Maynard Jackson

Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. was born on the twenty-third of March 1938 at Dallas, Texas, the second of six children of the Reverend Maynard Holbrook Jackson Sr. — pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church at Atlanta and a Morehouse College trustee — and Irene Dobbs Jackson, a college dean who held the doctorate from the University of Toulouse. He was the maternal grandson of John Wesley Dobbs, the Atlanta Black political organiser and Prince Hall Masonic grand master of Georgia. The Jackson household was the most established Black professional family of mid-century Atlanta.

He was educated at the David T. Howard High School in Atlanta and entered Morehouse College on the Ford Foundation Early Admissions Scholarship at fourteen. He completed the bachelor's at Morehouse in 1956 at eighteen and the LL.B. at the North Carolina Central University School of Law in 1964. He entered private legal practice at Atlanta in 1964 in partnership with Donald Hollowell.

He stood for the United States Senate against the incumbent Herman Talmadge in the 1968 Georgia Democratic primary at the age of thirty and lost by approximately fifty points but established his name across Georgia's Black electorate. He was elected the first African American Vice-Mayor of Atlanta in 1969 and served four years.

He stood for mayor of Atlanta in the 1973 Democratic primary against the incumbent Sam Massell, won decisively, and took office on the seventh of January 1974 — at thirty-five, the youngest mayor in Atlanta's history and the first African American mayor of any major Southern American city since Reconstruction.

His decisive administrative achievement was the construction of the new Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — completed in 1980 — and the simultaneous implementation of the federal minority-business set-aside programmes pioneered by Parren Mitchell (placed in this archive) in the airport's construction contracting. The Jackson airport set-aside programme — requiring twenty-five percent minority-firm participation across the eight-hundred-million-dollar construction programme — produced the most significant single transfer of public contracting wealth to Black-owned businesses in American history to that date.

He served two consecutive terms from 1974 to 1982 and a third term from 1990 to 1994. He was a principal organiser of the successful Atlanta bid for the 1996 Centennial Summer Olympic Games.

He died of a heart attack at Reagan National Airport on the twenty-third of June 2003, at sixty-five.

He is honored here as the first African American mayor of Atlanta.