News - William Hartsfield ought not be dissed

Poor Willie Hartsfield. He doesn’t stand a chance. His days of having his name proudly attached to Atlanta’s airport are, alas, numbered.

While he and Maynard Jackson are equally dead, Maynard has more political mojo from beyond the grave. By appointing an advisory committee, Mayor Shirley Franklin may have slowed down the rush to rename the airport for Maynard. But I strongly suspect this plane has pulled out of the gate and is headed for the runway.

Most of us don’t remember Hartsfield, who left the mayor’s office 41 years ago and has been dead more than three decades. But at some point in time, this city thought enough of him — and his 23 years as mayor — to put his name on our most prominent public facility. We did that so future generations of Atlantans would remember his contributions, even if we no longer remembered him personally.

But if we put another name on the airport, now that our memories of Hartsfield are no longer fresh, we’d defeat the entire purpose of naming the airport for him. Put another way, what part of “memorial” don’t we understand?

Georgia’s penchant for naming every stretch of highway, bridge, intersection, interchange or public building for somebody has gotten completely out of hand. So many obscure, marginal figures have their names plastered on things that this is rapidly ceasing to be much of an honor. But once we do put someone’s name on something to honor his or her memory, common courtesy — and common sense — call for us to leave it there.

Don’t get me wrong — Maynard was not an obscure or marginal figure. He was a pioneering, larger-than-life force whose impact will be long-lasting and substantial. Atlanta should honor him. But we should resist the urge to name things for public figures — Maynard or anybody else — until at least a year after their deaths.

This gives us a chance to take off our mourning garb and look at their life and legacy in total, in the cold, sober light of dawn. Had we such a policy, we wouldn’t have the abomination of the Cynthia McKinney Parkway in DeKalb County. And, truly, can any stronger argument be made?

If we followed all of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s gushing remembrances of Maynard to their obvious conclusion, we would just rename the whole damn place “Maynardgrad” and be done with it. Yet, a more measured reflection shows a record more mixed. He was not the mythical near deity in life that he’s become in death.

True, in his first term, he did kick down the doors of City Hall and upset a cozy power structure that deserved upsetting. But times changed faster than Maynard’s style did. By the middle of his third term, his pitched personal battle with City Council President Marvin Arrington gridlocked city government, and he was accusing the council of trying to “cripple the quality of life” by refusing to pass a large tax increase. He was even threatening to sue the AJC over coverage he didn’t like, a salvo the newspaper has very obviously forgiven.

In late 1991, amid genuine grumpiness about his tenure, I wrote a profile of Maynard for Atlanta Magazine. Descriptions of him included “inaction Jackson,” “only slightly better than a zero” and “too big for his britches” — and those quotes came from people who supported his 1989 comeback to City Hall.

Post-mortem media coverage duly noted Maynard’s role in helping land the 1996 Olympics. Barely mentioned was the fact that after Atlanta got the games, he picked a heated fight with Billy Payne to get the city a bigger role in shaping the Olympic experience. We all know how well that turned out.

Maynard’s insistence during his first two terms as mayor that portions of city contracts be set aside for minority contractors became a model for governments around the country. Yet, in 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Richmond v. Croson, said such programs were constitutionally suspect and severely limited them.

It was Maynard who pushed for buying the old Sears building to turn into City Hall East, a white elephant the city is now trying to unload. He also unleashed some dubious characters into Atlanta’s political life: He engineered the election and re-election of Bill Campbell, and appointed Eldrin Bell as police chief, Reginald Eaves as public safety commissioner and Ira Jackson as aviation commissioner (the latter two later went to prison on corruption charges.)

Of course, when a force of nature such as Maynard dies, it’s human nature to let such negatives fade from consciousness, to remember only the compelling persona and historic contributions. But the negatives are still there. Only passage of time puts legacy into perspective.

This is why we should resist the rush by Maynard’s admirers to rename the airport for him. But caught in the grip of selective memory, born of rose-colored remembrance, we won’t.

Oh, well, maybe ol’ Willie can get his name on that new yellow bridge.

richard.shumate@creativeloafing.com

i>Richard Shumate’s Ruffled Feathers column appears every third week in this space.