If “don’t get mad” sounds like advice for a traffic jam, Andrew Young’s version came with higher stakes.
Young learned about the proximity of danger to everyday life in New Orleans. He learned about self-protection from his father, a dentist, but also about how to keep his wits about him enough to know when it was time to stop resisting and just walk away. “Don’t get mad. Get smart.” This became a theme that applied to the work Young would do as a pastor, as a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., and as a public servant.
This inner discipline appears in Young’s memories of 1964, when he and other protesters were beaten during a march for racial equality in St. Augustine, Florida. They did not fight back. Instead, Young remembered, women in the group began singing: “You can’t make me doubt him. I know too much about him. I got the love of Jesus in my heart.” During the movement’s most intense moments, the music was often church music, and the training was often spiritual formation long before it was applied in the streets.
At 93, Young is bringing that memory and moral lexicon to a new educational initiative targeting students who are sensing the rising temperature in the nation. The Andrew Young Higher Education Initiative, launched as a weeklong intensive at Anderson University in South Carolina, teaches the formative principles of the movement: nonviolence, the affirmation of the dignity of human life, and the religious imagination that fueled them. Some 50 students attended the inaugural offering, and the plan is to reach 500 as the initiative expands to other campuses, including Christian colleges and historically black colleges and universities.
The initiative is developed in collaboration with Matthew Daniels, a law and human rights professor at Anderson, and Anthony Jones, the chair of the HBCU Committee of the College Board. In the classroom, the initiative goes beyond the telling of old stories. Students are challenged to grapple with the role of Christianity in the Civil Rights Movement, to cultivate practices of nonviolent engagement, and to articulate the moral vision of the King era in the contemporary public square without simplifying it to slogans. In the pilot program, students visited King’s home in Atlanta and wrote their own versions of the “I Have a Dream” speech based on contemporary issues.
The outreach to HBCUs is more than a nod to the movement’s history; it is part of the historical educational trajectory of the movement. Historically Black colleges were training grounds for young activists, from the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 at Shaw University to Fisk and Morehouse, which incubated disciplined protest, leadership, and the type of communal support that made bravery the rule, not the exception. This is important for a program that encourages students to “practice” civic character, not just admire it.
It also emerges in a society where many Americans think that conflict is increasing and hardening. In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 3,445 U.S. adults, 85% said that politically motivated violence is on the rise, while majorities said that both left-wing and right-wing extremism are major problems. The same study revealed a common gripe that transcends party lines: people don’t know how to speak to people they disagree with, and news environments reward anger.
Daniels shows how the message of teachings that focus on human dignity can be like an “inoculation” against extremism training the reflexes before the crisis comes. The example of this is the life of Young himself: church basements and sanctuaries as practice rooms, hymns as a means of keeping fear from dictating the next step. In this way, the initiative is not nostalgia for the 1960s. It is a curriculum centered around a question that many students already have: “What does it look like to stay brave and clear-headed when the world insists on turning disagreement into an enemy?”
