The award is glass, shaped like a flame, and the city does not give it often. The Phoenix Award is Atlanta’s highest honor, and this week it went to Billye Suber Aaron, at a celebration at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta for her 90th birthday. Mayor Andre Dickens stood beside her as she held it. She was born on October 16, 1936, which made the evening land almost exactly on the day.
The city’s citation called her a champion of education, philanthropy, and community service. All three words are accurate and all three are too small, because Billye Aaron did not simply serve Atlanta’s institutions. She built several of them, staffed them, and raised their money for half a century.
The teacher who walked into television
She arrived from Texas with an English degree from Texas College and a master’s from Atlanta University, and she taught: in the Atlanta public schools, and at Spelman, Morehouse, South Carolina State, and Morris Brown. In 1968 WSB-TV hired her to co-host Today in Georgia, and she became the first African American woman in the Southeast to co-host a daily, hour-long talk show. Asked decades later whether she knew she was paving the way, she was honest about it: “I’m not sure I was that wise. I am sure that it was something that I wanted desperately to do.”
In 1973 she married Hank Aaron, a year before he broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, and the two of them became Atlanta’s most consequential philanthropic partnership. His fame opened the doors. Her organization walked through them.
The woman who built the rooms
In 1980 she became development director of the Atlanta branch of the United Negro College Fund and stayed fourteen years. She co-hosted the Lou Rawls Parade of Stars telethon, became the second woman to serve as the UNCF’s vice president of the southern region, and co-founded the Mayor’s Masked Ball, the black-tie evening that remains one of this city’s defining fundraisers. Atlanta still dresses up every December for a ball Billye Aaron helped invent.
When she retired in 1994, she and Hank founded the Hank Aaron Chasing the Dream Foundation, awarding scholarships so low-income children could pursue the education she had spent her life teaching. She chaired the NAACP’s Freedom Fund Dinner for five years and sits as director emeritus of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “You try to use whatever talents you have,” she has said, “to spread it, to turn to help other people along the way.”
Ninety years in, the arithmetic of that sentence is visible in a single photograph: a woman in yellow holding her city’s highest honor, in a ballroom, in a town whose charitable calendar she largely wrote.
Atlanta has given the Phoenix Award to entertainers and presidents of causes. This time it gave it to the person who taught the city how to give.
The Social Register’s event directory tracks the season’s galas, benefits, and society evenings. Plan your next evening there.
