36 new york | january 3–16, 2022
the same careful evenness in her voice.
Her face mask was embroidered with the
logo of Florida A&M University, her alma
mater, to match her blazing-orange dress.
“I have lemon-pepper wings every Friday,
fried crisp.”
Her point, she said, was that Atlantans
had a responsibility to honor the city’s past
and preserve its legacy. This was the cra-
dle of the civil-rights movement, after all,
home to some of the country’s most presti-
gious HBCUs and a place where Black resi-
dents have prospered under Black mayors
and Black business leaders. The vaunted
“Atlanta Way”—the colloquial term used
for the collaboration among Black and
white elites that has kept the city humming
since the middle of the 20th century—is the
“envy” of other big-city mayors, she told me.
But it’s also a profoundly divided city, the
most unequal in the U.S. in several recent
years. Black wealth sits astride an equally
striking degree of Black poverty.
All of which gives her departure a whiff
of surrender, a sense that the city’s prob-
lems are, for all the breathless booster-
ism that surrounds it, intractable. She has
certainly had enough of the job itself. “My
assessment has not been any different than
Simone Biles’s or Naomi Osaka’s or Calvin
Ridley’s, any number of other people who
said, ‘I’m putting my emotional and mental
health first,’ ” she told me.
She admits that being mayor was never
a great fit for her personality—“an intro-
vert masking as an extrovert” is how she
describes herself, someone who would
“much rather be somewhere reading a book
than sitting at a party.” The gulf between
her temperament and the demands of a
job that is usually held by people she calls
“social sponges” only got wider in the past
year. Since the riots in 2020, Atlanta voters
have become transfixed by crime. Mur-
ders were up by 50 percent from 2019 to
2021, roughly on pace with Chicago and
Philadelphia—part of a national trend,
though still a statistical aberration amid
a historic lull. The developing picture has
been painted with a “panicked brush,” Bot-
toms said, and residents have responded in
kind: Crime was their top concern ahead of
the November 30 runoff election. The top
candidates to replace her as mayor, Atlanta
City Council president Felicia Moore and
Councilmember Andre Dickens, were well
to her right on policing, though Dickens,
the more dovish of the two, prevailed.
And while these problems were coming
into focus, Bottoms was thinking about
death a lot. “My dad died suddenly at 55,”
said the mayor, who turns 52 in January.
“When my dad turned 50, he had five yearsleft that he didn’t know were only five years
left. If those were my last five years on
earth, how would I want to spend them?”
So she was there at the jail, taking a
first stab at the official story of what her
brief mayoralty has meant. Her time in
office seemed to have sobered her; the
magical transcendence that marked her
inauguration had given way to a recog-
nition that a lot would go unfinished.
“I’m not God,” she said. “In the same way
the groundwork for so many things was
laid by previous mayors, I’m laying the
groundwork for mayors to come as well.”
Whether her successor builds on
that legacy remains to be seen. But the
deeper question about Bottoms’s tenure
haunts other American cities, too, espe-
cially after George Floyd—whether thedemands of being a Black mayor are at
odds with making those cities work for all
Black people.week after ourinter-
view, Bottoms shared a
video on Twitter of her
father, the singer Major
Lance, performing onSoul
Trainin 1972. He’s singing “Since I Lost
My Baby’s Love,” a B-side single he had
released the previous year, and wearing
an extraordinary getup: a floppy newsboy
cap, lapels out to his shoulders, and foot-
devouring bell-bottoms. “My mom says
a man on Auburn Ave made this outfit,”
wrote Bottoms, shouting out Atlanta’s old-
est Black commercial district. “Not sure
which I like best, the voice, moves, or the
suit. Love it all!”
The mayor’s social media is full of warm
tributes to her dad, who died of heartAROUND 1976:Bottoms’s father, Major
Lance; Keisha; and Curtis Mayfield in the
family’s garden in Collier Heights.magic was the theme of her inaugura-
tion, a term she used liberally to describe
the election that lifted her, “a girl named
Keisha,” to the highest office in America’s
so-called Black mecca. “I truly believe it
was the energy and inspiration of gen-
erations of Black-girl magic that fueled
our victory,” the mayor said in her first
big speech, at Morehouse College. “I am
Atlanta magic. You are Atlanta magic. We
are Atlanta magic.”
The notion that Atlanta is exceptional
was also the theme of her big moment
on the national stage. In the summer of
2020, the city looked like the rest of the
country: angry and at war with itself, with
rioters torching cop cars amid peaceful pro-
tests after the murder of George Floyd in
Minneapolis. The mayor was shaken and
disappointed. “Go home,” she said. “When
Dr. King was assassinated, we didn’t do this
to our city. So if you love this city—this city
that has had a legacy of Black mayors and
Black police chiefs and people who care
about this city, where more than 50 percent
of the business owners in Metro Atlanta
are minority business owners—if you care
about this city, then go home.”
The people in the streets weren’t inter-
ested in her plea—cops had been kettling
and arresting them by the hundreds—but
they weren’t her only audience. Pundits
praised her response as a savvy blend of
disapproval and empathy. “Your passion,
your composure, your balance has been
really incredible,” Biden told her. The vice-
presidency ultimately went to Kamala
Harris, and Bottoms declined the consola-
tion prize of heading the Small Business
Administration, but her political future still
looked brighter than ever. She was a bona
fide rising star in the Democratic Party, so
much so that after Biden was sworn in, his
first campaign event was a fund-raiser for
her reelection. An internal poll this past
spring had the mayor’s approval rating at
68 percent in Atlanta. The question didn’t
seem to be whether she would win a second
term but what she would do with her gov-
erning mandate once she did.
And she knew which vision of Atlanta
she wanted people to see. “Atlanta will
be known for lemon-pepper wings and
great strip clubs if we’re not careful,” she
toldHarper’s Bazaarin 2020, trotting out
some of the hoariest stereotypes about the
city’s Black poor. There is nothing wrong
with those things, she clarified when we
sat down for an interview i ayor’s
ceremonial room at City Ha it all,”
she said. I had met Bottoms in passing once
or twice before—my father-in-law helped
with her campaign—and I recognized PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF BOTTOMS (1976); DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES (2020)