Andrew Young first had the idea more than fifty years ago, back when he was a young congressman. Now, in the Atlanta neighborhood where Martin Luther King Jr. grew up, it’s finally taking shape.
The Andrew Young International Institute for Peace and Reconciliation will rise in Vine City — a fitting capstone to one of the most consequential lives in Atlanta history. Young has been a civil rights leader, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Georgia congressman, and two-term Atlanta mayor. Across all of it, he has bet on a single idea: that people who disagree can still sit down and talk. The institute makes that bet permanent.
The lesson goes back to his New Orleans childhood.
“My daddy taught me when I was four years old, don’t get mad, get smart,” Young recalled. “You’re going to disagree with people, and they’re going to disagree with you, but if you lose your temper, that stops your thinking.” As one of the only Black children on his block, he learned early how to get along with everyone — a skill that would shape his entire career.
The institute itself traces back to his years in Congress, where Young introduced a bill that helped create a peace center in Washington, just blocks from the White House. He left Capitol Hill in 1975 for the UN but never let go of the dream of bringing that idea home. Decades later, as the city turned a vacant lot into Rodney Cook Sr. Park, the pieces fell into place. The institute will sit beside the park, around the corner from Sunset Avenue — the very street where Dr. King once lived.
Location is the heart of the plan. With Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Emory, and Atlanta’s HBCUs all nearby, Young envisions a hub where students from different campuses earn dual degrees and practice the increasingly rare art of talking across differences. “We have thousands of students here who would benefit,” he said.
It’s a skill he learned from Dr. King himself. When King wanted to organize in Birmingham, he sent Young — who admitted he didn’t know a soul there. King gave him a month to change that. Why send Young? “Because you don’t mind talking to people,” King told him. “You talk very well to people who are different.”
For longtime residents, the project means something. Sally Dorn had just moved to Atlanta when Young became mayor. “He was such a pillar in the community for what it means to be an influential leader and civil rights activist,” she said, hoping the institute inspires the next generation. “You never know who could be inspired to be the next great leader by their time in the institute.”
The work is already underway. Invest Atlanta has approved $2 million in public funding, and the city has helped reroute stormwater around the property. “So we’re just getting started,” Young said.
If anyone has earned the right to begin something new at this stage of life, it’s him — and he sums up the whole endeavor in the plainest terms. “You have to learn how to get along with other people, and it’s not automatic,” he said. In a city that has always wanted to be a place of peace, that may be the most Atlanta sentiment of all.
