 billion jobs to stabilize the planet he says we need at least three billion jobs in the next couple of years now you're not going to get that fighting over the dead ceiling you're not going to get that in gun control I mean it's not that I I mean if Martin Luther King had not sent the guys home with their guns and put them on a nonviolent agenda we wouldn't have the South as we have it now and so as much as I want them to have political victories I think that as soon as possible well when you add to that another fact I've run across is that what happened to the money that Halliburton made in Iraq so I mean they made I think it was like six billion a month for almost nine years normally after the Second World War the automobile companies built tanks and they brought that money back into America and it created taxes for a GI Bill and you know highways and I mean we redeveloped America and came out of the recession on the basis of the Second World War we even rebuilt Germany and Japan we can't do that on the Iraq war because they didn't bring the money back and when somebody wanted to do an audit and investigation they moved to Dubai and declared themselves not an American company now I'm not I'm not making a judgment now I'm not condemning them but I'm saying that there's about 21 trillion dollars in tax havens around the world that's the minimum the United States total economy is only 16 trillion the Japanese economy is 5 trillion so if you take the Japanese economy and the US economy out of the world economy what are you going to get a recession and no I mean who gives a damn about a debt ceiling so I mean I forgive me but I'm I mean that's these are irrelevant issues the issue is how do we get that money back in circulation now Shirley can back me up or she can tell you I'm lying when I leave but by and large that's what we focused on as mayor she was running the city and we realized that they had all of this we used to call it petrodollars back then but we figured there was a half a trillion petrodollars that were in Swiss banks and and you know Lichtenstein and and all over and if we could get it into circulation and so we developed big projects that are in and around Atlanta and we were able to bring 70 billion dollars and 1,100 companies into metropolitan Atlanta during the 80s and then when she was mayor and in after the Olympics she did even better than that because we created a climate where we had big imaginative visionary things like the sewers but we were able to get a seward she she gets the reputation for being the sewer mayor but we don't flood in Atlanta anymore because we rebuilt our sewers and and and we went to Wall Street with tax exempt bonds and we did we didn't we had a sales tax on for sewer but with the airport we didn't tax the citizens at all for the Atlanta Airport and the Atlanta Airport now according to generate we may have put 10 billion dollars of tax exempt municipal bonds in the airport but the last report I had was that their 434,000 jobs and the airport generates 52.3 billion dollars for the area right around the airport now the people who bought those tax exempt bonds were making 6% tax exempt throughout the recession for the most part and government bonds are 1% or 1.5% but the municipal bond market that a city like Atlanta that keeps a triple double A rating has been able to draw on we've been able to do almost anything in the city without raising taxes and instead of occupying Wall Street we were up there bringing money out and and we were we arranged for Wall Street to be the conduit for a lot of these projects that helped to take Atlanta from a billion a million people now to just about six million people see we got enough and Austin is doing well but we need St. Louis to do well we need the Mississippi Valley to stop flooding so and and there's no safer place to put your money than the middle of the United States of America these people are hiding their money because they say they're not many places in the world where their money is safe the politics is corrupt but if you can create a climate where your money is safe where people are honest and efficient and we began to put some of that tax money I mean tax well I was I got to get another name for it but it's it's underutilized resources that that need to be put to work if we're going to I mean Egypt is 35 million people in an economy that works but they got 90 million people and so for another 50 million people the economy is not working that can't be solved with a war that can't be so I mean it requires a new vision Nigeria we taught them democracy we taught them about education and they turned out a million college graduates a year but no jobs that's a recipe for chaos and disaster so it seems to me that that the president has to first of all help the American people to realize that while politics is local and we're going to deal with local issues to survive as a planet we have to put a global economy to work we have time for two questions from the audience evening ambassador welcomed Austin a year and a half ago I heard you speak at Haley Farm and you told a poignant and a compelling story about being removed from first grade and the aftermath and the repercussions of that decision in your life could you tell that story well it was really third grade I got put out in third grade and I got put out a class for playing with an ice pick in the back of the room with another boy I was I was too young to be in third grade but you know they put me there because I could read and write and I ended up to keep from getting beat up I hooked up with the biggest baddest boy in the class and we were playing mumbly pig in the back of the room and we both got put out that changed my life because I was about to drop out of Howard University because I really was confused and I was lifeguard at the swimming pool and this kid came guy man came in who got put out with me in third grade and he asked me what I was doing and I told him I was messing up and about to drop out and he he said look I said where have you been he said I've been in and out of every prison in Louisiana and I said well why didn't you come back to school he said my mother was making a dollar a day plus car fare and we had five I had five brothers and sisters she could not take a day off to come see about me so he never went back to school from third grade but he sat there and lectured me on how I was wasting my life and how he was his he didn't have to tell me he was as smart as me but you the only lesson was there but for the grace of God go I and there's nothing special about me I just have been lucky and blessed and so that put me under a burden to go back to school and to barely finish and find a way to try to amount to something because is he the the charge that he gave to me was you've got to make the world work for people like me so that we can have some of the same opportunities you have and I'm still trying to do that and and it's just now for the first time and I don't know how long the governor of Georgia is realizing that it doesn't help to just lock people up and that we're beginning to have serious discussions about prison reform and so that was that was I mean when I couldn't hear my parents this reason I believe in public schools I learned more lessons about what not to do from the failures of the people around me and that I could never have learned from my parents and I you can't hear it from your parents but when you see it I mean there was drugs were never a temptation to me because there was nothing romantic about it was the sick poor kids in fourth and fifth grade who were smoking this funny stuff and it was making them sick and and you know you I say that that Valenice Jones public school is where I got my degree between that and my neighborhood that's where I had to become an ambassador to survive last question for the ambassador hi we can hear me right here thank you for this conversation and master young when you were asked earlier what civil rights caused this country should pursue you said human trafficking but isn't human trafficking just one symptom like gender discrimination racism or the Atlanta summertime in January of a larger system of economic inequality that this country continues to endorse and promote towards the rest of the world towards the end of dr. Martin Luther King's life he began to understand the relationship between white supremacy and a system of production dependent on equal distribution of wealth this is what he was doing operating organizing the poor people's march in Washington when he was killed in your opinion can we claim the United States has moved past white supremacy when it still continues to endorse a system of self-interest as we saw in the factory fires in the u liberalized Pakistan that dr. King understood to create the possibility of white supremacy well I think I think he would realize that it's not just white supremacy there is a class structure in America that and and also I mean no criticism Martin Luther King was a democratic socialist and I think that that one of the things that I have we experienced I think in Atlanta is that we couldn't we couldn't legislate a redistribution of wealth and that we didn't need to that what we had to do was to legislate equal economic opportunity and growth so the manor Jackson would not build the airport and less 25% of every contract went to minority and female contractors and we had affirmative action but they'd usually give the women in the black folk the hardest jobs with the lowest profit margin may not made the difference and I think that's the only city where that every single contract that went on from that airport and that we do in the city during those days between Maynard me and Shirley they were fairly distributed with the Olympics we raised two billion two and a half billion dollars in the Olympics and 40% of the of the Olympic money went to minority and female contractors and we include and minority Hispanic and Asian we don't mean just black and and when people raised the fuss out of first of all the Olympics was done as a private sector venture it wasn't government funds and we said look if we are able to pull this Olympic off and raise two billion dollars it's going to bring in another five to ten billion dollars a year of private funds that are not controlled by the city and you get 90% percent of that money at least but if we start fighting over 40% of Olympic money the 90 you won't the money of the money won't come there the Olympics brought money into Atlanta in fact the day we won the Olympics UPS moved to Atlanta I think I and G moved to Atlanta and Olympic hotel built a a facility that I think is now the four seasons but all that happened in one day and we have had a steady stream of economic growth because we have a stable inclusive social economy and and I think I think that's the way we have to deal with and and including women I pick on female trafficking simply because that's the biggest and it's the one I feel most guilty about I got three daughters and three granddaughters and and they are not immune to the problems against women and and to the discrimination against women and they they're more women than men in the on the planet and they probably have been more productive with less opportunity so I think if we can get women mobilized and and and and and and have a women's movement it'll take care of things like the environment and it's it's sort of like with with Dr. King everybody said well why aren't you talking about jobs that was the problem then but if we had talked about jobs in 1960 we'd have been communists we talked about lunch counters you know and and lunch counters led to jobs but you you you in in social well leadership responds to whatever is emotionally compelling and in fact the last thing I would have thought could have started a movement was a bus boycott because I didn't ride the buses that much say and but a bus boycott was where it started and and then sit-ins and you know and and we've been moving up the ladder and I don't know how to cut this short but but it's a continuous process we used to sing a song freedom is a constant struggle we've struggled so long we must be free but there's still some other freedom struggle that and I say that I used to wish that my children wouldn't have to go to jail and get beat up for what they believed in and then I said that's not fair best days of my life were out in the civil rights movement you know why would I want to deprive my children and my grandchildren of you know standing up for something they believed in and and learning that there's some things in life that are well worth dying for and you know you just hope that it's the right thing well Mr. Ambassador you talked about how moving it was for our 36th president to say the words we shall overcome I want to thank you not only for coming to his library but for doing more than almost anyone alive to help us to overcome thank you very much