He is notable also for public works projects, primarily the new Maynard H. Jackson International terminal at the Atlanta airport, and for greatly increasing minority business participation in the city.

His maternal grandfather was civil rights leader John Wesley Dobbs, who worked to successfully overturn the white primary in Georgia.

[3] After attending the Boston University Law School for a short time, Jackson held several jobs, including selling encyclopedias.

[1] Prior to their divorce, Bunnie Jackson founded First Class, Inc. She was the first African-American woman to own a public relations and marketing firm in Atlanta.

His campaign was underfunded, and he lost, but Jackson won in Atlanta, gaining prominence in the city, which had a substantial black minority.

[5][6] In 1973, Jackson was elected with 60 percent of the vote, as the first African-American mayor of Atlanta and any major southern city; he was supported by a coalition of white liberals/moderates and African Americans.

[5][6] Jackson was mayor through the period when the separate Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) 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.

[8] Maynard Jackson heightened racial tensions in May 1974 when he attempted to fire the incumbent white police chief, John Inman.

Jackson believed the change was needed to grapple with Atlanta's growing crime problem and charges by the black community of police racial insensitivity toward African Americans.

In August 1974 Mayor Jackson appointed A. Reginald Eaves, an activist and personal friend, as Public Safety Commissioner.

He generated controversy by appointing an ex-convict as his personal secretary and for what was considered as affirmative action in the police department, which some described as "reverse discrimination.

[12] In addition to the 1979–1981 Atlanta Child Murders mentioned above, residents were concerned about a rising crime rate during Mayor Jackson's tenure, which was consistent with national trends.

The business community accused Mayor Jackson and Police Chief George Napper of dismissing public concerns about crime.

Towards the end of his second mayoralty, a 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago ranked Jackson as the twenty-fourth-best American big-city mayor to have served between the years 1820 and 1993.

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