Maynard Jackson: The First Black Mayor of a Major Southern City

Maynard Holbrook Jackson Junior was thirty-five years old when he was elected mayor of Atlanta in October of nineteen seventy-three. He took office on January seventh, nineteen seventy-four, and in doing so became the first African American to lead a major Southern city. He was not the first Black mayor in the country, and he knew it. He was the first in a city of Atlanta's size and symbolic weight in the South, in a city whose white establishment had spent fifty years telling the world it was the City Too Busy to Hate.

The establishment was about to find out what that phrase meant under a mayor who took it seriously.

In his first term, Jackson used the pending expansion of what was then called Hartsfield Airport as leverage. The project was the largest public works undertaking in Atlanta's history. Jackson announced that he would delay the expansion unless minority-owned businesses received a significant share of the contracts. The white business community was furious. The airport expansion went forward with minority business inclusion. The model Jackson built in Atlanta spread to municipal contracting practices across the country.

He served two consecutive terms, left office under Atlanta's term limits in nineteen eighty-two, watched Andrew Young, his fellow movement generation mayor, serve two terms after him, then ran again and won a third term beginning in nineteen ninety. He died in office in two thousand three. The airport was renamed in his honor that year. If you flew into Atlanta on this trip, you landed at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The leverage he used to build that airport's expansion is why his name is on it.