Campbell divides Atlantans — again

Bill Campbell is like a walking inkblot test.

Ask Atlantans about the ex-mayor's legacy, and responses are visceral:

He fought for the poor. He spewed racial invective.

He was charming. He was cruel.

He's a victim of evil prosecutors. He's a crook.

It's been four years since Campbell was mayor, three since he left town and one since he was indicted on federal corruption charges. But discussion of his tumultuous years (1994-2002) as mayor still triggers unvarnished feelings, whether about him personally, race in Atlanta, corruption in government or whether black men are targets. Few lack an opinion.

His federal corruption trial, which starts Tuesday, may further expose those divisions.

"This can be an O.J. Simpson trial," said civil rights legend and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. "No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty."

While Young overstates the case, his comment demonstrates the dichotomy that is Bill Campbell. The former mayor, who is accused of taking at least $160,000 in payoffs and $137,000 in illegal campaign contributions, has steadfastly denied the charges. He declined to speak for this article.

Campbell's civil rights pedigree is real. He integrated the Raleigh schools alone in first grade. The janitor's son graduated from prestigious universities: Vanderbilt, then Duke. But even those times are tainted in his mind.

"The only thing he told me about his time in college was going to a swimming hole and everyone got out," said Young, who was mayor during the 1980s, when Campbell was an ambitious young councilman. "It's not a personal tragedy, it's an American tragedy. His whole life, they were trying to break his spirit. He sees the trial as a continuation of what he's gone through since first grade: Can a smart, uppity black man make it?"

Not all black men see Campbell as such a symbol, however. Michael Lomax, a former political rival, says Campbell's plight is of his own making.

"Bill was his own worst enemy. He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory," said Lomax, who was trounced by Campbell in the 1993 mayoral election and now heads the United Negro College Fund. "Bill was not gracious and magnanimous in victory. That says a lot about you."

Campbell mastered personalizing the politics of race to uplift or attack. Lomax said he overused such rhetoric.

"Bill is more privileged than many white people," he said. "Many others had a role in the civil rights movement, but it didn't embitter them. There is a flaw there. He needs to look in a mirror. I don't know if he knows himself fully."

Campbell's contradiction

Campbell was always a paradox. He was a promising attorney, lived in the predominantly white and wealthy Inman Park neighborhood and sent his two children to Paideia, a private school. Yet he became the darling of elderly and low-income blacks.

Part of his commitment to Atlanta's poor was because he's an astute politician who plainly saw the numbers. But he also saw his mother in the faces of women in the senior centers, said Michael Langford, an Atlanta native and political activist who became Campbell's director of community affairs.

Langford met Campbell in the early 1980s, when the councilman was trying to make a name for himself. It was at a community meeting in the impoverished Vine City area west of downtown, where senior citizens were getting murdered.

"Not knowing him well, I just saw a young, silk-stockinged attorney," Langford said of his first impression of the dapper and articulate future mayor. But Campbell commanded the meeting. "What are we going to do?" he asked, sounding like he meant to help.

"He had a special relationship with the seniors," Langford said. "Everything Bill did, he took personal. I saw a passion."

Campbell cultivated a fight-the-power persona.

"Bill was always a no-vote man," said Young, who as mayor supported the controversial Presidential Parkway through the east side of the city, a project Campbell vehemently opposed and that was ultimately defeated. That made him a hero in the neighborhoods and helped win him the mayor's office.

"He had an anti-establishment attitude," Young said. "It was a fatal style. He divided the world into friends and enemies. His style was to fight enemies and help friends."

In 1993, he was viewed as a bridge between white and black, downtown and the neighborhoods. Debi Starnes, a former Campbell neighbor who succeeded him in his council seat, said he was appealing because "he came in as cross-race. He could work with everybody."

Affected 'to the core'

But the 1995 Freaknik changed him, she said. The annual black college spring break gathering brought tens of thousands of students to Atlanta, where they partied — often raucously — in a rolling motorcade, gridlocking entire sections of the city. Stores and restaurants would shut down to keep from dealing with the throngs of young people. Business and community leaders demanded the mayor do something. He responded, ordering police to enforce traffic and quality-of-life laws. They towed cars and made arrests by the score, ultimately driving the celebration out of town.

Many blacks were outraged at Campbell's treatment of black youth, seeing it as kowtowing to the white community. That reaction "profoundly affected his personality," Starnes said.

"That's what changed," she said. "It affected him somewhere to the core. He said, 'I've been vilified by my people, and your people are nowhere to be seen.' He meant white people and the downtown business community. After that he worked so hard to win his people back, he never returned to the middle."

Campbell "retreated into a smaller group of people around him. It doesn't take a psychologist [which Starnes is] to understand, anyone has to do that to survive. He had a shrinking group that could be trusted, and they ran amok."

Eluding public spotlight

During his final years in office, as the federal investigation tightened around him, Campbell became scarce at City Hall and unavailable to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and local television stations. He turned to more sympathetic audiences. His favorite was V-103 radio station with Frank Ski, the popular morning host who has become a close friend. On Ski's show, Campbell compared the FBI to "the KGB in Communist Russia" and referred to federal authorities as "the forces of evil."

So far, a grinding federal investigation that started in 1999 has netted 12 city officials and contractors and a strip club owner on an array of bribery, perjury and corruption charges. Many were Campbell friends.

Federal prosecutors are using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to try to tie Campbell into the same complex web of payoffs, city contracts and campaign contributions. The charges say Campbell raked in more than $160,000 in payoffs and $137,000 in illegal campaign donations to, among other things, gamble in casinos and fly with friends to Paris. Some former friends are scheduled to testify.

"They're lies from beginning to end," Campbell said when the charges were levied in 2004.

Actions anger residents

But it wasn't just corruption that angered residents, employees and those who knew the mayor. It was also that much of the city's government had ceased to operate properly.

While Campbell was being scrutinized by federal prosecutors, the city was under fire from other federal officials — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA repeatedly fined the city for not repairing the crumbling sewer system and allowing countless sewage spills. The massive problem — costing more than $3 billion to remedy — is finally being addressed by his successor, Mayor Shirley Franklin.

Campbell started his term by getting voters to pass a $150 million bond issue to pay for a host of infrastructure repairs. Five years later, half the projects remained incomplete.

Campbell presided over the Olympics in 1996, but that, too, drew controversy. He helped a friend win the contract to rent parts of city streets and sidewalks to vendors. The result was likened to a flea market. Olympic officials were livid, and many vendors losts thousands of dollars.

And when Campbell left office, the city was in the red by more than $80 million, the first deficit it had experienced in many years. Franklin had to raise taxes and lay off hundreds of employees to balance the budget.

Langford, like many Campbell supporters, said there were numerous successes: Public housing was improved as projects were demolished and replaced by mixed-use developments; community centers were built; and the mayor fought for affirmative action and minority involvement in contracts. In fact, he likened opponents of such programs to the Ku Klux Klan.

In early 2003, when leaving town, Campbell told a radio audience, "I never sold out — ever. I am proud to say I stood up for my people."

After he left office, the much-investigated former mayor struggled to find work in Atlanta.

Willie Gary, a flamboyant and highly successful African-American plaintiff's attorney from Florida, came forward and offered him a partnership in his firm. Campbell moved there and took up a caseload, most notably representing the family of Kenneth Walker, a black insurance analyst from Columbus shot to death in 2003 by a white deputy in a drug stop gone wrong.

Now on a leave of absence from the law firm, Campbell spends most of his time in a "war room" sifting through the 400 boxes of documents that have been generated for his upcoming trial. He has vowed to take the witness stand in his defense and must be thoroughly prepared for what would be a withering cross-examination.

Ski recently went out to dinner with Campbell in Atlanta, and people repeatedly approached him as if he were still mayor, telling him they were with him, that they were praying for him.

Personal healing

In recent months, Campbell has visited black churches, at least a couple of dozen, by Langford's count. The reaction is often standing ovations. Friends see the purpose of the church visits as twofold: Campbell is waging a public relations campaign to remind people of his service and his plight. And he is seeking personal healing.

"African-Americans are very forgiving people," Ski said. "They forgive you if they think you're real. Bill is reaching out to the court of public opinion. He has to win over people that he is unjustly accused."

Mary Sanford, 83, former residents leader at the Perry Homes public housing project, said there still was plenty of support for Campbell. "The seniors still talk about him," she said. "They don't believe that stuff about him."

"But I hope they won't find anything to bring him down." She always liked Bill Campbell. "Best thing, he was there," she said.

Many people say Shirley Franklin, whose first term has been roundly acclaimed, makes Campbell look bad by comparison. Ski says that's an unfair comparison, that Franklin is not fighting the same demons.

"At its core, it's a fear of the black man," Ski said. "A white man is not troubled by a black woman. Bill Campbell is a black man who could tell the most powerful white people in this city, 'This is how it's going to be.' "

Clark Howard, the afternoon radio star on WSB, doesn't see race at the root of Campbell's troubles. He sees greed, corruption and wasted opportunity. "He could have done so good but he became a hood," Howard said. "He was running a kleptocracy, in my opinion. Government by thievery."

Howard said a program director ordered the mild-mannered consumer affairs guru to stop bashing the mayor. Howard told them, "Fire me. I feel it's that important."

The manager backed off, but Howard said station executives surveyed listeners to see if they wanted to hear about Campbell on what was usually a consumer affairs show.

Howard said 96 percent of his listeners said they "strongly" wanted to hear what he had to say about the mayor.

The divergent views of beloved hosts Ski and Howard — and their sizable audiences — show the public divide Campbell left in his wake.

Many shifted allegiance during his years in office.

Retired Atlanta Police Deputy Chief Louis Arcangeli, an Inman Park resident who voted for Campbell in 1993, gradually grew to believe his administration was poisonous.

Arcangeli stepped into the center of a scandal when he brought then-Police Chief Beverly Harvard evidence that the department was downgrading or failing to report thousands of crimes. The force was several hundred positions short during the Campbell years and statistics on crime looked bad. So "they cut crime with an eraser," Arcangeli said.

Arcangeli was demoted, but was reinstated to his old rank after Campbell left office.

Campbell and Harvard "bruised me up and tried to cover it up," said Arcangeli. "They really tried to crush people, not just oppose them.

"You can measure the harm to the city by the economic deficit that Campbell left. But how can you measure the harm from the hate he spread in his defense?"

Arcangeli said he recently encountered Campbell on a downtown street. He said Campbell spotted him and changed his course to avoid having to speak.