He helped direct the massive campaign against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and his success at the negotiating table in winning important gains for Birmingham African Americans led to the selection of Young as executive director of SCLC in 1964.
Young marched at King's side in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964; Selma, Alabama, in 1965; Chicago in 1966; and Memphis in 1968 and was at the motel in Memphis when the civil rights leader was shot and killed on April 4, 1968. Young remained with the SCLC as its executive vice-president for two more years, but increasingly articulated the view the movement would have to shift from protest to political action.
Congressman, U.N. Ambassador, and Mayor
In 1970 Young resigned from the SCLC to seek election to the United States House of Representatives from Georgia's nearly two-thirds white Fifth Congressional District in Atlanta. Young lost the congressional race to a conservative white Republican incumbent, but ran strongly enough to pre-empt the Democratic field for a rematch two years later. In 1972, with the Fifth Congressional District having been redistricted by court order to increase the proportion of African American votes to nearly 45 percent, Young put together a coalition of African Americans and white liberals to defeat his Republican opponent by a vote of 72,289 to 64,495, becoming the first African American to be elected to Congress from the Deep South since the Reconstruction Era.
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