CITIES: New Men for Detroit and Atlanta

• Share

(3 of 3)

The son of a minister who urged all six of his children on to advance degrees, Maynard Jackson raced through the Atlanta school system, graduated from high school at age 14, garnered a bachelor's degree from Morehouse College at 18. After earning his law degree cum laude from North Carolina Central University in 1964, he returned to Atlanta to practice law, but eventually decided to enter politics. Explains one white associate: "Being black and raised in the South, he was always told that if he lived by certain standards, all the things he wanted would eventually come. But the things he wanted didn't come."

"Big M." He became an activist, highly visible vice mayor in 1970, pushing for tough, bread-and-butter reforms, particularly in the areas of housing and construction. He promoted black employment in construction, backed a community rent strike and conducted grievance hearings at a public housing project.

He and his wife Burnella live with their three children in a comfortable ten-room home in southwest Atlanta. Jackson avoids drinking in public, gave up smoking several years ago, and is affectionately called "Big M" by his friends.

Maynard Jackson's election represents a carefully prepared, some would say inevitable, flowering of Atlanta's black middle class. Still, he will have to walk a careful line between black demands for increased social justice and white insistence on solidifying Atlanta's place as the South's commercial capital. While Jackson wants to eliminate police brutality and job discrimination, there is no evidence that he will automatically think black in a crisis. Yet as one associate observes: "He feels he must rectify injustices suffered by his people. He's no militant, but there's a smoldering fire in him that won't go out until all blacks have equal rights." Jackson himself puts his goal simply: to make Atlanta "a city of brotherhood, prosperity and peace for all."