I am not much of a prognosticator.  For that, we can all be grateful.

In my brief career as a columnist, I have earned the eternal enmity of Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell and his cronies for saying he would go down as one of the most forgettable mayors in Atlanta history.  I predicted that after eight years as mayor of a major U.S. city, his accomplishments would be exactly zero and in a few years, we would have a hard time remembering who he was.  His only claim to fame would be that he happened to occupying the mayor’s office when the 1996 Olympics came to Atlanta.

I was wrong.  He is going to be well remembered.

 First, he will be remembered as the mayor who gave Atlanta a near permanent reputation as a trashy city that didn’t work when the world’s spotlight was focused on the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996.  This was due in large part to the tacky sidewalk vendors program operated by his personal friend, Munson Steed.  Campbell’s lack of leadership negated the hard work of a lot of people who deserved better.  To this day, the mayor has remained unrepentant, claiming the city made $2.5 million looking like a flea market on steroids.  Had I been willing to sell the city’s reputation down the drain, I would have gotten a lot more money than that, you can be sure.

But his most important legacy may be that he played the race card once too often and, in doing so, has perhaps mortally wounded those in this country who use race as a cudgel.  It will take awhile to assess the total impact of Campbell’s actions but suffice it to say that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the Concerned Black Clergy of Atlanta, Georgia State Representative Billy McKinney and the nut that fell from his family tree, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney have seen their race card turn from an ace to a deuce.

Screaming that he is a victim of a race-based prosecution by federal investigators has fallen on deaf ears with both blacks and whites. Like the little boy that cried wolf, he made the claim once too often.  It was bound to happen.

There is no question that racism still lingers from the Jim Crow days of “separate but equal” in which black people were separate but certainly not equal.  We’ve been a long time getting over that.  We will stamp out the last vestiges of prejudice only when fair-minded people of both races learn to trust and respect each other.  To do that, we have got to rid ourselves of the race baiters on both sides.  That is why I see the mayor’s diatribe as a positive development.   As one young black professional told me, if you yell “race” every time something doesn’t suit you then when an act of racism does occur, nobody will believe you.  I couldn’t agree more.

An individual high in the ranks of the national Democratic Party says privately that people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are becoming irrelevant to the new generation of blacks.  Like a couple of old geezers who don’t realize their best days are behind them, they are out of step with the times. Blacks are no more monolithic today than are whites.  They run the gamut from conservative to liberal.  In fact, some of the most conservative people I know are black and no one, black or white, is going to tell them how to think or what to do.

While the mayor of Atlanta is screeching “race” at anything and everything, fair-minded people are trying to find a satisfactory solution to the admissions question at my alma mater, the University of Georgia.  The matter has ended up in court, but the debate has been largely devoid of the racial posturing one would hear in Atlanta.  Everybody seems to want to do what is right and that is as it should be.  Education is a critical step on the ladder to the American dream and both blacks and whites should be afforded the opportunity.  There is no easy answer to the question – that is why it ended up in court – but it doesn’t need to be made harder by either side playing race cards.

So, adios, Bill Campbell. Take your angry rhetoric and sulk into the sunset and invite your mean-spirited friends to join you.  When you are gone the world will get instantly more fair-minded.

That day can’t come soon enough for me.