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Young personally urged other liberal candidates to stay out of the Florida race and give Carter a chance to win in a head-on contest with the old segregationist. He stumped the state and helped garner 70% of the black vote for Carter—enough to give him his victory margin over Wallace. By then, Jimmy Carter had convinced Young that he could go all the way. Though Carter has not taken all the stock liberal positions. Young feels that blacks are instinctively sympathetic to him. "Jimmy doesn't need that much advice about black issues," says Young. "His childhood was with blacks. He knows the poverty of rural Southern people firsthand. We've had the kind of experience in Georgia that is practically unmatched anywhere else in the world. Atlanta is the only place where a banker or a big businessman and a welfare mother might end up at the same cocktail party." This contrasts, adds Young, with the "adversary" style of politics in the North. "We have a black-white partnership in Atlanta. In the North, liberals want to solve problems for blacks."
Like Carter, Young is a product of the emerging biracial South. Son of a New Orleans dentist, he graduated from Howard University and Hartford (Conn.) Theological Seminary and was a minister in several Georgia and Alabama Congregational churches. In the 1960s he became a deputy of King, and negotiated desegregation with white authorities in various communities. Elected to Congress in 1972 from an Atlanta district with a white majority, he is the first black Georgia Congressman since Reconstruction. Some fellow blacks in Congress criticize him for not being militant enough, but he prefers compromise to confrontation. Says he: "You don't get anything by demanding the whole world at the top of your lungs."
If Carter is elected, Young could probably have almost any job he wants, and some people say he aspires to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. But he professes to be content where he is. When Carter's stubborn streak erupts, Young figures, he can smooth things over for him on Capitol Hill. A member of the House Rules Committee, Young likes to plot strategy and work behind the scenes to make Government more responsive. "To me, it's a wonderful game to get that big bureaucracy moving." His ultimate goal, he says, is to become Speaker of the House. Few people in or out of Congress would call that an impossible dream.