10 Facts About Maynard Jackson

1.

Maynard Jackson married Valerie Richardson in 1977, to whom he was married for 25 years until his death.

2.

In 1968, when Maynard Jackson was 30 years old, he decided to run for the US Senate against incumbent Herman Talmadge.

3.

In 1970, Maynard Jackson became Atlanta's first black Vice-Mayor, his first elected position which he held for four years.

4.

In 1977, Maynard Jackson fired over 900 sanitation workers during the 1977 Atlanta sanitation strike.

5.

Maynard Jackson was mayor through the period when the separate Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority obtained a large amount of federal funding for a rapid-transit rail-line system, when construction began, and when MARTA began its first rail transit service in Atlanta and in DeKalb County in 1979 and during its continual expansion thereafter.

6.

Maynard Jackson oversaw the completion of many planned public works projects, such as improvements to freeways and parks, and the completion of Freedom Parkway, which were expedited from 1990 to 1996 in preparation for the Olympic Games that began in August 1996.

7.

In 1974, Jackson received the Samuel S Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

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8.

Maynard Jackson provoked a major racial crisis in May 1974 when he attempted to fire the incumbent white police chief, John Inman.

9.

In 1979, with a soaring murder rate and nationwide publicity about crime there, Georgia Governor George Busbee, acting on a request from Mayor Maynard Jackson, called in Georgia State Patrol troopers to help patrol the downtown.

10.

Maynard Jackson died in 2003 at the age of 65, of a cardiac arrest at a hospital in Arlington, Virginia after suffering a heart attack at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.