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Georgia Today: 'Sanctuary city' bill introduced; GA Health care study; civil rights icon Andrew Young
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On the March 13 edition of Georgia Today: The state government tries to crack down on so-called "sanctuary cities" and some cities and counties push back; a new study compares health care spending in Georgia to the leading causes of poor health and early death; And at age 93, civil rights leader Andrew Young says he has no plans of slowing down.
Sofi Gratas: Welcome to the Georgia Today podcast from GPB News. On this podcast, we feature the latest reports from the GPB News team. You can send us feedback or story ideas to Georgia@Today@GPB.org. Today is Thursday, March 13. I'm Sofi Gratas. On today's episode, the state government tries to crack down on so-called "sanctuary cities," and some cities and counties push back. A new study compares health care spending in Georgia to the leading causes of poor health and early death. And at age 93, civil rights leader Andrew Young says he has no plans of slowing down.
Andrew Young: My purpose is to do God's will each and every minute of my life — and to kind of figure out exactly what that is.
Sofi Gratas: These stories and more are coming up on this edition of Georgia Today.
Story 1:
Sofi Gratas: Cities and counties are pushing back against a bill being considered by state lawmakers that could lead to lawsuits against local governments with so-called sanctuary policies. Senate Bill 21 would increase the consequences for cities and counties found not to be following state and federal immigration laws by making them pay damages in court. Larry Ramsey, of the Association County Commissioners of Georgia, told a panel of state House lawmakers yesterday that the bill would encourage lawyers looking for payouts from local government.
Larry Ramsey: There will be efforts by plaintiffs lawyers to turn everything into a sanctuary policy. So they will — again, I've seen this in other contexts, where I could see a cottage industry rising.
Sofi Gratas: Senate Republican leaders, including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, says the bill is aimed at public safety and follows President Trump's actions on border security.
Story 2:
Sofi Gratas: A new study from the Institute for Health Metrics compares health care spending in Georgia to the leading causes of poor health and early death. Researchers want to better understand the connection between health care and health outcomes. GPB's Ellen Eldridge has more.
Ellen Eldridge: Despite heart disease having the largest impact in Georgia, patients are spending the largest part of their health care dollars on Type 2 diabetes, joint and musculoskeletal disorders. Joe Dillman is the author of a study evaluating 77% of all health care spending across the U.S. He says the results show how health care needs vary.
Joe Dillman: Type 2 diabetes impacts everyone, of course, but a lot of the spending — the majority of the spending is on the above 65 population. Whereas other musculoskeletal disorders, the majority of the spending is the working age.
Ellen Eldridge: Dillman says oral and dental disorders comprise the third-largest health spending category in Georgia. For GPB News, I'm Ellen Eldridge.
Story 3:
Sofi Gratas: A team of independent monitors says Atlanta's Fulton County conducted a, quote, "organized and orderly" election last year. The county has struggled in the past with long lines and slow reporting. Republicans, led by Donald Trump, made it the center of false claims about voter fraud. After intense scrutiny of its 2020 election, county leaders implemented wide-ranging changes that appear to have paid off. Today, a team of independent monitors partnered with the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which observes elections all over the world, and including a former Republican state election board member, concluded the county administered a, quote, "smooth, secure and accurate" election in 2024.
Story 4:
Sofi Gratas: President Donald Trump has withdrawn the nomination of David Whelden, a former congressman from Florida, to lead the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. Senate committee today announced hearings on his nomination has been canceled. A person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the White House no longer supports Weldon because it became clear he did not have the votes for confirmation. Whelden was considered to be closely aligned with now U.S. Health Secretary and vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Weldon also questioned vaccine safety and the CDC's role in vaccine oversight.
Story 5:
Sofi Gratas: As the temperatures go up and people head outside, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and bird scientists are encouraging a big cleanup of outdoor bird feeders. Normally, birds like cardinals, chickadees and mourning doves would not be eating in one place all the time together. We change that behavior when we put up bird feeders, says Todd Schneider, wildlife biologist with the Georgia DNR. We also increase the risk of disease spread.
Todd Schneider: A lot of the diseases that can affect bird populations can be transmitted at feeders.
Sofi Gratas: For example, songbirds get sick from salmonella every year. It's usually fatal. So Schneider says it's important to clean bird feeders and remove what gathers under them every few weeks.
Todd Schneider: Moist environments, environments where there's a lot of debris on the ground — if you have a lot of feeders in one area, that's a good environment to breed bacteria.
Sofi Gratas: And since humans can get sick from this bacteria too, they should wear gloves and maybe a mask when cleaning up.
Story 6:
Sofi Gratas: Saint Francis Emory Health Care in Columbus, in West Georgia, has named Robert Parker as its new CEO, effective immediately. Parker comes from Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital in Kentucky and has more than 20 years of health care leadership experience. He replaces former CEO Melanie Tremble, who left in November. Parker says he's focused on continuing the hospital's growth, including recruiting medical professionals and enhancing patient care with new technology and facility upgrades.
Story 7:
Sofi Gratas: From marching in Selma to serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young has shaped history. Now 93, he looks back on his extraordinary life and the work still left to do. GPB's Pamela Kirkland spoke with Yang recently.
Pamela Kirkland: So you turn 93 in just a few days. Quite the milestone. Looking back, do you feel like it's gone by really quickly or really slowly?
Andrew Young: I don't know. I really have — I don't know how to gauge it. It's — it's a funny thing about birthdays. Everybody has them, but nobody knows what to do with them. And some people like to have parties. Some people like to be alone. I don't like to celebrate mine, but they always celebrate it because I'm always doing something, and the something I'm doing wants to celebrate. Now it's — I'm trying to get a foundation going that will help continue my work after I'm gone.
Pamela Kirkland: I heard you tell a story once that after you graduated from Howard University when you were 19, you were in King's Mountain, N.C., and you ran up the mountain and you got to the top, and you said you thought to yourself, okay, if everything else on this earth has purpose, I also must have some kind of purpose. Looking back now, what do you think your purpose is?
Andrew Young: My purpose is to do God's will each and every minute of my life — and to kind of figure out exactly what that is. Is quite a challenge. It's worked out pretty good for me because I had a college degree, but it was in biology and chemistry, and I had decided I didn't want to be a dentist. But I knew that there must be some purpose for me, and the basis of knowing my purpose is that there's something I can do that nobody else can do. And that's what's happened to me. I have done what nobody else wanted to do.
Pamela Kirkland: After seminary school, it's a panel at Talladega College where you end up meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Andrew Young: Well, yeah, but before that, I got a call from my conference superintendent of the Congregational churches, and he asked me, would I go to a pastor of a little church in Marion, Ala? Well, I'd never been to Marion, Ala., and never been to Alabama much. And I said, no, I'm sorry, but I've already decided that I'm going to go to New York, and I have a job at a settlement house helping young people. And I'm going to train for the 1952 Olympics. And he came right back at me and he said, but if you don't go to Marion, Ala., we'll probably lose a church. And I said to myself, damn. And I mean, he put it in just such a way that I couldn't say no. So I found myself in a little English Ford that I bought. And I'm driving down to Marion, Ala., for the summer and I — I cried half the way because I didn't want to be going there. I didn't know what I was going into. As soon as I got there and found out where I was going, the first family I visited, there was a Bible on the table and I opened the Bible and it was underlined. And I said, "Who reads the Bible?" And they said, "Oh, this is my daughter's Bible." She said she took a course. She had to take a course in New Testament nonviolence and then, to blow it all out of proportion, I looked at the next frame and there was a senior lifesaving certificate with Jean Child's name on it, and I said "I was on Howard University's swimming team." And I come down here and here's a woman with a Bible and a basketball letter and a swimming and a lifeguard certificate. And I'd never seen her, but I'd seen her mom and daddy. And I said, "I guess the Lord sent me here to get a wife." And — and I decided before I met her that that's the woman. That's what I was there for.
Pamela Kirkland: Yeah. And it was your wife at the time and Coretta Scott King, who got along so, so well.
Andrew Young: Well, they not only got along well, but they — Coretta was from Marion, Ala., too, and went to the same high school. And so she and Jean knew each other. When I, I came back to this little church in Thomasville, Ga., and my fraternity had a religious emphasis week, and they had invited Martin Luther King to come to speak. And then they were afraid that he might have to cancel. So they invited me as a backup. And both of us showed up. So that's how I got to meet him. But there again, I mean, I haven't done a thing by myself, but everything in my life is laid out for me. And so that's the way I've lived my life since. Because that worked out so well.
Pamela Kirkland: And looking back on that and just thinking about, as you said, how things were just laid out for you. I've heard you say before, you don't believe in coincidences, but you do —
Andrew Young: I think coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. And I figured all these things happening to me couldn't be without meaning. And in order to define the meaning of those things, I had to believe in God and that there was somebody in control of heaven and earth. And just like he commissioned the trees to shine and to grow, and the cornfields that look good and the sky to be blue, there was something for me to do. And — and I was — I was being dragged into it slowly but wonderfully.
Pamela Kirkland: This month marks the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. What do you remember the most about Bloody Sunday?
Andrew Young: Well, unfortunately, what I remember was that Dr. King told me not to march and — otherwise, I'd have been in the front line getting beat up. ... But he was coming over that afternoon. First place? The march on Bloody Sunday was a mistake. It was the first Sunday in March and we thought it was the second Sunday, or at least the people did. And the difference is that none of the ministers — ministers have to be in their churches on the first Sunday. And so all of the ministers were in the churches — in their churches back in Atlanta. Joe Lowery was in Nashville, I think, or somewhere. Mobile. But people — two or three hundred people showed up wanting to march from Selma to Montgomery. And so I — I called Dr. King and talked to him while he was in his pulpit. I said, "we can't turn these people around." I said, "now there's a group of policemen at the bottom of the hill." They're not going to let them go far. And I don't know whether they're going to arrest them or just turn them around." And he said, "Well, don't you go." Well, Hosea [Williams] and John — John Lewis was representing SNCC and Hosea was representing SCLC. And he said, "I'll be over there this afternoon" and "You don't get arrested." And that's what we thought might happen. And so I was — I prayed to get, get them going, but I stayed in the back of the line. So I was not in the, uh, I was not in the tumbling, but I — This was '65 and I had had a pretty good beating in 1964, in Saint Augustine. And so I, I kind of knew what it was like and I wasn't anxious to repeat it, but I would have. And — Because we didn't know. And in fact, Bevel and I — James Bevel — used to say that we could talk the police out of beating us up. Because we never stop talking. We never stop reasoning with them. It wasn't police that beat me up in Saint Augustine. It was the Ku Klux Klan who had been deputized by the sheriff. But anyway, I didn't need another beating. That was — that was a moment that we did not plan that way. And what we didn't know was that in the cities of the North, most of the cities you know, from Washington up to Boston and all the way out to Chicago, there were snowstorms. The movie that was playing on TV was Judgment at Nuremberg, which is Hitler's persecution of the Jews. When the film was over, they cut to Bloody Sunday and people saw the relationship. They saw Hitler in Nazi Germany, and they saw Sheriff Jim Clarke in Selma, and they made a connection. And that's what awakened the Congress and the citizenry, and especially President Lyndon Johnson.
Pamela Kirkland: I want to ask you about this group you were with. You mentioned John Lewis, Hosea Williams, C.T. Vivian. You have called yourself kind of the point guard of the movement in the sense that you knew you needed to pass the ball. You knew you were mediating all of these great personalities, but really, really strong-willed, very passionate people at the same time. What was it like playing that role?
Andrew Young: It was miserable. Because I don't care what was going on, I was always wrong. I was never as militant as Hosea wanted me to be. And I was never as humble as Bevel wanted me to be. I mean, I was always wrong because everybody wanted to be next to Martin Luther King, and I got there before anybody else.
Pamela Kirkland: Some may argue that some of the fights today over diversity initiatives kind of echo the battles of the 1960s. Do you see it that way?
Andrew Young: I don't. I think that it's a misunderstanding of what might have happened in the '60s. But the country has done better since the end of the Second World War than it has ever done in our entire national history. And we've had more peace on earth. Like, I have been able to travel, I think, to 151 different countries now. Most of those, I was not traveling as an ambassador and I was, you know, hitchhiking the streets of Europe. And I was wandering around Africa by myself or with my family. And everywhere I've been in the world I've been welcomed. And people love America because they see us as being fair to everybody. Now, if — people are now trying to figure out how it's fair to put tariffs on your friends. And they'll work that out — and they're working it out already. And I think that — Well, I go back to Martin Luther King: "Truth crushed earth will rise again." You know, when I — I had to make a remark at President Carter's funeral and he wrote the — he wrote one line from the book of Ephesians in the fourth chapter: "Be kind and forgiving as God in Christ has forgiven us." I don't know why he put that down, and I don't know when he put it down, but that's what they handed me to talk about and I figure that's that's a good message: that we have to be kind to each other, and we have to be forgiving because all men sin and fall short of the glory of God — and women do, too.
Pamela Kirkland: Ambassador Andrew Young, thank you so much for speaking with me again.
Andrew Young: God bless you.
Story 8:
Sofi Gratas: The former CNN Center in downtown Atlanta is getting a major makeover. The iconic building, now simply called The Center, will soon be transformed into a hub for dining, retail, entertainment and content creation. Owner CP Group says the 1.2 million-square-foot facility will feature new restaurants, shopping and spaces dedicated to local art installations. CNN moved out last year after nearly 40 years in the building, relocating operations to Midtown Atlanta.
Story 9:
Sofi Gratas: Turns out Atlanta Braves tickets are among the most expensive on the resale market. That's according to a report released this week by resale marketer Vivid Seats. The company said the average ticket for 2025 home and away Braves games was selling for $122 as of February. That makes it the fifth-most expensive ticket in Major League Baseball. The report also found the Braves had the most widespread fan base in the MLB, with 480 counties loyal to the Braves, according to ticket sales.
That is it for today's edition of Georgia Today. If you would like to learn more about these stories, please visit GPB.org/news. And if you haven't yet hit subscribe on this podcast, take a moment right now and keep us current in your podcast feed. If you have feedback, we would love to hear it. Email us at GeorgiaToday@GPB.org. I'm Sofi Gratas, and we'll see you tomorrow.
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