Civil-rights leader Andrew Young advised a Toledo audience to look at the problems the country faces today from an economic point of view instead of from a racial one.

“When Lincoln started talking about integrating money, he got shot. When Martin Luther King started talking about integrating money, he got shot,” Mr. Young said. “The problem is not the race. The problem and opportunity is in the money.”

Mr. Young, 84, spoke Thursday at the University of Toledo’s 2016 Edward Shapiro Distinguished Lecture Series at Savage Arena. More than 500 people came out on the rainy night to hear his views on how to counter issues facing the nation.

In his talk, he weaved in insight and guidance given to him by his father and Mr. King. He spoke of being a 4-year-old and living in a neighborhood with Irish, Italians, and Nazis.

“I got along very well with the Irish and Italian kids, and also the Polish and German kids,” he said, adding that he had some Polish relatives. The guidance his father gave him has stuck with him in dealing with fights.

“My father explained to me that Nazism and white supremacy is a sickness, and you don’t get angry with sick people. You have to find a way to help them. And if you can’t help them stay out of their way ... because it is contagious,” he said.

Instead of using emotion when tackling an adversary or problem, his father advised him to use “reason and sanity, and deliberate organized thought and analysis of a problem.”

Mr. Young said poverty persists in neighborhoods where most of the people have credit scores under 500. He said living in that type of neighborhood brought a “whole bunch of operations that exploit the poor,” such as check cashing and payday loan services. He pointed out that this problem is shared by many races, including white and black.

He did not waver when talking about controversial events. He pointed to the killing of nine black people in a church in South Carolina by a white gunman last year.

“We called it a race problem. That taking down the Confederate flag would make it better. Come on, let’s look back. There was no race involved in Connecticut when they shot up the schools ... or when they bombed the post office in Oklahoma. Those were all white people. We are trying to make a race problem out of a mental health problem,” he said.

He said people should not be ruled by money. Instead, they should respect and understand it. 

Mr. Young was the first black to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 1972, he became the first black since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia.

Before those public service positions he was heavily involved in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, working as a confidante and strategist to Mr. King.

Mr. Young marched many times in the deep South, including in May, 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., where dogs were turned on those protesting segregation, and in Selma, Ala., in 1965, which led to the Voting Rights Act.

The Edward Shapiro Distinguished Lecture Series was created by the late Edward Shapiro, a professor emeritus in the department of economics. When he retired in 1989, he left an endowment which funds the lectures.

Contact Natalie Trusso Cafarello at: 419-724-6133, or ntrusso@theblade.com, or on Twitter @natalietrusso.

First Published September 30, 2016, 4:00 a.m.