Maynard Jackson

Maynard Jackson was the son of a minister, Maynard Jackson, Sr. and a college professor, Irene Dobbs Jackson. Although born in Texas, he spent much of his youth growing up in his mother's native Atlanta. He became the first Black mayor of Atlanta at the age of thirty-five, making him the first Black mayor of a major city in the Deep South, and one of the youngest. Armed with an exceptional intellect and a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he left David T. Howard High School in the tenth grade, entering Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1952 at the age of fourteen. By the age of eighteen he was a Morehouse College graduate. Before he became mayor of Atlanta, he had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1968. In 1973, with Atlanta's Black population then at slightly more than fifty percent, Jackson ousted then mayor Sam Massell with more than ninety percent of the Black vote and nearly twenty percent of the white vote. Only a few years before his untimely death, he had been appointed to a high-ranking position within the National Democratic Party. He continued to live in Atlanta and, along with his daughter Brooke, ran Jackson Securities, Inc.