[Eclipse]

Our conversations, on both sides of the track about Strom Thurmond came to my mind when I read this article yesterday. Ivan Allen was mayor of Atlanta through much of the 60s. He did what Strom did not have the moral backbone and courage to do. He certainly wasn't perfect, but given the times and his background, he could have made a lot of different choices.
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It's long, but a good read.

Mayors kept city too busy to hate
Jim Auchmutey - Staff
Sunday, July 6, 2003

William B. Hartsfield popularized the image of a "city too busy to hate" in the late 1950s. But it was Ivan Allen Jr. who had to live up to the slogan during the '60s, and Maynard Jackson who proved it during the '70s with his election as Atlanta's first black mayor.

Now all those titanic figures are gone, two of them dead within a week and a half. Though very different personalities from very different backgrounds, the three mayors were similar in one crucial way: They were die-hard hometown boosters who created modern Atlanta. During their 44 years in office, the city and its surroundings were transformed socially, physically and economically.

When Hartsfield became mayor in 1937, the Atlanta area had a population of barely half a million. The city was strictly segregated, deep in debt and known for little more than Coca-Cola and "Gone With the Wind."

A high school dropout from the city's working class, Hartsfield established Atlanta as an air hub, expanded its boundaries to include the wealthy north side, and set the pattern for its pragmatic, accommodationist approach to civil rights.

One of the mourners at Hartsfield's funeral in 1971 was the chief beneficiary of Atlanta's racial evolution, Vice Mayor Maynard Jackson. A son of the black elite, Jackson was a honey-voiced lawyer who after his election as mayor in 1973 badgered the white business community into accepting minority participation in city projects.

At the end of his third term in 1994, metro Atlanta was hurtling toward 4 million people and humming with construction for the Centennial Olympic Games --- an honor it won largely because of its skillfully projected reputation for equality and justice.

Allen, who died Wednesday at 92, was the linchpin in this relentless wheel of progress. When he was elected in 1961, the civil rights movement was boiling over into the streets, diminishing all other issues. Allen was recalled last week as a mayor who presided over an unprecedented boom, who lured major league sports, and who laid the foundation for a rapid transit system.

But he was remembered above all as the first Southern politician to speak out for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a defining moment in Atlanta's long, stumbling walk from provincialism to international prominence.

"It took a lot of courage. No Atlanta mayor had ever done anything so dramatic on the national stage," says Gary M. Pomerantz, author of "Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn," a history of the city told through the family sagas of Allen and Jackson.

One of the turning points occurred 40 years ago this month when Allen flew to Washington to testify for the law that would overturn almost a century of public segregation. His decision reflected a personal metamorphosis that was part conscience and part calculation. It is a story that, coincidentally, includes the other two Southern leaders who died last week, Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond.

An unlikely hero

Allen was an unlikely poster boy for Southern liberalism.

The grandson of a Confederate cavalryman, he was raised in upper-crust society, a Georgia Tech man who hung out at the exclusive Piedmont Driving Club and knew black people mostly as maids and waiters. Years later, when he was running for mayor, his campaign manager took Allen aside and gave him some pointed advice about appealing to the black vote. Call them Negroes, she said --- KNEE-grows --- not nigras, as Allen and other white gentlemen of his class and time were wont to do.

Allen was a businessman, heir to his father's office supply firm, but he had a Boy Scout's impulse for service that ripened into political ambition. As a young man, he had been executive secretary to Gov. Ellis Arnall. He wanted to be governor himself and in 1957 traveled the state on a speaking tour, sounding like most Dixie politicians of the day.

"Segregation is our way of life, and not a political football," Allen cried in his nasal voice. In a letter to Gov. Marvin Griffin, he went so far as to propose a 1 percent sales tax to pay for moving disaffected blacks back to Africa.

Allen changed his tune when he became president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1960 and found himself bargaining with a group of black college students who were staging sit-ins at segregated stores and lunch counters in downtown Atlanta.

Lonnie King, a Morehouse man who headed the protest committee, met with Allen daily for weeks and saw him as the prototypical Atlanta businessman --- conceding only what he was forced to by threat of boycott or bad publicity.

"It must have been shocking for him to meet people like us. The idea of blacks asserting their rights was so foreign to people of his background," King says. "But I'll give the man his due. He grew, and he grew at warp speed."

Allen negotiated a settlement that called for measured desegregation. Later that year, after Hartsfield announced his retirement, Allen assumed his mantle as the business establishment's choice for mayor. His opponent: Lester Maddox, a blue-collar Atlantan like Hartsfield who had reached strikingly different conclusions from Allen about racial change. Maddox was agin it.

In courting the black vote he would need to win, Allen had to live down some of his earlier statements. When he heard that his enemies might release one of his questionable letters, Allen asked for a meeting with the Rev. William Holmes Borders, a leading black minister, so he could explain. "Don't worry," Borders assured him. "We Negroes don't like anybody better than a reconstructed Southern white man."

Allen defeated Maddox in the Democratic primary with 99 percent of the black vote. Maddox carried the white vote.

A favor for Kennedy

Taking office in 1962, Allen ordered the "white" and "colored" signs removed from water fountains, opened seating to both races at Municipal Auditorium, and threw out the first pitch at an Atlanta Crackers game in the newly desegregated Ponce de Leon Ballpark. In Birmingham, meanwhile, the Barons disbanded for the season rather than drop barriers at their stadium.

In the spring of 1963, Birmingham police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on civil rights demonstrators, providing a nightmarish example of what can happen when a city's leadership fails. The images were fresh on Allen's mind when an emissary from President John F. Kennedy visited that July. Lawyer Morris Abram asked the mayor to testify before Congress in favor of the president's public accommodations bill, which would end racial discrimination at hotels and restaurants.

Allen admired Kennedy, but this was a lot to ask of an elected official in the South. The mayor spoke with his friends (thumbs down was the verdict most often delivered) and conferred with his mentor, Coca-Cola chief Robert W. Woodruff (a qualified thumbs up). The advice was similarly mixed when Allen went to meet with black leaders at the Butler Street YMCA.

"A substantial number of people told him not to go because he'd be hurting himself politically," remembers retired Atlanta Life Insurance Chairman Jesse Hill, who was there. "I was surprised. I felt he should go. I was very proud of him."

Testifying was risky. Polls showed a heavy majority of white Southerners against the bill. Gov. Carl Sanders opposed it. So did the Chamber of Commerce and The Atlanta Constitution, nationally known for its moderate positions on civil rights.

"Allen assumed that testifying could mean the end of his political career," says Taylor Branch, author of "Parting the Waters," a history of the civil rights movement. "It was a lonely thing for him to do."

'We must take action'

On July 26, Allen walked into Room 318 of the Senate Office Building with Atlanta's representative in Congress, Charles Weltner. Georgia's senators, Richard B. Russell and Herman Talmadge, were conspicuously absent. Allen took a seat at the Commerce Committee witness table and read his statement in a soft tone that some described as anguished.

Atlanta had been forced to deal with desegregation, the mayor said, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes under court order, sometimes adroitly, more often clumsily. Now America needed to do the same.

"We cannot dodge this issue," Allen testified. "We cannot look back over our shoulders or turn the clock back to the 1860s. We must take action now to assure a greater future for our citizens and our country. A hundred years ago the abolishment of slavery won the United States the acclaim of the whole world when it made every American free in theory. Now the elimination of segregation, which is slavery's stepchild, is a challenge to all of us to make every American free in fact as well as in theory --- and again establish our nation as the true champion of the free world."

The acting chairman, Democratic Sen. John Pastore of Rhode Island, congratulated Allen for his courage. Then another senator raised his hand: Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

For 20 minutes the old Dixiecrat grilled Allen, his cross-examination growing increasingly combative. Pastore finally leapt to the mayor's defense, saying he wouldn't allow any more "when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife questions." Cheers rose from the packed gallery.

"I am surprised that you permit applauding in this room," Thurmond protested.

"I can't stop it after it happens," Pastore replied.

Thurmond dismissed the spectators as "left-wingers" and surrendered the floor.

Threat investigated

Allen returned to Atlanta and a pile of angry mail. Later that year, after the Kennedy assassination, the FBI investigated a letter from Florida threatening to kill the mayor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson.

Reaction gradually turned more favorable --- although his stand cost him the friendship of some who never forgave him, Pomerantz says.

Almost a year after Allen's testimony, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the "colored" and "white" placards that had marked Southern apartheid finally started coming down. The most publicized act of defiance occurred in Atlanta when Lester Maddox grabbed a pickax handle and chased three black college students from the parking lot of his restaurant, the Pickrick. He closed and sold the business rather than desegregate.

By then Allen was leading reporters on hard-hat tours of the stadium that was rising like a huge flying saucer beside the new freeway interchange downtown. Civil rights troubles would continue, the mayor dealing with each headache and tragedy. But in the meantime, in the parlance of the day, Ivan Allen was building a major league city.