Allen was involved in community service long before becoming mayor. He headed Atlanta's Community Chest drive in 1947. In this role he was the first white man asked to attend the black division's kickoff dinner. After he was elected president of the chamber of commerce in 1960, he launched the "Forward Atlanta" campaign to promote the city's image and attract new business and investment.
Allen ran for mayor in 1961 and defeated Lester Maddox. He took office in 1962 and later that year flew to Paris, France, to help identify the bodies of the Atlantans who perished in the Orly plane crash. Many of these people, members of the Atlanta Art Association, had been personal friends, and he felt that their families would want him there.
Allen served two four-year terms and quickly established himself as a liberal-minded leader over a city that was 40 percent black but almost fully segregated. On his first day in office, he ordered all "white" and "colored" signs removed from city hall, and he desegregated the building's cafeteria. He authorized the city's black policemen to arrest whites and hired the city's first black firefighters. He worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and spearheaded a banquet of Atlanta's black and white leaders to honor King after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Allen was the only southern elected official to testify before Congress in support of the public accommodations section of U.S. president John F. Kennedy's proposed civil rights bill. He knew that his testimony, in July 1963, would prove very unpopular among his Georgia constituents. The bill became law the following year as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but even before it passed, many Atlanta restaurants, hotels, and other public facilities had desegregated by mutual agreement between their owners and Mayor Allen.
In 1962 the mayor made one serious blunder in regard to Atlanta's race relations. Urged by whites in southwest Atlanta, the city constructed a concrete barrier that closed Peyton Road to black home seekers from nearby Gordon Road. The incident, later known as the Peyton Road affair, drew national attention and caused newspapers around the country to question Atlanta's motto, "the City Too Busy to Hate." The "Atlanta wall," as some newspapers called it, was ruled unconstitutional by the courts and was torn down.
