Andrew Young knows the weight of injustice.

Born in segregated Louisiana during the Depression, he learned about evil early. When Young was 4, his father had to explain swastikas to him because the local chapter of the Nazi Party met nearby.

As a young leader of the civil rights movement, Young was standing beside Martin Luther King Jr. when a bullet cut King down.

Not that King's slaying was a surprise. Virtually everyone around him expected it.

"You don't really have a choice," Young said. "He said, 'I'd rather die for something I believe in than be hit by a truck.' "

Young, a civil rights activist and minister who has served as mayor, congressman and ambassador, delivered the keynote address at Virginia Tech's Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration Monday evening, the night before Barack Obama was scheduled to become president.

The links between Obama and King are obvious, Young said. Writers and scholars with precise, poetic and prophetic speaking powers, they both burst into the world's consciousness at a young age.

But there are differences. King grew up in segregation. Jailed for protesting it, he was arrested, hauled 300 hundred miles in a police wagon, handcuffed and menaced by a dog -- conditions Young compared to Abu Ghraib.

Though the civil rights struggle is remembered as a mass movement, Young said the masses were not always all that large. When King was arrested and taken to the Birmingham, Ala., jail, about 55 people went with him.

"There had been three [hundred] or 400 that volunteered," Young said. "But they just didn't show up that morning."

Obama grew up in a different world.

"He was able to grow up not being negatively affected by the black experience," Young said. "He chose to be black. And he chose to work in Chicago's slums. And he chose to identify with the black experience."

Yet Obama's father was Kenyan. His mother was from Kansas. He lived in Indonesia. He had a Chinese stepfather. He lived in Hawaii with his white grandparents.

"I'm uncomfortable calling him black," Young said. "I say don't limit him. I say he's an Afro-Asian-Latin-European. And that makes him all American."

The confluence of influences and events that put Obama in the White House are too methodical to be coincidental, Young said.

"Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous," he said.

But Young said he doesn't want his conviction that God's hand steered Obama to the White House to be confused with the notion that Obama is some kind of messiah.

"Nobody has ever heard him say, 'Yes I can,' " Young said. "He always says, 'Yes we can.' "