Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and civil rights activist Andrew Young, long at the forefront of advancing equal opportunity in the United States, recalled in a recent interview with Kyodo News his experiences as an athlete during the racial segregation of the 1940s and the "thrill" of seeing African American swimmers begin to triumph on the Olympic stage.

Young, 86, who also served as a U.S. congressman from Georgia and a two-term mayor of Atlanta, pointed out that "it takes a support system" to train as a competitive swimmer and that further development is needed at a time when disparity in access to pools and coaches remains a barrier.

(Andrew Young)[Photo courtesy of Andrew J. Young Foundation]

"I happened to be a swimmer because I grew up near Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, and it wasn't because we had any swimming lessons or training," said Young, who competed in track and swimming for Howard University from 1948 to 1951. "There were just very few of us (African Americans) who could swim at all."

Having come of age in prewar Louisiana before the groundbreaking professional careers of athletes like Jackie Robinson in baseball and Earl Lloyd in basketball, Young recalls racial segregation as a fact of life that limited his early participation in sports.

When barred from competing in local track meets against white runners -- whose race times he saw in the newspaper and knew he could beat -- Young was left to develop his promise as a track athlete on his own, without formal meets or training.

"I never walked to the grocery store -- I ran everywhere," he recalled.

Success on the Howard University track team led to an opportunity to train at New York's Pioneer Club in hopes of qualifying for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Though Young ultimately chose ministry work in Alabama over athletic training in New York, he encountered a level of support and potential in track that was almost entirely unavailable in swimming.

"The way my father explained to me white supremacy and racism was to take me to the movies, a segregated (theater), to see Jessie Owens in the 1936 Olympics," Young said. "I had my role models in track. But there were no role models in swimming."

It would be decades before Fred Evans became the first African American to win a national collegiate swimming championship in 1975. The emergence of African Americans at the pinnacle of Olympic swimming only began in 2000 with Anthony Ervin's gold in the 50m freestyle at Sydney.

Maritza McClendon (nee Correia) made history by qualifying for the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where she helped the U.S. women's swim team win silver in the 4 x 100m freestyle relay. Twelve years later, Simone Manuel became the first African American woman to win individual gold in an Olympic swimming event when she took first place in 100m freestyle at the Rio Games in 2016.

(U.S. Olympic swimmers Cullen Jones, left, and Simone Manuel talk during a red-carpet event before the Golden Goggle Awards ceremony in New York City on Nov. 19, 2018.)

The 22-year-old Manuel, who turned pro in 2018 after a collegiate career at Stanford, is a key swimmer in the U.S. Olympic team's prospects for Tokyo 2020. She told Kyodo that apart from her training for World Championships and the upcoming Olympics, she is keen to continue participating in learn-to-swim clinics for underserved communities.

"My goal is to help diversify the sport of swimming," Manuel said. "There aren't that many people (in swimming) that look like me. A lot of African Americans do not know how to swim."

"I'm hoping that my swimming and them seeing me on TV can inspire them to get into the sport of swimming and learn how to swim."

According to USA Swimming Foundation statistics, 64 percent of African American children have little to no swimming ability, leaving them at significantly greater risk of drowning than those with basic water safety training.

U.S. swimmer Cullen Jones, who won two gold and two silver medals when competing at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2012 Games in London, also said expanding access to swimming is one of his top priorities.

"We've already reached four million children," Jones said of his work with the Make a Splash initiative over the past decade. "I love it. Seeing all the kids learning something new every time they touch the water is just beautiful."

"To break that generational problem (of) people not knowing how to swim and not teaching their children -- it's been my life's work, besides diving in and trying to touch first in the 50 and 100 (meter races)," he added.

For Andrew Young, who remarked that "it's just a thrill" to see African American swimmers like Jones and Manuel win at the Olympics, his own efforts toward social change started after his college days as a competitive athlete.

Young worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in U.S. civil rights efforts to end racial segregation policies, and helped to draft antidiscrimination legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As mayor of Atlanta from 1982 to 1990, he also headed the city's successful bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics, which brought new sports facilities to the area including an Olympic-size swimming pool at Georgia Tech.

"For us, the centennial Olympic Games was really the birth of an international city. Nobody knew Atlanta, and they were shocked when we won," Young said, contrasting it to "well-established" Olympic cities like Tokyo, which first hosted the Games in 1964 and is currently gearing up for 2020.

"Tokyo should have a wonderful Olympics," he said. Though the former diplomat no longer travels to the Games in person, he said he looks forward to watching from home and hopes the spirit of inclusiveness is preserved in the long run.

"The fundamental basis for the Olympics was peacemaking and not just competition and performance. I don't want us to lose that if we can help it," Young said.