Once described as a "rabid moderate", Allen was the only elected official from the entire south who gave evidence in support of the Kennedy administration's great 1963 civil rights bill. Three years later, his hands trembling, a trait he claimed to have inherited, he showed great personal courage when he confronted a hail of bricks and bottles in the Summerhill riot. After his death, senator Zell Miller of Georgia said, "No one person in the South's recent history did more to bring the races together than Ivan Allen Jr."
Allen was widely credited with saving Atlanta from the racial violence that shook south-central Los Angeles in 1965 and Detroit in 1967. He was part of the white power-structure of the city that wanted to be "too busy to hate", and he became mayor partly by persuading employers such as the Rich department store to engage in dialogue with the new radical black leadership.
As mayor, he worked with institutions such as the Citizens & Southern Bank and the Coca-Cola corporation to develop the city on a racially tolerant basis. He worked closely with Dr Martin Luther King and other African-American leaders. He was also an Atlanta booster who helped endow his beloved city with its Hartsfield international airport, a mass transit system, a stadium, and baseball and football franchises.
Allen was the son of Ivan Allen, founder of an office-machinery business, and usually known as the "senator", although he was only a local Georgia legislator for two years. Ivan Allen Jr - his son was Ivan Allen III and his grandson is Ivan Allen IV - grew up in the small opulent elite that has controlled Atlanta from its leafy northern suburbs since its famous editor Henry Grady taught it to prefer business to Confederate nostalgia, and the Coca-Cola company brought it wealth beyond the imaginings of rural Georgia.
As a boy, Allen swam and played tennis at the exclusive Piedmont carriage driving club. He was a good athlete and an excellent golfer: long before the regional code allowed such things, he played a secret challenge match against two black caddies. He was educated at Georgia Tech, and active in its alumni affairs to the end of his life.
As a young businessman he was one of the "better class of people", as they were known locally, who were embarrassed by the crudities of the other Georgia politicians, with their half-avowed links to the Ku Klux Klan. During the war, Allen served as a major and ran the selective service draft for Governor Arnall, and then served as executive secretary to the relatively liberal governor.
He soon retired to run the family business and grew wealthy on some shrewd investments; in 1957, he ran for governor himself as a segregationist, of the paternalist rather than the vicious kind. He lost, not so much because of his racial attitudes, but because before the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" decision in Baker v Carr in 1962, Georgia was dominated by the deep rural counties, and no Atlanta businessman could hope to move into the governor's mansion.
In the next few years, as black Atlanta challenged the segregation code, Allen saw how things were moving and played a key role in quietly persuading the city's power structure to move too. He was supported by Mills Lane, the powerful banker, and Gene Patterson, the eloquent editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and maintained his contacts with the Woodruff family of Coca-Cola as well as with the emerging black leadership, which in Atlanta was exceptionally strong, with King, his father Daddy King, Maynard Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Julian Bond and many others.
As mayor, Allen followed the segregationist Lester Maddox (obituary, June 26); his first black successor, in 1973, was Maynard Jackson (obituary, June 25). Allen was successful in many of his projects. The day he took office all "white" and "colored" signs came down. He built highways, a new civic centre, and desegregated the schools without trouble. He even succeeded in getting the city through the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 without major rioting.
But things were getting tougher. Allen was finding it harder to get support for housing and for rapid transit. Atlanta's black population was more militant, and Allen decided not to run for a third term.
Shortly after retiring he went on a hunting trip to Africa and nearly died of a tropical fever. His later years were darkened by the suicide of his son, Ivan III, in 1992. He is survived by his wife, Louise Richardson Allen, and two other sons.
· Ivan Allen Jr, politician, born March 15 1911; died July 2 2003.
