‘History will judge us’: Former Atlanta mayors defend minority contracting

“That focus has always been in the DNA of Atlanta,” former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But in the last year, those programs at all levels of government have been under unprecedented threat, as the Trump administration has implemented executive orders to purge affirmative action or diversity initiatives from government and federal funding recipients.

Trump has called DEI initiatives “wasteful” and discriminatory. “Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great,” an executive order said Jan. 20, 2025.

The city’s disadvantaged business program and its dramatic success in addressing inequity in city spending went on to inspire other cities — and eventually the federal government — to copy its structure.

The federal about-face has whipsawed municipalities, universities and corporations across the country that have spent decades designing programs to rectify centuries of discrimination. Some quickly canceled diversity initiatives.

Others took to the courts, challenging the constitutionality of the executive order. A large lawsuit featuring a litany of municipalities remains in progress.

Atlanta took neither route.

A federal funding freeze would have cost Atlanta city agencies $1.4 billion last year alone, with housing and infrastructure seeing the worst hits, according to a city document reviewed by the AJC.

Credit: vwong@ajc.com

Credit: vwong@ajc.com

Instead, the city last summer lost out on nearly $40 million in airport grants when airport leadership refused to sign new grant language disavowing its diversity initiatives. The city has opted to continue to implement its present day minority contracting program, the “Equal Business Opportunity Program.”

The City Council, however, quietly rebranded its DEI office last fall to remove all references to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

In a statement this week a city spokesperson confirmed Atlanta “remains fully committed to opportunity for all and continues to administer the Equal Business Opportunity (EBO) Program, which ensures that qualified businesses can compete fully and fairly for City contracting opportunities.”

But all the while, the eerie silence of the city’s faith and business community about the importance of the programs bothered former City Councilman and columnist Jabari Simama, a co-convener of the “Soul of Atlanta Coalition.”

“We all need to sing out of the same hymnal. And the problem is, not enough people are singing,” he said.

He decided to help convene a “people’s movement” led by the former mayors, to offer a platform for businesses and residents to highlight why the program has worked and merits defending.

“This is a 50-year plus program that doesn’t belong to any one mayor. In fact, it doesn’t even belong to just mayors. It belongs to the city of Atlanta,” Simama said.

The program had the same goals as the Civil Rights Movement, former Mayor Shirley Franklin said, “to ensure the full participation of groups of people who had been marginalized and left out of the mainstream of American business.”

“It was doing business the Atlanta way, and that means y’all come, we’re all included,” former Mayor Andrew Young put it.

Maynard Jackson “laid this groundwork for all of us,” Bottoms said.

“In the same way that mayors before me had to deal with their own battles related to the federal government or lack of support, this is the battle for this moment. History will judge us for how we weather this storm,” she said.

Credit: Ben Hendren

Credit: Ben Hendren

Nothing new

While this year’s pressure from Washington stands out, pushback on this program is nothing new, said Franklin.

“The city of Atlanta has had to fight for the programs for 50 years.”

Indeed, pushback has existed since before the program was even implemented.

Staunch initial opposition to Jackson’s plan caused eight months of delay for the first joint venture contracts in the mid-1970s, which ultimately brought Black-owned firms into a multimillion-dollar airport expansion.

Opponents at the time argued the contracts “represented unreasonable demands on the previous contractors, that they appear to establish a racial quota system and will cause delays and higher costs in the airport development,” The Atlanta Constitution wrote in August 1975 when the City Council voted 14 to 4 to approve them.

Councilman Nick Lambros, one of the four white council members who opposed the program, argued at the time the rules would drive bidders away “when they were required and forced and commanded” to bring in “companies that have no experience.”

But even after winning the council vote, inclusion of Black-owned firms in the airport still met more opposition: airline executives.

They “balked at several of Jackson’s proposals to guarantee black involvement in construction subcontracts,” The Atlanta Constitution wrote in October 1975.

The executives, including from Delta Air Lines, also worried at the time that the minority contracting plan could put federal funding for the airport at risk.

“Obviously, the loss of federal grants-in-aid would be a disastrous blow to the accomplishment of the project,” the executives wrote to city officials.

Former Mayor Andrew Young recalled, “Almost every contract I signed when I was mayor, I got taken to court by somebody. The first time I almost panicked because I’d never been in a courtroom where I had to testify,” he recalled.

But the city attorney told him, “Oh Andy, don’t worry about that. We got that. We got that handled.”

“We didn’t have it handled in the Georgia cases,” Young recalled.

The issue landed before the Supreme Court in 1989, which forced changes to the program, including requiring all cities to implement regular disparity studies to prove continued need.

Atlanta suspended all procurement until it could reshape the program, Franklin, who was also Young’s chief administration officer, recalled.

“The program has succeeded because it’s been modified and edited … corrections have been made and changes have been made. It is not the same program that it was 50 years ago,” she said.

In 1974, less than 1% in city contracts went to Black and minority firms. By 1976, that had jumped to 13%, and continued to climb.

“During the last five years, the city awarded between 25 and 30 percent of its business to minority-owned businesses,” The Atlanta Journal wrote in April 1982.

The latest 2021 Atlanta disparity study determined that 34% of city contract dollars from 2015-2019 went to minority- and women-owned businesses.

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

‘One mayor at a time’

While all former living mayors have banded together in this coalition, they and Simama differ in their opinions about what current Mayor Andre Dickens should do in the face of the Trump administration’s policies.

At a rally in October, Dickens invoked David and Goliath’s story to describe the issue.

Former Mayor Kasim Reed says the city should “no question” be willing to forgo its federal funding to defend the program. “That’s what the $200 million budget surplus is for,” he said.

He added that Atlanta “is a signal sender to the United States of America and to the world.”

“Freedom is never permanent in the United States, and so with what is being done right in our faces, you’re either going to react or they are going to continue to roll back progress in the United States,” Reed said.

Simama wonders if the city could file its own lawsuit and take a prominent national stance to defend the programs.

“There are things that still can be done,” he said. “And I am not sure if we are doing everything that we should be doing.”

The coalition has an event to spur student support planned for the spring, he said. They’ll work on a web platform to uplift stories of minority- and women-owned business success in Atlanta and elsewhere.

Former Mayor Bill Campbell, who is also a part of the coalition, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Young, on the other hand, said he wouldn’t “waste a nickel on a legal fight” over the programs. When it comes to accepting federal money, he said, the airport in particular has proven it largely does not need it to survive.

Franklin said she couldn’t answer whether it was worth forgoing federal funding without understanding exactly how much was at stake.

The city did not answer the AJC’s questions about exactly how much federal money is still on the line across city departments.

Bottoms has another suggestion. Perhaps there is a way to reword the city’s programs to emphasize “small business” only, rather than race or gender-specific terminology. It’s an idea Dickens told the AJC he was considering last summer.

Bottoms, who is a Democratic candidate running for governor of Georgia, said, “What I do know, just in terms of our numbers statewide and Atlanta as a whole, is when you focus on small businesses, you’re also focusing on minority- and women- owned businesses just because of the share that minorities and women own in that marketplace.”

There’s a “good chance” the city can come close to achieving the same goals with that language instead, she said. “I haven’t seen the analysis that the city has done, but I would hope, and I trust that that analysis has been done, or at least should be in progress.”

“Is it ideal? Absolutely not, but during this administration, is it necessary? I would venture to say it is.”

Ultimately, she said, the decision lies with Dickens, the only one who has all the internal and external data to make it properly.

“There’s one mayor at a time,” Bottoms said. “At the end of the day, Mayor Dickens should be the one who makes the decisions about how he faces this challenge on behalf of the city of Atlanta.”

— Staff writer Mirtha Donastorg contributed reporting.

This year’s AJC Black History Month series marks the 100th anniversary of the national observance of Black history and the 11th year the AJC has examined the role African Americans played in building Atlanta and shaping American culture. New installments will appear daily throughout February on ajc.com and uatl.com, as well as at ajc.com/news/atlanta-black-history.