An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America

Andrew Young is one of the most important figures of the U.S. civil rights movement and one of America's best-known African American leaders. Working closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he endured beatings and arrests while participating in seminal civil rights campaigns. In 1964, he became Executive Director of the SCLC, serving with King during a time of great accomplishment and turmoil. In describing his life through his election to Congress in 1972, this memoir provides revelatory, riveting reading. Young's analysis of the connection between racism, poverty, and a militarized economy will resonate with particular relevance for readers today.

In An Easy Burden Andrew Young draws on his own life's experiences to recount with both passion and objectivity one of the most dramatic periods in U.S. history.

-President Jimmy Carter

There is no better personal account of the struggles of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement than Andrew Young's An Easy Burden. The strategies, the alliances, and the debates that created the greatest social movement America has ever seen are here in a personal and touching story.

-Juan Williams, Senior Correspondent,Morning Edition

Andy Young's courageous participation and strategic leadership were crucial to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. His political witness and theological insight are indispensable to any understanding of those historic events.

--James H. Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary

A personal account of America's civil rights movement by a prominent insider.

Andrew Young was born in New Orleans in 1932. In 1960, he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He served as its executive director from 1964 to 1970. He was elected to three terms in Congress and two terms as Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. He was the first African American to be appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.