Veteran Civil Rights Activist and U.S. Diplomat Andrew Young to Deliver 2026 Evers Lecture on Sept. 3
Andrew Young – a veteran civil rights activist who served as a Georgia congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a former mayor of Atlanta – will deliver the Medgar Wiley Evers Lecture on Thursday, Sept. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Two Mississippi Museums.
Young will reflect on his life in public service and his longstanding ties to Mississippi in a conversation with Ebony Lumumba, a Foundation for Mississippi History board member and the department chair and associate professor of English at Jackson State University. The event, which is free and open to the public, will also feature a special performance by singer and dramatist Ayanna Gregory, daughter of the late comic and civil rights icon Dick Gregory.
“We’re honored to welcome Ambassador Young back to Mississippi,” Two Mississippi Museums Director Michael Morris said. “We’re looking forward to hearing him reminisce on his time here with Evers and other figures of the movement.”
In 1961, Young was named director of the Citizenship School Program housed at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, when Martin Luther King Jr. was president. He first met Medgar Evers through his work with the SCLC.
His involvement in the Civil Rights Movement included being a key strategist in campaigns that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In Mississippi, Young participated in James Meredith’s March Against Fear in 1966. That same year, he accompanied Black students as they entered previously segregated schools in Grenada, Mississippi, alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1968, Young helped launch the Poor People’s Campaign, a national movement focused on economic justice and the needs of Americans living in poverty.
Young was elected to Congress in 1972, the first African American from the Deep South since Reconstruction. In 1977, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by President Jimmy Carter. He was elected Atlanta’s mayor in 1981 and re-elected in 1985.
“It is a rare opportunity to hear directly from a civil rights veteran who played such a significant role in ensuring all Americans have access to their constitutional rights,” Morris said.
Young has received honorary degrees from more than 100 universities and colleges in the U.S. and abroad and has received various awards, including an Emmy Lifetime Achievement award in 2011 and the Dan Sweat Award in 2017. His portrait also became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
The Medgar Wiley Evers Lecture Series was established in 2003 to honor the legacy of Evers, a civil rights activist who was the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. His widow Myrlie Evers presented the Medgar and Myrlie Evers papers to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2002.
Previous Evers lecturers include Joy Reid, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Lonnie Bunch, Henry Louis Gates, Robert P. Moses, and Manning Marable.
The event is sponsored by MDAH, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.
In 2014, the Kellogg Foundation awarded $2.3 million to MDAH to support programming at the Two Mississippi Museums and fund a partnership between MDAH and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.
The Two Mississippi Museums—the interconnected Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum—opened December 9, 2017, in honor of the state’s bicentennial. The museums take visitors through the sweep of Mississippi history and the state’s role as ground zero in the nation’s Civil Rights Movement.
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