Maynard Jackson

They came in with a mission that my people are going to take part in this country and we're going to be we're going to be full participants in the economic progress of America.

Like people like Maynard Jackson gets unsung because 90% of the prosperity that Atlanta was able to build came off of Manning Jackson because he was willing to go toe-to-toe with the good old boy hazard kind of power structure in the state of Georgia.

And he said, if my people don't get a part of these concessions in this airport, you're not going to have an airport.

When people with that sort of grit left and their children and their grandchildren took over and they inherited what he built, they didn't really take it for granted and they let it fall by the wayside, I think.

man that's a really peace answer yeah because i'm glad you mentioned maynard jackson because a lot of people who came to atlanta in the 90s if they're not black american they really don't appreciate the decades of struggle that was uh that laid the foundation for that city to be what it was maynard jackson because i remember reading an article And he was responsible for making a number of millionaires in Atlanta through contracts.

And like you said, he was really critical.

He was really instrumental in helping Atlanta become the city that it was.

By the end of 1970s, Atlanta had become a national symbol of Black political progress.

Maynard Jackson had been elected as the city's first Black mayor in 1973.

Black professionals, business owners, elected officials, and civic leaders were helping to shape a city increasingly promoted as the capital of the New South, a place that wanted to be known for opportunity rather than the open segregation of Georgia's past.

Atlanta was often described as a Black Mecca.

the belief that if we could do our work correctly, we would be able to build an audience that would then support that theater, not just with audience, but financially.

And then we had the great good fortune of being in a city like Atlanta, where Maynard Jackson was very committed to the arts.

So he started the first Bureau of Cultural Affairs.

So that was wonderful because we could do a grant for a city grant and say, we're going to do this, we want to do this, and this is how it's going to serve the community that we live in.

We all were working at these theaters together.

And we were all young and idealistic and broke, so that whoever was working would buy something for everybody to eat, and we would all go over to somebody's house and eat spaghetti and talk about how wonderful the world was going to be once we had our way with it.

And speaking of Mayor Maynard Jackson, you served as the press secretary and speechwriter for him.

And in addition to your career doing that, you were also an essayist, a poet, a novelist.

It is quickly it is quickly growing with immigrants of other nationalities come in.

We've always managed to figure out a way to figure it out, whether it was William Hartsfield or Maynard Jackson, whether it was Lester Maddox or Joe Frank Harris.

I'm confident that you can, but it seems that working class Georgians, both white and black, seem to be apathetic this year.

And I'm afraid they may sit home.