Ivan Earnest Allen Jr. (March 15, 1911 – July 2, 2003) was an American businessman who served two terms as the 51st mayor of Atlanta, during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Allen took the helm of the Ivan Allen Company, his father's office supply business, in 1946 and within three years had the company bringing in annual revenues of several millions of dollars. In 1961, he authored a white paper for revitalizing Atlanta. It was adopted by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and became the Six Point Forward Atlanta program. This plan would become his roadmap as mayor for creating an economic surge that established the infrastructure, business, education, arts, sports, and international presence that are the foundations for modern Atlanta. Allen was a founding member of Atlanta's influential Commerce Club, which he chaired until his death in 2003. He became president of the city Chamber of Commerce in 1961 and during this same year ran for mayor, defeating the staunch segregationist, Lester Maddox. In an effort to attract northern capital to Atlanta, Allen Sr. headed the Atlanta chamber's "Forward Atlanta" booster campaign (1926–1929), a strategy that lured almost 700 new businesses to Atlanta and helped influence Allen Jr.'s future as a businessman and civic leader.
From an early age, Allen understood that his family was privileged. He began attending Boys High School in 1927 and was one of the few students to own a car. That same year, his father's name was published for the first time in the Social Cities Register, an annual list of elites in Richmond, Atlanta, Charleston, Savannah, and Augusta. He regularly attended the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta with his parents and would later serve as an elder for many years and remain an active member until his death.
Bids for governor
In 1954, Ivan Allen Jr. made a brief bid for Georgia Governor on a segregationist platform. In a field of nine candidates, he lost to segregationist Marvin Griffin. Allen gained much of his support from the black community, which made up 40 percent of the city's population at the time. He took office in early 1962, replacing outgoing Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield, who was retiring after 23 years in office.
In June 1962, during his first term as mayor, Allen took the solemn responsibility of flying to France to help identify and bring home the bodies of 106 of Atlanta's art and business leaders who, on an art appreciation tour, died in the Air France Flight 007 plane crash at Orly Airport in Paris. Local Black leaders criticized him for demolishing a Black neighborhood to build it.
His building program, with its emphasis on developing downtown, was opposed by some of Atlanta's black leaders as not adequately meeting the need for low-income housing. Despite the criticisms, however, there was more low-income housing built during Allen's eight years as mayor than the entire thirty years prior to that. Allen wrote, "It is wonderful to be idealistic and to speak about human values, but you are not going to be able to do one thing about them if you are not economically strong. If there is any one slogan I lived by as mayor of Atlanta, that would be it". In his 1973 autobiography, The River of No Return, Cleveland Sellers a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee claimed that Allen then instructed police to, "get them out of here, if you have to tear it down brick by brick," referring to their homes.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mayor Allen challenged members of Atlanta's prestigious Commerce Club to accept African American businessmen. When Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Allen helped organize a 1,500-person bi-racial banquet to honor him (Atlanta was King's hometown). Furthermore, he shamed many of the white leaders in the city into supporting the event beyond pragmatic grounds. Many attended the dinner, making it a turning point in Atlanta's race relations.
Allen described that to be the moment which made civil rights a very personal matter to him: "I have to be honest with myself and admit that up until the time I had to make the decision to go to Washington or not go, my liberalism on the race issue had been based to a large degree on the pragmatism: it was simply good business for Atlanta to be an open city, a fair city, a "City Too Busy to Hate", a city trying to raise the level of its poorest citizens and get them off the relief roles...I am certain that at this point I had finally crossed over and made my commitment on a very personal basis. And I think I took some of my friends with me".
The Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage
Entrusted by the Allen family to carry forward Mayor Allen's legacy, Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts awarded the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service from 2001 to 2010. In 2010, Georgia Tech established the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage. Awarded for the first time in 2011, it recognizes those around the world whose life and work embody Mayor Allen's moral imperative and compassion in shaping a better future for humankind. His remains were reinterred at Oakland Cemetery alongside other family members in 2009.
Ivan Allen Jr. was awarded a Doctor of Public Service degree from Georgia Tech and honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Morris Brown College, Juniata College, Clark College, Morehouse College, LaGrange College, Emory University, and Davidson College.