The day I met Andrew Young

It was a great honor to share the podium with Ambassador Andrew Young at Penn Center’s 1862 Circle Induction Gala at the Sonesta on Hilton Head Island.

He was inducted, thanking Penn for “getting me started on my way.”

I spoke on behalf of inductee Joseph “Cap’n Crip” Legree Jr. of St. Helena Island, best known as one of the last Gullah cast net makers.

The audiences greatest response was when Young said, “Down here, the spirit moves slow and deep.”

He really does know us.

The history books say so.

Long before Young became a congressman, mayor of Atlanta or United States ambassador to the United Nations, even before he was a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. and a leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the heart of the civil rights movement, he was at Penn.

On the afternoon before the banquet, two Saturdays ago, Young saw again for the first time the quiet, sandy campus of Penn, this time from an electric wheelchair.

He tried to piece together what took place where during the days of singing and arguing and planning as King brought his leaders to retreats at Penn.

Today’s Penn director, Rodell Lawrence, said Young took lots of pictures. And I got a lot of pictures to prove I once shared a stage with Andrew Young.

Young told the crowd that he came back to the place he was introduced to she crab soup and hand-clapping as a musical instrument, to say “thank you.”

The great civil rights meetings here all ended with singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” he said. And that always started with the clapping.

But he also came this time to teach.

He said as a young man he was off up North as a pastor, but his wife wanted to leave and he said OK. And he took a job with the Highland Folk School in Tennessee, but soon lost it. It was an interracial place when that was not accepted, and about the time he got there it was temporarily closed because the state said they were bootlegging.

That’s when Young was introduced to so-called moonshiner Septima Clark of Charleston.

She lost her teaching job in the Lowcountry after admitting to be a member of the NAACP, then against state law for government employees.

She took the lead of Johns Island entrepreneur Esau Jenkins, who was someone like our own Crip Legree, Young said, because he was one of those people with a “third-grade education but a Ph.D. mind.”

In the early 1950s, Jenkins taught people to read and write in buses he had to haul them from Johns Island to work and school in Charleston. It was so they could pass literacy tests and vote.

From that came the citizenship schools movement, led first by Clark at the Highland Folk School. It became grounded at Penn, and Young, Clark and later Dorothy Cotton would lead a program that trained thousands of people to teach blacks from Virginia to east Texas what they would need to know to get registered to vote.

“We taught them as adults,” Young said. “We tried to teach them that they could read because they were already reading Coca-Cola signs and things like that.”

In 1964, Young became executive director of King’s SCLC. In March of that year, it held its first retreat at Penn Center, founded in 1862 as a school for freedmen before they were officially free.

For Young, the rest is history.

But before he asked his audience to do some of the Gullah clapping, and before he said “amen” and sat down, he taught us this:

“Teaching literacy and voter registration was the basis of the civil rights movement, and it came from here, and most of you don’t know it.”

This story was originally published April 29, 2017 at 4:28 PM with the headline "The day I met Andrew Young."