With the making of a new Hulu documentary about Freaknik, the roving street party is getting more attention than it has in 30 years.
Freaknik — Freaknik (/ˈfriːknɪk/; originally Freaknic) is a 1980s-90s era annual spring break party for black college students that grew into one of the largest rolling street parties in America.
The documentary is set to be released in the coming weeks, but there’s a lot to unpack.
Freaknik: How It Began
This article will provide an unofficial history of Freaknik, the famous and infamous rolling party that snared Atlanta traffic and turned highways into parking lots and dance floors.
The origins of what would become Freaknik can be traced to 1983, when dance clubs made up of students from the Atlanta University Center began throwing parties. This was the height of the pop-locking craze and a few years after aspiring filmmaker Spike Lee had left the AU Center’s Morehouse College.
One group in particular, the D.C. Metro Club, conceived of a party coinciding with spring break in April. It’s name was “Freaknic,” a play on the words “freak” and “picnic.”
Party flyer from the early 1980s.
The president of the D.C. Metro Club, Schuyla Goodson, is credited with coming up with the term “Freaknik” on the grounds of Spelman College.
There is some debate over where the inaugural Freaknic was held, but many say it was at John A. White Park near the AU Center.
The first “Freaknic” party was attended by around 150 people and became an annual event, but the D.C. Metro Club got in trouble with Spelman College. Then-President Johnetta B. Cole banned the group for the legal risk that Freaknic posed as the parties grew larger and larger.
Through the late 1980s, AU Center officials tried to sanitize the event, renaming it “Black College Spring Break,” with an obvious appeal to HBCUs in the MEAC, SWAC and various small black colleges and universities scattered around the South.
As the number of visitors to Atlanta began to swell each year, the behavior of the attendees began to worsen. As does everything in the South, the discussion began to take on racial undertones and then overtones.
“Most of the white establishment wanted Freaknik to end pronto,” said Fred Richard, a Grambling State University alumni, who now lives in suburban Atlanta after going to grad school at Clark. “We partied so hard in Atlanta because we didn’t want to go to Daytona Beach; we wanted to have fun here like they were doing in Florida.”
Race Becomes A Factor
Atlanta’s African-American lawmakers, all the way from council-men and -women to others in high positions around the city’s mayor, tried to balance their obligations to keep law and order by extending a welcome mat to the party-goers, which were overwhelmingly black.
But news broadcasts would often lead with the arrests and images of rowdy behavior from the crowds of students in town for the raucous weekend. Resentment from residents in Atlanta’s top neighborhoods slowly began to boil as negative news reports about Freaknik began to circulate.
The issue was illustrated best by then-Councilwoman Carolyn Long Banks, who told the Times, “There is a fear of the congregating of more than one or two black people in any given area. It has become a racial issue for some of the neighborhoods. These kids are the black cream of the crop, and if they are not treated well, there is little hope for the rest of us.”
In the early 1990s, the AU Center dance clubs, fraternities and sororities all tried to milquetoast the “Freaknik” name — downplay it and rebrand it “Freedom Fest was one attempt) — but it was too late. College officials, engaged in feeble attempts to refocus the then-highly sexualized party weekend, tried bonding it to a job fair, step shows and other collegiate events, but to no avail.
Music And More Began To Change
In 1990 and 1991, Freaknik was still just another black spring break function, the likes of which students at Winston-Salem and Norfolk, Virginia, were used to.
But by the end of 1991, a wave of misogyny would sweep through rap and hip-hop music. Instead of the conscious, pro-black vibes that came to characterize much of the popular music, the tunes turned to darker themes, often fueled by weed smoke.
“The music definitely played a role in how people started acting,” Wilson said. “Instead of bumping Public Enemy or listening to some words by Sistah Soulja, gangsta rap exploded. Everybody was on that NWA, West Coast, all that stuff.”
But it wasn’t just gangsta rap. Florida’s Miami bass, New York’s lyrical hip-hop and the South’s own SouthernPlayalistic vibes were all contributing. You can’t have a party without the music.
Another culprit was the mob mentality: A common scene for Freaknik was to see a jam -packed street with people on the hoods of the cars and loud music. Women would be dancing on the cars or next to one and they would be surrounded by ogling and touchy-feely men with video cameras.
“In a lot of ways, what set Freaknik off in the early 1990s was the videotape footage. Like the videotape beating of Rodney King that set off riots, when people from all these different cities came back home and showed their friends the video footage of Freaknik, it exploded.”
According to media estimates, about 100,000 people attended Freaknik in 1993. The next year, that numbered had doubled to 200,000 although arrests were cut in half.
As Olympics Neared, Atlanta Wrestled With Its Image
At the crux of many civic debates, was this question: What kind of city was Atlanta trying to be? A party city or one that was brand-safe for big business?
“You have to understand,” said Tony Robinson, a barber from Atlanta, who went to Clark Atlanta in the late 1980s. “In the early 1990s, Atlanta was in the midst of remaking itself for the Olympics.”
In 1994 and 1995, the city was being flooded with new money and was trying to put on its best face. But this rolling black street party would churn through every year and make national headlines for all the wrong reasons.
A
New York Times article from that time says, “Young people showing off their late-model luxury cars in caravans tied up major arteries for about five miles north of downtown. But the police managed to channel most of the impromptu motorcades out of residential areas. Mayor Campbell acknowledged that “there were no streets which could contain the cars and the young people’s determination to stay in their cars and to see and be seen.”
When visitors began to pour into
Lenox Square, the mall of Atlanta’s wealthy, the affluent residents began to complain about the traffic outside the structure. Instead of a place to shop, the weekend brought thousands of people-watchers and rowdy behavior.
Atlanta’s City Council and Mayor Bill Campbell, who was elected in 1994, began to get criticized for allowing the city to be overrun with “hoodlums” and party-goers who would go inside stores to gaze but wouldn’t shop.
Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell in 1996.
Tug Of War: Atlanta Politics Meets Freaknik
The city’s white business leaders began to push for an all-out ban on Freaknik, putting tremendous pressure on Atlanta’s black leadership, which was starting to feel the heat.
In front of the microphones, Atlanta’s black leaders were politically correct when asked questions about Freaknik and public safety.
“We welcome anybody coming to this event who is law-abiding,” said Atlanta Police Chief Beverly Harvard. “We will not tolerate the violation of this city.”
Privately many of them wondered how long they could last as political piñatas.
“If our event goes poorly as a result of the Freaknik crowd, it would seriously jeopardize my ability to come back,” Campbell said in March 1995, one month before the event. “So Atlanta does have a lot riding on the success of this.”
Freaknik: Business and Residential Resistance
One neighborhood, Inman Park, even sued the city to keep it off-limits from visitors. Spurred by Atlanta’s business elite, the City of Atlanta began to turn against Freaknik at least to some degree. Some Atlanta students said race was a major factor.
Quoted by the Washington Post at the time, Samuel Bell Jr., who was student body president at Clark Atlanta University, said, “These students are, supposedly, the future leaders of our nation, and what are they saying, that we’re going to loot and pillage the village? It’s an atrocity.”
The city responded by denying permits to party organizers and offering underwhelming support to the few activities that happened to be sponsored. Police officers blocked entry into whole neighborhoods and made some streets one ways around the AU Center.
“Remember, this wasn’t Miami. This wasn’t Jacksonville or even Galveston, where there’s a beach. Atlanta is all asphault,” said Robinson. “Half of the city — and you know which half — just couldn’t understand what all these black people were doing down here.”
Inside City Hall, leaders tried to soften the mayor’s stance, saying that the students should be welcomed by the city, but that their energy should be channeled into a more positive direction.
C.T. Martin, an elder statesman on the city council, said then, “I understand the mayor’s predicament, but this is the home of Martin Luther King and six black institutions of higher learning, and we owe it to the parents of these young people to cradle their children while they are here.”
Atlanta Turns On Freaknik
“There is nothing for people to do,” Lori Dodson, a Spelman student at the time, told the
Times. “We had events scheduled but we had to cancel them because of the city.”
While there was sporadic violence connected to the event each year, Atlanta officials touted the success of letting students flock to the city, but kept them driving in circles by routing them to the highways and away from prestigious areas. Faced with no where to go, many revelers congregated in parking lots and just partied in their cars and on the streets.
To save face, Atlanta officials stopped providing the press with crowd estimates, which would only fuel the naysayers. Still, the police would shut down around 200 blocks of city streets to curtail cruisers during the three-day weekend.
“They tried to stop it before it got started,” Corey Griffin, a reveler from Dalton, Georgia, told the Times at the time. “I think it’s nice to come down here and spend some money. But I felt I was unwanted.”
Soon Campbell and city officials made it ther mission to deny any permit associated with the words “Freaknik” or “Freaknic.”
As the 1990s closed, Freaknik became a shadow of itself and all but died out except for the occasional brash party promoter.
“Few issues in the city of Atlanta have been as divisive in the last 10 years,″ Campbell
told the Associated Press in 1998. “It is a very difficult weekend even under the best of circumstances.″
“In Atlanta, Freaknik became a curse word,” said Monica Wilson, who traveled to the annual party each year from 1993 to 1996 as a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
With no public safety support, sponsors or organizers, Freaknik, seen as a headless monster, began to unravel and die out.
Final Word
What began as a party for collegians quickly morphed into a weekend of unabashed street partying. Among the city’s business leaders, the sentiment was that Atlanta was built for a lot of things, but it wasn’t built for that.
Crowds particularly gathered around city landmarks like Underground Atlanta, Piedmont Park, Old National Highway, the AU Center and Peachtree Street, the city’s main vein.
All but dead, now the name “Freaknik” still pops up every now and then, but it’s in reference to its heyday, circa 1994 and ’95. It is the party that time forgot.
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