Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn by Gary M. Pomerantz

Author:Gary M. Pomerantz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Maynard Jackson was home alone and stayed up late, watching the returns from the Democratic primary in California. He’d left his wife, Bunnie, and their new baby in Durham, with Bunnie’s parents, and returned to Atlanta alone to inform a group of supporters that he had decided not make a run for the Georgia state legislature. He felt good about his decision not to run. He was thirty years old, had a family and decided that he would do the sensible thing and build a law firm—black-controlled but integrated. Someday, he believed, his firm would rival the prestigious King & Spalding in Atlanta.

It was past three o’clock in the morning in Atlanta on June 5, 1968. In the dim glow of his television Maynard Jr. watched Robert Kennedy, who had just won the California primary, say to a few supporters gathered in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, “So my thanks to all of you and it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.” Moments later, Kennedy was struck by a bullet fired from close range.

At that late hour, the news coverage in Atlanta was fragmentary and when it ended Maynard Jr. still wasn’t certain if Bobby Kennedy had survived. Before he turned out the lights, the local news recapped the day’s events. With a hint of boredom, the commentator said, “It looks like Sen. Herman Talmadge is going back for another term unchallenged. Today is the last day for qualifying.”

Lying in bed, in an east Atlanta neighborhood that was in the process of transition, from white to black, Maynard Jr. thought about Bobby Kennedy and the more he thought about Bobby Kennedy the more he thought about Herman Talmadge. To him, Talmadge seemed a distillation of the best and the worst the South had to offer; he had power and intellect and hailed from a politically gifted family, yet he was using it, as Maynard Jr. saw it, “to keep a people in virtual bondage, economic bondage and in political segregation.” Only eight weeks had passed since Maynard Jr. had walked in the cortege at the King funeral. In King and Kennedy he saw visionaries who had tried to bridge the racial and class divisions in America.

Herman Talmadge and his political machine represented the kind of bigotry and narrow-mindedness that was killing the dream. In the summer of 1968, Maynard Jackson was young enough, bold enough, dreamy enough and perhaps foolish enough to believe that, in the political kingdoms of Kennedys and Talmadges, he could find his own place and somehow make a difference. From the Grand’s lectures to his father’s Sunday sermons, Maynard Jr. had been raised to believe in the ballot and in the ultimate triumph of God’s goodness.

Only one day before he and Bunnie had agreed that she would take a maternity leave from her job at the anti-poverty agency Equal Opportunity Atlanta. He would become the sole wage earner of the family, helping to pay the mortgage on their $17,000 home. But with the liberal Kennedy felled and Talmadge breezing to another six years, Maynard Jr.

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