If you’re a native Atlantan, you’ve probably heard the name Marvin Arrington Sr. Now, the whole world can know his story.
A new documentary called “Bo Legs: Marvin Arrington, Sr., an Atlanta Story” chronicles the life and work of Arrington Sr., taking a close look at his love for the city of Atlanta and how he factored into some of its biggest moments.
A native Atlantan, Arrington Sr. went to Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University) on a football scholarship, and in 1965 became one of the first two Black students to attend Emory University School of Law full-time. He served on the Atlanta Board of Aldermen – later the Atlanta City Council – for 25 years, including a stint as president, and had a hand in everything from MARTA, to the 1996 Summer Olympics, to the rehabilitation of Zoo Atlanta.
He also made headlines for a few controversial reasons. In 1997, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor against incumbent Bill Campbell. The race turned ugly, with both sides making personal attacks. Arrington Sr. made a comment about former Mayor Maynard Jackson, who supported Campbell, that many saw as related to his skin tone. In 2008, while he was serving as a Fulton County Superior Court judge, he again made headlines when he cleared the courtroom of white people, including lawyers, to speak to Black defendants. Directed by filmmaker Adelin Gasana, “Bo Legs” digs into all of these moments and more.
Gasana has lived in Georgia for roughly nine years, but was originally born in Rwanda. His family moved to Chicago when he was a toddler, but he spent most of his childhood in South Florida.
“I’m a Florida boy, through and through,” Gasana said.
Although that sentiment may be true, Gasana has ingratiated himself into the Atlanta community with ease, and the city has helped him take his career to the next level. This documentary, he said, is coming around at the perfect time. Arrington Sr., who retired from his life as a judge in 2012, was able to see the film.
“Oftentimes when you do documentaries about historical figures, figures who made a generational impact, it’s often after the fact,” Gasana said. “It’s after they have been long gone. I think that the timeliness of this documentary, ‘Bo Legs,’ was very prescient. We did it while he was here.”
Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Gasana about the making of the documentary and Arrington Sr.’s legacy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the inspiration for this particular documentary come from?
Adelin Gasana: I was headhunted. I worked as the archival researcher for the Maynard Jackson documentary entitled “Maynard.” Obviously, Maynard Jackson was the first African American mayor of Atlanta and the first Black mayor of a southern town post Civil Rights. So working on that project was illuminating, because I really learned a lot more about the history of Atlanta – the beginning steps of modern Atlanta, rather.
The executive producers, Buzzy – Maynard Jackson III, that’s Maynard Jackson’s son – and his wife Wendy Jackson, were good friends with Fulton County Commission Marvin Arrington Jr. [Arrington Sr.’s son]. They have been childhood friends from the get go, and Marvin Arrington Jr. wanted to do a documentary about his father. Lo and behold, my name was passed on over. I’m very grateful for that.
The initial journey of this documentary came with skepticism. I was doubtful … I’ve been in documentaries for nearly two decades now, and I get a bunch of pitches. I’m very grateful that people consider me to be a part of their projects, but you know, nine times out of ten, they’re not really good projects. It’s a good idea, it’s a good story, but not every story makes for a documentary, right?
I set off on archival research for two weeks, and I went everywhere. I did all the legwork. I went to the Atlanta History Center, the Woodruff Library, Emory University, the UGA archives, where all the WSB-TV television content has been stored from back in the 1960s through probably the late 1990s. I scoured all the AJC archives. And I was blown away. I mean, it was more than enough. I came back to Marvin Arrington Jr., who’s the executive producer, and said, we got a documentary.
It’s interesting you say you didn’t know too much about him before starting this process. I grew up here, and I had heard of him, but his name just doesn’t come up as much as a lot of the other Civil Rights figures from Atlanta. Do you have any sense of why that might be?
Gasana: Oh, sure. And largely, that’s why documentaries are done, right? It’s these uncanny stories, these stories off the beaten track.
When we think of stalwarts and leaders, names like Martin Luther King Jr., C.T. Vivian, Joseph Lowery, John Lewis – these national figures really take the limelight. So as you start going deeper into the nuances of Atlanta, really at the local level, individuals like Marvin Arrington Sr. will be somewhat in the background. The ones who are here know enough about him. So really any Atlantan who was civically engaged, was aware of the local politics from probably the early 1970s up until the late 1990s, knows who he was. It’s just this new generation, this new flood of Atlantans, probably don’t know him and his impact.
Me going through these archives and coming back and being blown away, was every reason and inspiration and motivation to do this. These stories need to be told. And there are a lot of these types of Atlanta figures who don’t necessarily get their shine. That’s why I thought this would make for the kind of documentary that would really make Atlanta relevant and show how integral the people behind the scenes really are.
Was there anything you learned about him in the process that surprised you or that you didn’t expect?
Gasana: I was really impressed about how he has this generational impact. Whenever you talk about these types of figures, you’ll think that an older guard of Atlanta leaders will speak on behalf of his charisma and his work. But for us to have, for example, [former Mayor] Keisha Lance Bottoms speaking on, “Well when I was growing up, he was that guy at City Hall. He was the guy getting things done for a growing Black, middle-class community.’ It just shows you that kind of generational impact.
It’s interesting, me coming to Atlanta and then growing in Atlanta and Atlanta helping elevate my career, I see similar impacts of what his vision of Atlanta was. He wanted Atlanta to be that fertile ground where people can come in and live out their dreams. And more so, I was really impressed by his public service – not taking advantage of his place to profit or to amass wealth, because he could have easily gone that route. I mean, he had that leverage, he had that access.
When you have the Maynard Jacksons and Andrew Youngs, the first two Black mayors of the 1970s and 1980s, these guys are really national figures, and so they dominate the scene. But along the way, when you get down to city codes and crafting legislation, Marvin Arrington was always in the mix. He’s sitting in those meetings, he’s sitting in those rooms with these guys getting things done.
There are so many talking heads in this documentary. How did you go about deciding who to interview?
Gasana: We wanted to follow the kind of people who played a part in his ascendency. So you have the ones who knew him back in his HBCU days at Clark Atlanta, his days as a football star. Then of course, you transition to Emory University, his early days as a young lawyer being part of the seams and the legal profession, and there are those who can speak to that. Then, of course, as he emerges into city politics and whatnot, then the old Board of Aldermen, transitioning to what the City Council is today.
What’s interesting about Atlanta is that as big as it is, it’s really insular in many ways. It’s connected, right? So when you have certain people who can speak on certain things, they’ll say, oh you need to speak to this person, oh you need to speak to that person. So, instead of us casting that, it just kind of cast itself.
Switching gears a bit – like I mentioned I’m from here, and I like to think I know a good bit about Atlanta and Georgia’s history. But still, there were a few things I had never heard of in this documentary. I’m thinking specifically about the section on the Peyton Wall, which was known as Atlanta’s Berlin Wall and raised specifically to dissuade Black residents from moving into a certain neighborhood. I think that in Atlanta, there’s a sort of tension between the fact that the city was at the center of Civil Rights and the more negative side of that history. In your opinion, how important is it that people reckon with that?
Gasana: I think it’s very crucial. That’s one of the questions we get asked in our Q&As, and even some of the feedback to the documentary said, oh I didn’t know about that part of Atlanta, or even just how Atlanta got formed.
One of the things that I like to always highlight for a document like this is that Marvin Arrington Sr.’s story, being Atlanta born and bred, really is harmonious to Atlanta’s growth. He was born in a segregated town, in the Black part of town, the Black neighborhood. It’s very important to understand the historical context in that regard. We’re talking 1940s, 1950s Atlanta – not even a mid-size city, right? A provincial town of the deep south. It was part of the culture. We’re in the throes of Jim Crow, and that can never be forgotten.
In the mid-1960s, Atlanta’s moniker was actually, “The City Too Busy to Hate.” That’s when it kind of met the fork in the road. What kind of future do we want? It goes back to Marvin Arrington Sr.’s impact locally. He saw a different kind of city than [where] he grew up. He knew that we needed to go in this direction, and he was going to help lead and pave that way. Atlanta wasn’t guaranteed. I mean, none of this was guaranteed, right? It took these types of leaders, it took this type of focus to say, we’re different from our past, that we have more to offer. Slowly, and lo and behold, Atlanta emerges as that frontier city of the south.
Towards the end of the documentary, you get into some of the things he did that were a little more controversial. You talk about some of his comments about Maynard Jackson during his mayoral campaign, and the time in the court when he asked all white people to leave so he could speak to primarily Black defendants alone. From you perspective, how do you deal with those more controversial aspects of a public figure’s life when making a documentary?
Gasana: As important as it is to commemorate these individuals and these figures and their impact, we also don’t want to be so glossy-eyed of their shortcomings. Interestingly enough, the executive producer, Marvin Arrington Jr., wanted me to go even deeper into some of the other controversies. Maynard Jackson and Marvin Arrington Sr.’s kind of chasm, if you will, was long-standing. It ventured back all the way into their early days in politics.
To give you a quick backstory to that, Maynard Jackson was originally from Dallas, Texas. He comes to Atlanta by the time he’s six or seven years old, a very young boy. His father was a pastor at a church in Atlanta. They were part of the Dobbs family, a very prominent African American family.
[Jackson] goes to Morehouse College, enters the scene and political life. He kind of gets there early. He runs in 1968 for a U.S. Senate position and loses, but loses a very close race. Then he runs for Vice Mayor, becomes the vice mayor [of Atlanta’s Board of Alderman, comparable to President of the City Council] to Sam Massell, and then eventually becomes the first Black mayor. In many ways, the Atlanta-born and bred folks felt he didn’t pay enough of his dues. By the time he’s elected mayor, Marvin Arrington Sr.’s already in politics and on the Board of Alderman for about four or five years running. So there was always kind of a chip on his shoulder in that regard.
Then, as Marvin Arrington Sr. becomes president of the City Council, he was Maynard Jackson’s floor leader. To understand a little more about how the city government works, oftentimes, a lot of policy and legislation gets passed when the mayor and the City Council president get along … but you see a gridlock when they don’t get along.
Maynard and Marvin would get a lot of things done in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but then when it was time for [Arrington’s] reelection, Maynard endorses his opponent. He was taken aback. So that’s when all of this brews and what not. Not saying that they were enemies in any real regard, but there was tension from the onset.
Going back to your question on the bigger point, it was important to really touch on that. As a historian and as a documentarian, you never want to be the one who gets the feedback that says, wow, you didn’t talk about this, and you left this out. This is part of his story. None of us are perfect. Even the ones who do documentaries and write books on Martin Luther King Jr., they talk about his shortcomings. This is to really get the fleshed-out, down-to-earth reality of who these individuals are.
“Bo Legs” is currently available to watch on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube.
