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Civil Rights Leader Peddles Hope in a Big Box

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Times Staff Writer

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to present the case for civil rights to the white establishment, he turned to Andrew Young.

Forty years later, Young, a silver-tongued civil rights leader who represented striking sanitation workers in Tennessee and helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been recruited to promote Wal-Mart as a company that serves the poor.

Young announced last month that he would be chairman of the national steering committee for Working Families for Wal-Mart -- a new group funded by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to counter criticism of the company’s treatment of employees and effect on local communities.

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Young sees his new role -- which involves making public appearances and writing opinion pieces in support of Wal-Mart -- as consistent with his life’s work.

“All my life I have tried to fight poverty,” he said in a telephone interview from New York. “Jesus told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and heal the sick. Well, Wal-Mart is feeding the hungry good fresh food.”

Although some African American activists have long complained that Wal-Mart pays low wages, offers inadequate health insurance and has a poor record of promoting minorities, many business-oriented leaders think Wal-Mart could play a significant role in revitalizing impoverished inner cities by providing inexpensive goods and new jobs.

Young himself would like to see a Wal-Mart in every poor urban community.

“To have a Wal-Mart in your neighborhood means you can live a middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “Wal-Mart has done extremely well in small rural towns, but the most lucrative market is the inner city. It is a trillion-dollar economy and it is definitely underserved.”

Wal-Mart has more than 3,900 stores across America, many in suburban and rural areas, but its shares have fallen more than 10% over the last year amid concerns about slower growth and labor issues.

Minorities are a huge part of the urban market, said Jeffrey Matthew Humphreys, director of the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, who published a recent report showing that African American buying power in the U.S. has increased from $318 billion to $760 billion in the last 15 years.

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In two weeks, Wal-Mart will open its first store inside the freeway loop that surrounds Atlanta and distinguishes the city from the suburbs. The Gresham Road store is in a struggling, predominantly African American community not far from gentrifying neighborhoods.

“We’re trusting and hoping that Wal-Mart revitalizes the area,” said James McWhorter, church administrator of the Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church, which acted as a pre-hiring center for the new store. Nearly 5,000 people applied for 450 jobs.

Yet many communities here -- including Andrew Young’s own affluent neighborhood in southwest Atlanta -- oppose Wal-Mart’s plans to move into their areas, complaining that the huge stores will bring traffic, noise and crime.

Although Young admits he would prefer Wal-Mart to build a store farther from his home because of congestion, he believes that Wal-Mart can have a positive role in most urban neighborhoods, and there are other African American leaders sympathetic to his view.

Joseph Beasley, the Southern regional director for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said many mom-and-pop stores had taken advantage of poor African Americans.

“Many residents would love to have a Wal-Mart come in,” said Beasley, who works in a poor northwest Atlanta community where, he said, small stores often charge high prices for spoiling meat and vegetables and impose 2% fees for cashing checks.

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But Wal-Mart critics cautioned against welcoming the stores simply because residents wanted one in their neighborhoods.

“One of the things my generation has a problem with is that we silence and mute social justice for the sake of sponsorship of a chicken dinner,” said the Rev. Markel Hutchins, 28, associate pastor at Philadelphia Baptist Church in Atlanta. “We should not forget that Wal-Mart makes its money off the backs of those whom we serve.”

Yet others credit Wal-Mart with making attempts to improve its business practices.

Last year, Black Enterprise magazine listed Wal-Mart as one of its “30 Best Companies for Diversity,” based on the basis of what it called significant representation of blacks and other minorities.

After opening a new diversity office in 2003, Wal-Mart announced that executive bonuses would be cut if women and minorities were not promoted in proportion to the number who applied for management positions.

Still, Young’s defense of Wal-Mart shocked the company’s critics.

Paul Blank, campaign director for WakeUpWalMart.com, a 150,000-member group backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, suggested that Young serve the poor by helping to make Wal-Mart a better company.

“Wal-Mart is creating a permanent underclass,” he said. “It’s in direct contrast to the ideals of economic and social justice in America.

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Young said Wal-Mart critics took special cases and generalized from them. “In a big corporation they could find anything they wanted to find,” he said. “If you’ve got human beings, you’ve got problems.”

He described the issue of health benefits as “disingenuous,” arguing that insurance was a concern for the poor or elderly, not for people with jobs.

Wal-Mart is not the first private company that Young has supported. After serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta, he set up GoodWorks International, a consulting group for corporations.

In 1997, Young established a contract with Nike. After touring factories in Asia with Nike interpreters, he said he found no evidence of widespread mistreatment of workers. Young was criticized for not addressing the issue of low factory wages.

Young said the arrangement with Wal-Mart -- he refused to say how much the company will pay him -- enabled him to do exactly what he wanted to do.

In his later years, Young explained, he has become disillusioned with trade unions and government and has turned to the private sector to generate wealth in poor communities.

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“What I’ve found is that if you want to generate wealth, you have to be where the money is,” he said. “The challenge for democracy and free enterprise in the 21st century is to do for the poor what Roosevelt did for the middle class.”

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