Maynard Jackson lifted up Black businesses, but some say city faltered

Fifty years ago this month, Maynard Holbrook Jackson, Jr. became the city’s first Black mayor, ushering in a new era of political and business representation for Black Atlantans who had long been pushed to the side.

On Jan. 7, 1974, Jackson stood in front of thousands gathered at the Atlanta Civic Center to watch his inauguration and laid out his vision for Atlanta to move beyond just being a “city too busy to hate” to becoming a “city of love.”

“Our definition of love must be a definition of action. Love must be strong economic growth and prosperity for all,” Jackson said. “Love must be the absence of racism and sexism. Love must be a chance for everybody to be somebody.”

Through his three terms as mayor, first from 1974 to 1982 then again from 1990 to 1994, Jackson put forward economic integration policies to try to open opportunities for everybody to become that somebody. He mandated minimum percentages of city and airport contracts that had to go to minority firms. He advocated for the hiring and promotion of Black people.

The mandates he put in place (and the bruising fights he had with the white business community to protect his decisions) set a foundation for minority businesses that lingers to this day.

“Maynard created an environment in Atlanta that made it acceptable and even desirable for Black businesses to get opportunities to participate in the economics of the city,” Egbert Perry, chairman of Atlanta-based developer The Integral Group, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Perry moved to Atlanta in 1980 to work for H.J. Russell and Company, first as an assistant to the late Herman Russell and eventually as president of the company before leaving to start Integral in 1993. He said the inclusive environment Jackson created as mayor permeated all industries.

“It was a very progressive period for Black professionals, being able to get through doors that had been intentionally and systematically closed for forever,” Perry said.

Contracting and affirmative action

At the time he became mayor, Jackson said only 0.5% of city contracts were going to African Americans, though the city was majority Black. So, during Jackson’s initial stint in office, he established the Minority Business Enterprise program, which mandated that 35% of all city contracts go to minority firms.

The mandates also opened opportunities for established Black Atlanta companies that hadn’t been there before. H.J. Russell and Company, a construction business started by Herman Russell in 1952, is one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the country, a growth that was helped by Jackson’s contracting policies, according to Perry.

Jackson also helped Perry personally when he started his own development company.

“My very, very, very first project in Atlanta as Integral was a project that I did as a result of a phone call from Maynard,” he said.

Jackson told Perry that one of the development partners for an apartment complex by the West End MARTA station had pulled out of the project, and the two other developers were looking for a third to step in. Integral ended up forming a partnership with the two and thus had its first Atlanta project.

Overall, the contracting mandates were a boon to Black and minority businesses and corresponded to a growth of Black-owned firms in the region.

Federal figures on Black businesses from 1972 to 1982 show the number of firms in metro Atlanta more than doubled during Jackson’s first two terms, though the data covers multiple counties in the region, not just the city of Atlanta.

In 1972, the year before Jackson’s historic election, there were 3,241 Black-owned businesses in the metro, according to the U.S. Census Bureau Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises.

In 1977, the number of firms had grown slightly, to 3,961. But by 1982, the end of Jackson’s second term, metro Atlanta ranked as one of the top 10 areas in the country by number of Black-owned businesses, with 7,077 firms. Nearly half of all Black firms in the state that year were concentrated in the Atlanta region.

Jackson’s minority contracting programs set an example that was replicated by cities across the country, the late Congressman John Lewis said at the time of Jackson’s death.

But when he first tried to implement the contracting program in Atlanta, Jackson faced strong opposition from some in the white business community.

“We had a company that resisted — I mean, it just became their passion to fight this all — they threatened us with everything they possibly could think of,” Jackson told a Georgia Tech historian in 1988. “And we just said, ‘Okay, you know, if you want to do it, you want to go to court, fine. We’ll see you in court, but we’re not going to back off on this policy because it’s right and because it is a means and the most effective means we can think of at this point, by which we can correct the wrongs of the past.’”

Jackson was also a strong proponent of affirmative action in hiring. His goal was to make it so that being Black and in positions of power wasn’t rare, which Jackson said in a separate 1988 documentary interview Atlanta achieved.

“But we paid a price to get there,” he said.

In trying to push for the hiring and promotion of Black Atlantans in six of the city’s white-owned banks in the 1970s, Jackson initially tried to quietly meet with them to encourage diversification in the ranks of vice presidents.

“There must have been maybe 100 to 120 VPs among all the downtown banks at that time and not one person was Afro-American,” Jackson told the documentary crew. But after 18 months of meetings, no progress had been made.

Credit: COX NEWS SERVICE

Credit: COX NEWS SERVICE

So, Jackson said he was going to move the $600 million of city money that was held across those six banks because of their recalcitrance. Shortly after moving the first tranche of money, the banks got his message loud and clear.

“It’s never been my desire to have to do things that way,” Jackson said. “But… you have been elected to use the power that you have, if you don’t use the power, you’re violating your promises. I would be doing Atlanta a disservice to let things linger and continue as they had been. My obligation as the transition mayor was to move us from status quo into a better way and a better day.”

When Jackson returned to office for his third term in 1990, he put in place his aggressive affirmative action policies again ahead of the Olympics.

“The Olympics set record levels of minority and female participation, maybe the highest of any American city to ever host the Olympics,” said former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. “All because of the institutional programming that Maynard put in place.”

The Olympics would never have come to the city “if we’d not been able to show that we have a history in Atlanta of acting inclusively,” Jackson said in 2001.

City falters in upholding Jackson’s legacy

Fifty years after Jackson said that, in Atlanta, everybody should have a chance to become somebody, the odds of that happening are disturbingly slim.

A child born into poverty has just a 4% chance of getting out of poverty in their lifetime, according to the nonprofit Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative.

Atlanta has the highest income inequality among large U.S. cities, according to a 2022 AJC analysis of census data. The median income for a Black household in metro Atlanta was around $61,000 in 2021, while the median income for a white household was more than 50% higher — roughly $93,000.

And the minority airport contracting program that was a pillar of Jackson’s economic integration policies has seen its fair share of corruption scandals in subsequent administrations, including during Jackson’s third term and most recently under former Mayor Kasim Reed.

The inclusive environment that Jackson created in Atlanta under his watch doesn’t really exist anymore, according to Egbert Perry.

“As things have changed, the old barriers and institutions are right back at play,” Perry said. “I think that general mood and commitment to collaboration to change outcomes … I think a lot of that has sort of disappeared or lost its way.”

Part of that may be because Atlanta is not the same city it was when Jackson was first elected in 1973. Instead of there only being a few thousand Black businesses in the region, there are now hundreds of thousands. Every mayor since Jackson has been Black, which has created a large class of Black political elite.

And the city’s racial makeup has also changed. Atlanta is no longer a majority-Black city — 47% of the city is now Black, when in 1980, more than 66% of the city was Black.

Mayor Andre Dickens says Jackson tried to expand economic opportunities for all Atlantans through the the tools he had at the time – the city’s infrastructure and the airport. Now, Dickens is using that same approach, but with modern tools.

“Technology is the fastest-growing sector, it is the highest-paying jobs, it is the place where you can see equity live out if you do it right,” Dickens said. “So in the spirit of Maynard, 50 years later, this is the ecosystem that can provide the equity that he sought, the economic inclusion that he sought.”

He has set a goal for Atlanta to become a top five technology ecosystem in the nation and recently established the Office of Technology and Innovation to achieve that goal, though he has not set a specific timeline.

What is clear is that the Atlanta of today — international, metropolitan, attractive to business and newcomers alike — exists in part because of the foundation Jackson laid. Its granted him a sort of immortality, Perry said.

“Maynard lives forever because his impact has created tentacles in so many places that people are benefiting from, without necessarily understanding or appreciating just how significant his legacy was,” Perry said.

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