Back in March, I wrote about the recruitment of Andy Young, the noted civil rights leader and former ambassador to the U.N., to the cause of defending Wal-Mart. Lots of people were astonished and I was a bit perplexed by the moral corruption of someone who actually fought for the rights of the oppressed.

Today, we hear that Young has resigned because of racially insensitive remarks about Jews, Koreans and Arabs. Maybe I’m truly native, but I have to admit that this astonished me:

Wal-Mart Image-Builder Resigns

By MICHAEL BARBARO and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had “ripped off” urban communities for years, “selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.”

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Mr. Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments.

Perhaps, more than anything, this shows what happens to people who are drawn to the light of power and money. Young sacrificed his legacy in favor of defending a company that preys on poor people and workers–and it corrupted his soul.