Maynard Jackson Jr., 65; First Black Mayor of Atlanta Guided City’s Explosive Growth

Maynard Jackson Jr., a descendant of Georgia slaves who became the first black mayor of Atlanta in 1974 and championed civil rights, affirmative action and the city’s growth during his three terms in office, died Monday morning after collapsing in a Washington, D.C.-area airport. He was 65.

Jackson, who underwent major heart surgery in 1992 and suffered from diabetes, was resuscitated at Reagan National Airport but suffered cardiac arrest and died at Virginia Medical Center in Arlington, Va., Dr. Winston Gandy, Jackson’s physician, said at a news conference in Atlanta.

A former labor relations lawyer who entered state politics in the late 1960s, Jackson became not only Atlanta’s first black mayor but the first African American to serve as chief executive of a major Southern city.

During his first two terms he spearheaded the city’s building boom, including the construction of skyscrapers, the building of the world’s largest airport and expansion of the convention facilities.

Jackson also battled the city’s white business community, faced a bitter garbage strike and dealt with a crime wave during which 28 young blacks were killed between 1979 and 1981.

Barred by law from seeking a third consecutive term, Jackson was succeeded by former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, who also served two terms.

But Jackson ran for a third term as mayor in 1989 and was elected with 80% of the vote. A few months later, Atlanta was selected to host the 1996 Summer Olympics and Jackson was involved in early planning for the Games.

“Under his leadership, Atlanta thrived and the state benefited as well,” Jimmy Carter, the former president and Georgia governor, said in a statement Monday.

Former President Bill Clinton also praised Jackson Monday, saying in a statement that “America lost one of its finest civil rights leaders” and “the Democratic Party lost a remarkable champion.”

During the news conference in Atlanta on Monday, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said Jackson “was a lion of a man and lived his life with courage, compassion and dedication to public service. His groundbreaking election as mayor in 1973 ushered in a new generation of leaders.”

Indeed, “The biggest impact Jackson had in Atlanta was simply being the first African American winning the office of mayor,” said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta.

“The initial campaign was very bitter, very hard-fought: lots of racial polarization,” Black said.

The divisive runoff pitted Jackson, then Atlanta’s first black vice mayor, against incumbent Sam Massell, the city’s first Jewish mayor.

Massell said Monday that Jackson “was arguably the strongest politician in Georgia and had influence nationally.”

In focusing “his efforts on reforms for African Americans’ needs, particularly affirmative action programs,” Massell said, Jackson “mustered a following that was national in scope among African Americans.”

As a result, Massell said, “he could go to any jurisdiction, any city, county or state, where there was any black population and have an effect on the elections because he had this admiration from the black community.... Frankly, he became a kingmaker.”

Gary Pomerantz, a former Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter, said Monday that Jackson’s first term “was marked by a great deal of tension.”

“There were certainly heightened expectations for his tenure by the black community in Atlanta and heightened concerns -- even fears -- in Atlanta’s white community,” Pomerantz said.

At 6 foot 3 and about 300 pounds and bearing a smile that was once described as “a toothpaste grin that can light up a room,” Jackson was a formidable personality.

“He had enormous physical heft,” Pomerantz said, “and when he walked into a room he filled it. And what he didn’t fill with that heft, he certainly filled with that deep tenor voice.”

Jackson “was enormously charismatic,” Pomerantz said. “But, as he would say himself, he was not a gradualist. He believed with great conviction that there were changes that needed to be made -- and those changes needed to be made at once.

“That raised the tension level in what is often called the white power structure of Atlanta.”

As mayor, Jackson not only “spearheaded the growth of Atlanta but brought it into the affirmative action age,” Pomerantz said.

“He certainly brought more people of color to the work force and the city government, in particular the building of the airport, which is sort of the crown jewel in Atlanta’s business world.”

Pomerantz is the author of “Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn,” a 1996 book about the historic rise of Atlanta as told through two of its defining political families.

One family is Jackson’s.

“In the late 19th century, the editor and orator Henry Grady spoke of Atlanta’s golden promise,” Pomerantz said. “I’m talking the 1870s, and a hundred years later Mayor Jackson was doing the very same thing: selling Atlanta to the nation, and he did a remarkable job at that.

“He was, without a doubt, one of Atlanta’s greatest orators and salesmen.”

At the time of Jackson’s 1973 election, Pomerantz said, a tide of black political empowerment was sweeping across America’s cities.

Jackson’s election followed that of Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of Cleveland. In the same period, Pomerantz said, “you had a number of first African American mayors. You had Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit and also Richard Hatcher of Gary, Ind.”

Born in Dallas on March 23, 1938, Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr., the third of six children, came from a long line of distinguished leaders on both sides of his family, Pomerantz said.

His great-great grandfather, Andrew Jackson, was a former slave who had bought his freedom and founded the Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta.

His father was a Baptist minister who was the first black candidate for the Board of Education in Dallas. He later served as pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the family moved when Jackson Jr. was 7, and co-founded the Georgia Voters League.

Jackson’s maternal grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, the son of freed slaves, was a railway mail clerk who co-founded the Atlanta Negro Voters League and became a powerful civic leader in black Atlanta.

All six of John Wesley Dobbs’ daughters were graduates of Spellman College in Atlanta, including Jackson’s mother Irene, who became chairman of the modern foreign languages department at North Carolina Central University in Durham. And Jackson’s aunt, Mattiwilda Dobbs, became an acclaimed opera singer.

Jackson excelled in Atlanta’s segregated public schools. After completing 10th grade at age 14, he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta as a Ford Foundation Early Admissions scholar.

Majoring in political science and history, he received his bachelor’s degree in 1956. After receiving his law degree cum laude from North Carolina Central University in 1964, he found work as a general attorney with the National Labor Relations Board. He joined the staff of the Emory Community Legal Services Center in Atlanta in 1967.

Jackson said the birth of his first child on April 8, 1968, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was buried, caused him to ponder the “life-death cycle,” which provided the impetus for his entering politics.

“I decided the solution to the country’s problems had to be in politics, not in violence,” he said.

In recent years, he was chairman of his own Atlanta investment banking firm, Jackson Securities Inc. In 2001 he was named chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute, where he was involved in the fight for election reform.

He is survived by his second wife, Valerie, and children Brooke, Maynard III, Valerie Amanda, Alexandra and Elizabeth.

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Times researcher Rennie Sloan in Atlanta contributed to this report.