CITIES: New Men for Detroit and Atlanta

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To Young, 55, the son of a tailor raised in Detroit's Black Bottom ghetto, the celebration seemed "more like a coronation than an inauguration." It capped a lifetime of fighting for black rights, first as a union organizer at the Ford Motor Co. in the late 1930s, later as a leader of the leftist National Negro Labor Council in the '50s and as a politician in the '60s. A state senator since 1964, he fought for passage of an open-housing law and against a ban on busing children to integrate schools. In both cases, whites from the Detroit area were among his leading opponents. But no one knows better than Young that Detroit is governable only with the cooperation of the city's white power bro kers in industry and labor. Thus he declared: "We can no longer afford the luxury of bigotry and hatred. What is good for the black people of this city is good for the white people of this city."

ATLANTA. The inauguration of Maynard Holbrook Jackson, 35, as the first black and youngest mayor in the city's history inspired at least one departure from custom. In days gone by, mem bers of the tightly organized Atlanta power structure and their families and friends could comfortably accommodate themselves in the 200-seat aldermanic chamber. This week more than 6,000 people from all parts of the city were due to fill the 4,600-seat Civic Center auditorium and adjacent rooms to see Jackson, white City Council President Wyche Fowler and 18 city councilmen (nine white, nine black) sworn in.

It promised a lively beginning for an administration that confronts a host of problems. Atlanta last year had a record 271 murders, and Jackson talks about crime as a problem much the way that Coleman Young does. "This city has never seen the kind of offensive we are going to mount against drugs, criminality and homicide," he pledged last week. "Those who are in dope in this city had better pack their bags."

Jackson must also deal with the city's other major troubled areas: mass transportation, high black unemployment, a barely integrated school system (currently 80% black), and a continuing white flight to the suburbs (Atlanta is now 52% black, and some estimates indicate it will be 61% black by 1980).

To grapple with such problems, and keep the booming business center of the city thriving, the portly (275 Ibs.), personable Jackson will have to deal shrewdly with Atlanta's white establishment. As a tangible earnest of its willingness to cooperate, Coca-Cola Board Chairman J. Paul Austin gathered 30 business colleagues together last week and helped offset the remaining $30,000 debt of the Jackson campaign. In his defeat of Mayor Sam Massell last October, Jackson polled 21% of the white vote. That was a considerable achievement. Massell gave the contest an appallingly racist tinge by branding Jackson a do-nothing and a potential black firebrand in a last-ditch effort to scare up white support. The Massell strategy backfired with the voters and many whites quietly switched their allegiance to Jackson.