The new city charter of 1973 drastically changed the structure of the government and the first major update in a century. Here's a nice outline of how it happened from the 1997 biography of Grace Towns Hamilton (1905-1991) by Lorraine Nelson Spritzer and Jean B. Bergmark. At the time Hamilton was a state legislator, Sam Massell was mayor and Maynard Jackson was vice-mayor, a position that changes drastically because of the new charter:

Beginning with the 1968 legislature, she took on the government of Atlanta in what would be a protracted but eventually successful struggle for a new Atlanta Cit Charter aimed at making the city's governing apparatus more workable and, for blacks, more representative. She was not alone in the struggle, but in the end she would get most of the credit for the successful outcome.

Of its own volition the city had submitted itself to scrutiny in 1965 by the Public Service Administration (PSA) of Chicago, which came up with a gloomy verdict: "Viewed broadly in a modern professional sense," said the PSA, "[Atlanta's government] would appear to be unmanageable." The problem, as the agency saw it, was that the mayor and the Board of Aldermen were trapped in a tangled skein of executive and legislative authority that weakened the mayor in favor of the Board of Aldermen because the aldermen not only made policy but also administered many of the laws they enacted. The peculiar structure might have cracked before, the PSA thought, had it not been for the personal strength of past mayors and the high caliber of some aldermen, but its viability was increasingly doubtful as the city expanded in size and complexity. The PSA recommended giving the mayor exclusive right to administer laws, the aldermen the sole right to make them.

Between 1968 and 1970 Hamilton mainly sought to implement this PSA recommendation. Mayor Ivan Allen and the Board of Aldermen had had the PSA report for two years but taken no action; Allen did not want trouble with the aldermen, and they did not want to relinquish their prerogatives. Pressure finally wrung from Allen a weak endorsement of Hamilton's aim -- she would get the same after 1969 from Allen's successor, Sam Massell -- but she was borne along in this campaign mainly by the support of her Fulton County colleagues in the legislature and her own determination.

After introducing what became known as the "strong mayor" bill in both 1968 and 1969 without success, she let the matter rest for a while, then, with characteristic persistence, returned to the attack in 1971 from another direction, seeking this time a total revision of the Atlanta City Charter, a document dating from 1874, whose age and inadequacy she and her supporters considered the primary source of modern Atlanta's "unmanageability." This time she was successful, as she explained in a 1972 interview: "I tried to correct, several times through legislation, matters in the organization of Atlanta's government that everybody seemed to think needed to be changed. These bills didn't pass. It finally occurred to me that the sensible thing to do would be to provide a document more suitable to the times we live in rather than 100 years ago. Therefore, I introduced a bill to establish the Atlanta Charter Commission, which passed." Out of the commission's work would come a new Atlanta city government, one that recognized blacks as never before.

What Hamilton sought was no mere recodification of the old charter; she insisted on "substantive changes," and she wrote into the bill establishing the commission specific authority for this objective. She wanted not only to implement the PSA recommendation; now she was ready to attack the malapportionment and at-large voting that nurtured and perpetuated first the nonrepresentation and then the underrepresentation of blacks in the halls of city government. It was a frank push for "black power," and she used that term in a letter to a student at Morehouse College; it was a push worthy of any of the militant young. She and other blacks thought the charter should be rewritten to reflect and advance contemporary reality, which was that Atlanta's Negroes now constituted 41 percent of the city's electorate, and at crucial points they had voted in greater percentages than whites, and that for years they had cast the deciding votes in Atlanta's mayoral contests and in 1965 had finally managed in an at-large election to put one of their own, Q.V. Williamson, from the city's heavily black third ward [this included all of Atlanta University area, Ashby, Bankhead, Adamsville, etc], on the Board of Aldermen, the first black alderman since 1870.

Now Atlanta blacks, marching under Hamilton's banner, were out for more, determined, as she put it, "to give the entire populace a real say-so in choosing the governing body of Atlanta." And they now had on their side the U.S. Department of Justice, overseer of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had come to see multimember districts, at-large elections, and gerrymandering as the major hindrances to black empowerment; as Justice had to approve all changes in election laws, including reapportionment plans, blacks were everywhere invoking federal support against white maneuvers to block their advance. Williamson's third ward was an example of the obstacles Negroes had faced in Atlanta; not only was it mostly black, it was also the largest ward in the city, having three times more people than the smallest ward, inhabited exclusively by whites. Already in 1969, before the Charter Commission was created, she had put through the legislature a bill making two wards out of the old third, giving the city nine wards, each electing two aldermen by the customary city-wide vote. Hamilton's move met little opposition as the city was by then increasingly swayed by black demands, but in fact her real aim, revealed once the commission went to work, was to shrink the number of aldermen and to elect half of them from redrawn districts, leaving only six to at-large selection.

The new Atlanta Charter Commission went to work on July 1, 1971, with thirty members appointed by the mayor, the aldermanic board, and the legislative delegations of Fulton and DeKalb Counties. Its mandate was to produce a new charter in eighteen months. Everyone knew Grace Hamilton was the project's godmother, but the commission chose to make her its vice-chairman and to name Emmet J. Bondurant, a prominent Atlanta attorney, as its chairman. If she felt any disappointment, she concealed it with her usual aplomb, saying, "Of course he was an excellent chairman of the commission because he knew, as many of us didn't, we were not lawyers, what was really involved in some of these things."

Exactly a year later, the commission published a first draft of the proposed new charter; it held public hearings until October 1, 1972, completed its final draft on December 1, and dissolved on December 31. Atlanta had a new governing document on March 16, 1973, when Governor Jimmy Carter signed the enabling legislation just passed by the Georgia legislature.

Exactly a year later, the commission published a first draft of the proposed new charter; it held public hearings until October 1, 1972, completed its final draft on December 1, and dissolved on December 31. Atlanta had a new governing document on March 16, 1973, when Governor Jimmy Carter signed the enabling legislation just passed by the Georgia legislature.

Hamilton was proud of the new charter, but it was not all she had hoped for. The first draft had satisfied all her primary objectives, providing Atlanta with a "strong" mayor, as the PSA had recommended, separating legislative and executive functions, and placing administrative authority entirely in the mayor's office. It also acknowledged racial reality by two new reforms -- the Board of Aldermen, renamed the Atlanta City Council, was reduced in size from eighteen to twelve members, eight of them to be elected by redrawn districts and four elected city-wide, and the Atlanta Board of Education's eight members were to be elected half by district and half at large.

The shrunken City Council immediately became the subject of dissent. As Hamilton remembered: "A lot of people got nervous, as people do when there's any change proposed that would increase power or give a different group access to influence, money and so on." Nevertheless, the dissent had to be taken seriously because its sources were both black and white.

The Board of Aldermen had objected vigorously all along to the cutback in number, and now it was joined in opposition by the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, which thought that fewer city aldermen "would reduce the base of representation and thereby reduce the influence of the Negro vote." The NAACP wanted district elections as much as Hamilton, but from more, not fewer, wards. The impasse was resolved by the compromise that left the new Atlanta City Council with eighteen members as before but with twelve elected by districts and only six by the old city-wide system. Hamilton, by now a seasoned and pragmatic politician, accepted defeat on the council's size "because the main thing was to get the bulk of the document through," but she remained convinced that Atlanta needed a smaller governing body, and she pursued this objective with her customary persistence for the remainder of her legislative career. She had achieved a major goal, however, which was "to create a more equitable structure to give the black population more of a chance." It was a chance they quickly seized. On October 16, 1973, when Atlantans, by now 50 percent black, went to the polls in a city election, they not only chose an even number of black and white city councilmen and a city school board with a black majority but also elected their first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of any large southern city in American history. Over a century of white rule in Atlanta had come to an end and black power had triumphed in the gateway to Dixie. Major credit in the minds of many was due to Grace Towns Hamilton.

Hamilton came to believe that a strong mayor, in the absence of professional management, was not the best answer to the city's problems. Still in the first flush of victory in March 1973,she was filled with optimism and modestly diverted attention from her own role in its creation, focusing praise instead on the commission. "It was a hard-working committee, it wasn't just something that let the staff write the reports. We spent thousands of hours on the job," she later remembered. People such as Sam A. Williams, executive director of Research Atlanta, wanted to keep the spotlight on her, and he wrote her after the charter became effective, saying, "If it had not been for years of work you invested in drafting the legislation, getting the Commission appointed, writing the Charter and finally getting it through the General Assembly, it would not have been done."

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