Tag: Maynard Jackson

In the 1960s, most decisions in Atlanta could be traced to a dozen or so business leaders who called the shots. All were men. Today, many executives are transplants to Atlanta; CEOs tend to have shorter tenures, and they exert less influence. But that also means business has become more diverse, both in staffing and scope.

The “Atlanta Way”—as city leaders liked to call their pro-business, pro-racial harmony approach—proved good for the city. Today, Atlanta has become the urban metropolis it was still striving to be in the 1960s. City leaders—Black and White alike—continue to work together to ensure it is one of the nation’s most appealing cities for business. But the city is faced with a troubling problem as vexing as any during the civil rights era: By most measures, we have one of the largest income gaps of any city in the country.

Less than seven years after the first airplane took flight, aviation arrived in Atlanta on the same site as today’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In 1925, the company that would eventually become Delta Air Lines formed, and that same year, the City of Atlanta leased an early airfield south of the city for its first municipal airport. We have partnered with the Atlanta History Center for this century-long timeline of Hartsfield-Jackson and Delta Air Lines.

The Atlanta University Center has shaped generations of leaders—for the nation and for their home city. Atlanta would be nothing like it is today without it.

“Through these materials we see the vast impact that this tragic event in Atlanta had on generations of Atlantans, as well as the work done within Jackson’s administration” to address the murders, said Tiffany Atwater Lee, head of research services at the library’s Archives Research Center.

"Two brothers brought the community closer. They taught me as a young man to respect other people. They told me to get all of the education you can, and don’t ever look back. Keep going forward, work, and be dedicated to something in life."

This time of unrest offers the chance to take a different path forward and lead the Atlanta region, the South, and the nation toward a more equitable future. We must take the lessons (both good and bad) from our courageous past to realize a New Atlanta Way.

Conceived in Chicago, created in Milwaukee, and premiered in Minneapolis, the Cyclorama was meant to celebrate the Union’s great triumph in capturing Atlanta and hastening the end of the Civil War. But when the painting moved South, new audiences flipped its meaning, bastardizing the spectacle into a testament to white Southern pride. For decades, it was a masterpiece of misinterpretation. Now, it has a new life at the Atlanta History Center.

The list of acts read like a jazz aficionado’s fantasy dinner party: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Buddy Rich, and more. It laid the groundwork for mayor Maynard Jackson to later launch the city’s own—and free—Atlanta Jazz Festival, which has been held annually since 1978 and starts this year on May 26.

It’s now been 15 years since Maynard Jackson’s death, but the issues explored in the new documentary film about his life—the city’s fraught racial history, the expectations placed on a black mayor, the scrutiny on minority contracts for city business—feel very relevant today.