Andrew Young, a renowned African-American statesman and politician, has served his city, state and nation with distinction during the last third of this century. A former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, mayor of Atlanta, and United States Congressman, he serves at present as co- chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. His book, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, will be published in November 1996 in the United States by HarperCollins.

In the following article, Ambassador Young reflects upon his own ties to the Olympics, and upon the spirit and values at the core of the 1996 Centennial event.

I've always been an Olympic fan, from the day my father took me to a segregated movie theater in New Orleans, Louisiana, to see the newsreels when Jesse Owens won in 1936. My dad used the Olympics to explain two things to me -- one, the significance of Hitler's claim about a master race, and two, the way Jesse Owens quietly and athletically crushed that claim. That experience, when I was four years old, helped me believe that I could do anything I trained hard or worked hard to do -- and that skin color and place of birth were not necessarily limitations.

All through college and even afterwards, I was trying my best to make the Olympics, as a sprinter in training. I never smoked, never drank, tried to keep in good condition. Those personal Olympic values really carried over into my politics and my professional life. They state that nobody ever loses when they catch hold of the Olympic dream.

When we in Atlanta started out to pursue it, as a city, we felt that even if we didn't get selected, it was a wonderful experience to start, in 1988, dreaming about 1996. By being chosen, it means we have a chance to showcase the values and the vision of a people living together in peace and prosperity, in spite of the fact that there are many cultural differences.

The Olympics have always represented a healthy approach to the diversity of the human race. The Games, coming to Atlanta at the end of this century, in celebration of the Olympic Centennial, present a unique opportunity. Never in history have so many countries -- 197 in all -- agreed to come together. Because of the pace of technology, somewhere between two-thirds and four- fifths of the human race will see something of the Games through some mass media -- sharing the same positive experience by coming together as one, to witness both the differences and similarities in their cultures as their countries compete in sports.

Atlanta's selection as the site, in large measure, grew out of a recognition that we understood what was at stake. During the bidding process, when representatives of the International Olympic Committee visited us, invariably they saw someone from their same heritage doing well in Atlanta. When IOC representatives from Latin America came here, they saw a man of Hispanic descent as president of Coca-Cola. I was working for the largest engineering firm in the city. Its chairman and CEO happened to have been born in India. He came to the United States as a 17-year-old, got his engineering degree and worked his way to the top. Most of the city government is of African descent. We have Asian banks, manufacturing and telecommunications firms all functioning in our city. Every visitor could take a measure of personal pride in something, or someone, in Atlanta.

They recognized as well a mutually supportive global commitment. During my eight years as mayor, we brought in more than a thousand international companies to Georgia. Some 300 Japanese companies had created 70,000 jobs. That also helped build our support with the IOC.

The site selection representatives saw something else, too -- a spirit of volunteerism. For instance, even though the visitors lived in hotels, they were entertained in our homes, with our families. We did that for them because we didn't have any money! But it turned out to offer a rare opportunity. Many of our guests had been to the United States on a number of occasions, but they'd never been in a typical American home, or to a backyard barbecue or fish fry. They got a chance to experience that with us in Atlanta.

Our ethnic diversity helped us too. When St. Patrick's Day was coming around, we had our Irish-American citizens invite the IOC representative from Ireland for the parade and a game of golf. The Dutch businesses invited the IOC representative from The Netherlands. And the Polish neighborhood group told the Polish IOC delegate, `we not only want your team to come, but we also want to make our homes available to the families of your athletes at no cost, so they can come and share in the Olympics.' It went from that gesture to an Atlanta host committee sponsored by AT&T that is involving a thousand churches.

This was really a wild, crazy dream. Nobody gave us a chance to win. And we did it with no government money. It was basically a gathering of about 25 or so families that volunteered their time and their own funds to pursue this dream. Only when we were designated -- after competing against 14 other U.S. cities and then the rest of the world -- did Atlanta and Fulton County and Georgia contribute some money to help us get started, money the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games is going to pay back.

Even though we were raising most of the money privately, we wanted to include everybody in the planning and decision-making; we wanted fulltime interaction with community groups right down to the grass-roots level. We have the broadest possible board of directors -- probably the first such Olympics board that includes individual millionaires, executives of major corporations and welfare mothers.

We're also making sure that everyone will share in this Olympic experience, and in the growth and economic development that will result. Forty percent of our spending and construction went to black and female-owned firms -- one of those cases where affirmative action really worked.

We've also made it an Olympics of the American South -- not just limiting it to Atlanta. Besides the yachting we have planned in Savannah and softball in Columbus, there'll be white water competition up in Tennessee, soccer over in Birmingham [Alabama] and down in Miami [Florida] -- and even in Washington, D.C.

The eyes and ears of the media -- globally, but even closer to home -- are on us as we go about our work. It's interesting that when the local newspaper was assigning reporters to cover the Games, it picked one man who didn't particularly like the Olympics and didn't even like sports. He told us that that was specifically the reason he was assigned. The role of a free press in a society like ours, you see, is to be analytical and critical. Because we knew he wasn't necessarily going to be sympathetic, it meant we had to be very self-critical. That's another lesson we learned. It has kept us on our toes, and means that everything we're doing will be done right in the open, where the public and the media can scrutinize it.

Atlanta, I believe, represents America at its best. We came through the civil rights movement of the 1960s without violence. It would have been very easy, after the Second World War, for us to turn on each other. We could have been another Beirut or Bosnia. But it was really mostly our religious foundation -- led by Martin Luther King and others -- which spurred us to solve problems without destroying either person or property. Non- violent problem-solving, therefore, is also part of the Atlanta legacy we hope to share with the rest of the world. We have all of the problems, divisions, insecurities that the rest of the world has -- but we've made a habit of dealing with them around a table, talking them through.

We have black banks that are about 100 years old, black banks and insurance companies that go back almost to the beginning of this century. We built this city, which today has a black majority of about 65 percent, from the black perspective -- around religious faith, education, political opportunity and free enterprise.

You know, in the 1960s, Atlanta came up with a slogan -- "a city too busy to hate." When we were bidding for the Olympics, we took some IOC members to visit a kindergarten where the children had made an Olympic Village out of Lego blocks. These four-year- olds, preschoolers, were asked by one of the visitors, `Do you want the Olympics to come to Atlanta?' And they all jumped up and screamed, `Yes!' Then the visitor asked, `Why should the Olympics come here?' And one of these four-year-olds said, `because we're a city too busy to hate.'

Photo credit: Courtesy Ambassador Andrew Young.

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