Andrew Jackson Young, Jr. (born 1932) was a preacher, civil rights activist, and politician who served as a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as a U.S. congressman, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and as mayor of Atlanta, Georgia.

Andrew Jackson Young, Jr. was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 12, 1932, the grandson of a prosperous "bayou entrepreneur" and the eldest of two sons comfortably reared by Andrew J. Young, a dentist, and Daisy (Fuller) Young, a teacher. He and his brother grew up as the only African American children in a white, middle-class neighborhood in New Orleans. In 1947 he graduated from Gilbert Academy, a private high school, and entered Dillard University. Intending to become a dentist, he transferred to Howard University the following year.

After graduating with a pre-medical B.S. degree in 1951, however, Young decided on the ministry and enrolled in the...