Women power: African-American females are playing major role in preparing Atlanta for the Olympic Games

Ebony, July, 1996

BOTH Harvard and Barrett are working closely with Susan Pease Langford, director of the mayor's Office of Olympic Coordination. It is Langford's job to coordinate all city agencies and departments for the Games. "I have to make sure that we are not only on the same page, but that we are reading the same book," says Lang ford, who was a trial attorney before being hired for her present position by Mayor Bill Campbell in 1994. "I know more than I could have imagined about how to clean streets, about how the sewer system works and about how the city works."

Langford is also responsible for making sure Atlanta won't be left holding an Olympic-sized bill after the Games. Montreal ended up $700 million in the red after hosting the 1976 Olympics, a predicament Atlanta wants to avoid. As a result, Langford and her staff of six (all women) work closely with the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games to see that the city recovers the cost of, among other things, water, sewer, sanitation, fire and police protection, related to the Olympics.

Langford says her position has meant long hours and a full plate of responsibilities, which includes regular reports to the mayor and the city council. "I wake up in the morning and make a list of things that have to be done," she says. "I'm a chart person. I have charts for everything."

KNEE Glover, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, also has been charting how Olympic money is being spent. With the Olympic Village and venues directly across the street from several city public housing buildings, she has one of the toughest jobs of the Games--to ensure that the $5 billion event will benefit Atlanta's low-income residents. That's a daunting task, considering the fact that the city of Atlanta has per capita more public housing than any other city in the country and has been on the federal "troubled list" since 1992. But Glover, who was brought on in 1994 to reorganize the city's Housing Authority, considers it a challenge. "If you were to do a wide survey, you would find there is a heck of a lot of skepticism about whether poor people will be on the Olympic agenda," Glover says. "We wanted to make sure . . . that all segments of our population v ill benefit."

Glover is using the goodwill brought on by the Olympics to push for improvements in public housing. If successful, the housing authority will revitalize five communities, which includes about 3,000 housing units. "The Olympic spirit is something that should not be discounted because there is so much activity and so much enthusiasm and so much sense of community around this great occasion," she says. "The Olympics have helped drive us toward a timeline. Because one thing is for certain, the Olympics are coming, and we will either be prepared or we won't. This has given us the opportunity to use the goodwill that surrounds this whole wonderful occasion to get some problems solved. And at the end of the day, what we really are talking about is collectively solving some problems that have plagued the City of Atlanta for at least 20 years."