The Mediator

Atlanta's Fifth Congressional District has all the elements that Vice President Spiro Agnew wants to mix into Republican election victories. There are the resentful white workers in automobile assembly plants, middle managers worried about inflation, and old-time gentry upset over the erosion of their ancient values. The Fifth also has a black minority (one-third of the voters) divided between slums as desperate as any city's, and a middle-class area of preachers and teachers centered around the Atlanta University complex. Now a black civil rights leader has a good chance to represent the Fifth and become the first Georgia black in Congress since Reconstruction.

The Rev. Andrew Young, on leave from the executive vice-presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, last week easily won the Democratic nomination. With the aid of white votes, he beat an old-guard white opponent. Young, 38, carried his campaign to teas with wealthy white matrons in the ornate mansions of the Northside and to revival meetings in the plain black churches of the Southwest.

Early Lessons. Throughout, his pitch was conciliation and moderation. "We see democracy at work," he said at his victory celebration. "We see the American system at work. This gives a message to students, the alienated, the intellectuals and the liberals across the country." The ballot count was also a message to his Republican opponent, Incumbent Fletcher Thompson. In the primary runoff, Young's appeal was broad enough to attract as many votes as Thompson, an archconservative, polled when he won the seat in 1966.

Racial and class accommodation is not a new approach for Young. Before he left his job as top aide to King's successor, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, he had always been the liaison between black demands and white recalcitrance. "Andy's a born conciliator," an S.C.L.C. staff member said.

If not born with it, Young learned negotiation early as a black child in New Orleans: "I was taught to fight when people called me nigger. That's when I learned that negotiating was better than fighting." Young's parents (his father was a dentist, his mother a schoolteacher) taught him to read before he was of school age, so he entered elementary school in the third grade. At 19, he was graduated from Howard University, where he was a premedical student. A newly awakened social awareness then steered him toward the Congregational ministry.

Klan Confrontation. "I very soon realized my preaching wasn't doing any good because the society was so rigidly separated, so oppressive of my church members," he recalls. "I saw almost from the beginning that you had to get people involved politically."

Young started a voter registration drive in Thomasville, Ga., only to have counterdemonstrating Ku Klux Klan members thwart his campaign. When the civil rights movement gained momentum in the early '60s, Young joined King and the S.C.L.C.

Young helped lead the marches and took his share of arrests and beatings. He was in charge of the demonstration the day in 1963 that Birmingham's Bull Connor set dogs on the marchers. But it was as a behind-the-scenes man, a bargainer, that he made his mark. He helped to construct the settlements of racial disputes in Birmingham and Selma and was a negotiator in the hospital strike in Charleston; he was the mediator in Resurrection City who tried to unite blacks, Mexican Americans and Indians.

Though not a galvanizing public presence, Young is justified in saying: "Nobody can challenge my credentials in the movement." Also, he can and does claim to have influence with white leaders. Young thinks he can join them in Congress because "Atlanta is ready to move beyond racism."

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