Justice & Law Quote by Andrew Young

There is a quiet provocation in Young framing civil rights as poverty work, not just moral theater or courtroom drama. He collapses two buckets American politics loves to keep separate: racial justice as a question of dignity and representation, and economic justice as a question of wages, housing, and power. The line is plainspoken, but it lands like a rebuke to the sanitized version of the movement that gets trotted out every January: civil rights as a finished chapter, culminating in legal equality, conveniently detached from the material conditions that made segregation so durable.

Young also uses the word "involved" strategically. It signals proximity rather than heroism; not saviorism, but sustained participation. That humility is doing work. It positions him as an organizer-pastor in the tradition of the Black church: a public servant whose credibility comes from long contact with the poor, not from ideology. The second sentence, "That's what I've been doing all my life", is a claim of continuity - and a warning against fashionable amnesia. He is insisting that the movement's through-line is not only protest but provision: jobs, services, coalition politics, and the slow grind of governance.

Context matters. As a key lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr., later a congressman, U.N. ambassador, and Atlanta mayor, Young lived the handoff from street to state. The subtext is that civil rights leaders are often criticized for "leaving" the movement when they enter institutions. Young flips it: if your goal is to help poor people, then policy, budgets, and international development are not a betrayal; they're the point.