An Open Apology to Andrew Young

Found by John Ballard

While scanning Chirpstory I came across this wonderful riff on Tax Cuts that is great entertaining reading. (By all means check it out, but first read what follows here.)
Curious who put it together, I discovered a very prolific blogger whose Twitter bio says  @AngryBlackLady Moonlighter at TheGrio.com. Recovering Lawyer. Pyromaniac. Grammar Enthusiast. I will figuratively blow your mind. #Obamalover #TFY #Obama2012.

The eloquent comment below was left by a commenter at one of her blog posts.

I'm posting it here not only because it is insightful but because I am an avid fan of Andy Young. At the time I was finishing college he was running for Congress and his campaign button was a simple blue square saying "Think Young." He lost that race but was later elected to Congress and appointed UN ambassador by Jimmy Carter. I have followed his career with admiration and was privileged to serve him a few times in my cafeteria.  

This comment is not about Young, however.
It is about taking a longer view of the Obama presidency.
I think it's excellent.

AN OPEN APOLOGY TO ANDREW YOUNG

�I want Barack Obama to be president,� pausing for effect, �in 2016�It�s not a matter of being inexperienced. It�s a matter of being young,� Young said. �There�s a certain level of maturity � you�ve got to learn to take a certain amount of sh*t.�

He went on to say that Obama needs a protective network that he currently lacks � a quality that could hurt him if he were to be elected. He said Hillary Clinton already has that kind of network, including her husband to back her up.

�There are more black people that Bill and Hillary lean on,� Young said. �You cannot be president alone. � To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion. His time will come and the world will be ready for a visionary leadership.�

When Andrew Young made those comments I was incensed. I was appalled that a freedom fighter who stood with Dr. King through thick and a lot of thin who took the slings and arrows with Dr. King to pave the way for someone like Barack Obama to become president would want to stop this progress either out of fear or some perverse loyalty to the Clintons whose policies by and large were antithetical to what Dr. King fought for. But his words have proven prophetic.

I�m an absolute believer that history is a window into the future. I was so offended by Andrew Yong�s derisive tone that I couldn�t appreciate what he was fully saying. He was speaking from the experience of standing under Dr. King when he stood atop Mount Sinai after leading us out of the land of apartheid and being there to catch him when white folks and cowardly Negroes pushed him off that rock for daring to believe that he was truly free to speak his mind. He was warning us that Dr. King�s past would be Barack Obama�s future. We just didn�t want to hear it.

Nowhere on the stones that adorn the new King Memorial�truly a glorious testament to this giant among men�will you see any evidence of the tumultuous last year of Dr. King�s life when he went from a patriot to traitor in the blink of an eye. But certainly those must have been memories Andrew Young was recalling when he made those comments about Senator Obama�s presidential candidacy. I thought he was hating, but he was merely saying �I�ve been there.� Black folks like me just didn�t want to hear it. We all wanted so desperately to get out of the desert and into the promise land.

While most of us are unaware or elect to pretend not to be aware that Dr. King was arguably the most hated man in America at the time of his death, Andrew Young remembers. He remembers when Dr. King went from Time Magazine�s person of the year in 1964 to being branded a traitor by the same magazine only three years later when he dared to speak out against the Vietnam War. And it wasn�t just editorialist of the all the major magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, that echoed this damning sentiment, other so-called civil rights leaders, friends and clergy turned against him as well. In a Harris poll released before his assassination 75% of whites and even 55% of Negroes expressed an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King. If they could turn on Dr. King so easily, what chance in hell did Barack Obama stand? NONE!

People will argue President Obama should have done this or should have done that, but there was NOTHING that he could have done or said to have changed the inevitable. He was always going to be held to an impossibly high and double standard. He was always going to have to contend with the opposition of the entire Republican Party who still embrace the Dredd Scott rule that a Negro has no rights that whites are bound to respect and the left wing of the Democratic Party who always cannibalize Democratic presidents, as they ALWAYS do. LBJ is suddenly back in favor with liberals after 40 years of never being mentioned publicly by any prominent Democratic and risk reminding the world that LIBERALS destroyed the presidency of the man who passed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Medicare. As Andrew Young correctly notes, Bill Clinton succeeded in defending himself from the left with the protection of the black establishment. The same establishment that sees President Obama as a threat to their access to (white) power.

I�ve asked CBC apologists like Roland Martin to explain why Maxine Waters, John Conyers and the rest of the CBC that have been in office since before I was born why they didn�t �unleash� on Bill Clinton after welfare reform; three strikes laws; the continuation of the disparity between powder and crack cocaine sentencing; one strike public housing rules which resulted in the eviction of countless poor black mothers and grandmothers from public housing; the Omnibus crime bill which gave rise to the industrial prison complex and historic rise of black and brown for profit incarceration; the drug penalty added to the higher education act which kept tens of thousands of mostly young black and brown kids out of college because of misdemeanor drug convictions, which ironically George W. Bush modified to make less draconian; NAFTA which was the biggest blow to labor since the Reagan era; DOMA which effectively legalized Gay discrimination; DADT; and on and on? His response, �They tried.� Tried what?! The few black folks to speak out against Clinton�s assault on poor black folks were Marian Wright Edelman, Reverend Sharpton and Minister Farrakhan. Certainly not Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson Lee, Tavis Smiley, Cornell West or Donna Brazil. None of them! � President Obama has been the most progressive president since LBJ, and he gets, as Andrew Young predicted, crucified. He not only gets blamed for what he hasn�t done to their satisfaction, he gets blamed for not cleaning up Bill Clinton�s sh*t fast enough. Nothing was ever going to be good enough for them, and we couldn�t see it.

Don�t get me wrong. I have no regrets about electing our president. I am as proud of him today as I was in 2008. And I will work my ass off to see him re-elected. Unlike �progressives� who talk a good game about championing the nameless poor and disenfranchised, I know these people by name. They raised me, nurtured me, sacrificed for me, and prayed for me to have a better future than their pasts. And I will be damned if I�m going to leave them vulnerable [to] the hell they will face from a souless and heartless Republican president and Congress. This country while blinded by impatience, hate and racism may not see it, but it still needs him. The only thing I regret is that neither he nor we, his supporters, were prepared for what he would be up against from the right, left and the Negroes on the Democratic plantation.

Andrew Young warned us, and we should have been prepared.

There is a string of positive replies to this comment at the link.