Atlanta Mayor Vows To `Fight To The Death' Against Attack On City's Business Set-Aside Programs

Jet, Sept 6, 1999

The Southeastern Legal Foundation, which has used lawsuits to abolish affirmative action programs around the South, has its sights focused on a new target--Atlanta, the very symbol of Black economic achievement.

However, Atlanta's Black politicians, among them Mayor Bill Campbell, have defended the requirement that one-third of the companies doing business with the city be minority- or female-owned.

Campbell, who as a child was the first Black to integrate a North Carolina school system, vowed to "fight to the death" to keep Atlanta's set-aside program.

"There will be no compromise, no mediation, no capitulation," said Campbell, who compared the foundation to the Ku Klux Klan. "We are pulling the sheets off the Southeastern Legal Foundation."

The Atlanta-based Foundation has said it will file a lawsuit to challenge the city's set-aside program as unconstitutional.

"This isn't about race," said Matt Glavin, Foundation president. "This is about breaking the law. When you have statutes that grant certain benefits to one group of people because of the color of their skin that are not granted to another group, you're violating the Fourteenth Amendment."

Backers of the program, which was started nearly 25 years ago by Maynard Jackson, the city's first Black mayor, say it is still needed to help fledgling minority-owned businesses in an environment where discrimination is still prevalent.

"If you can eliminate it here, the house of cards sort of falls down around America," said Lou Walker, president of the Georgia Black Chamber of Commerce. "If Atlanta goes, so goes affirmative action."

Blacks in the city have also threatened to boycott companies led by members of the board of directors of the Southeastern Legal Foundation. Two business leaders immediately resigned from the foundation board.