january 3–16, 2022 | new york 37ments, racial strife could be kept at bay.
This sunny image hid a pattern of local
terrorism: White homeowners went to
great lengths to avoid having Black neigh-
bors, including threatening prospective
buyers and even, on several occasions,
bombing their own homes. Through the
1970s and beyond, droves of whites fled
this incursion for suburbia, convinced
a Black takeover was imminent. To the
astonishment of many, Black steward-
ship brought prosperity. An uninterrupted
streak of Black mayors, starting in 1974, is
the most visible emblem of Atlanta’s rebirth
as a Black mecca and a global city. Black
cultural and educational institutions now
predominate, and Black wealth is more
common here than in almost any other
American metropolis.
That Bottoms had a foot in both worlds—
the downtrodden Atlanta and the enter-
prising Atlanta—was a principal appeal of
her candidacy. She has an “authenticity that
makes people trust” her, said Tharon John-
son, her former campaign adviser. “She’s
very relatable.” Early in her term, when
she ended cash bail and threw her weight
behind the criminal-justice-reform mea-
sures proposed by then–presidential can-
didate Biden, she made sure her decisions
were understood as part of a deep-seated
desire to make the system more humane
than it was when her family got caught
under its heel. “My dad was a wonderful
person,” she told me. “If addiction could
impactmy familyandmy dadtheway that
it did,it’s impactingpeopleacrossthiscity.”
Almost from the moment shewas
swornin,Bottomsfacedanunprecedented
sequenceofcrises.In March 20 18,hack-
ersbasedinIrantookthecity’scomputer
systemofflineanddemandedthebitcoin
equivalentofa $51,000ransom.Bottoms
refusedtopay. Thesystemstayedofflinefor
closetoa week,revertingmany city services
topen-and-paperoperations.
Republicans inthestate legislature
barelygavehertimetobreathebefore
launchinga newsalvo:a threat topass
legislationforthestatetotake overthe
Hartsfield-JacksonAtlantaInternational
Airport,thecity’scrownjewel.Thateffort
fizzledasit becameclearthat Governor
BrianKempandmost oftheGOPleader-
ship did not have an appetite for the fight
it would entail.
Then in early 2020, a new coronavirus
made its way to the U.S. Atlantans died
by the hundreds, the economy ground to
a halt, and Bottoms got into a public fight
with the governor over the stay-at-home
order and mask mandate she wanted
to impose.disease in 1994. She writes him birth-
day posts every April 4. In June 2019,
she shared what she captioned the “best
throwback pic EVER” from around 1976.
It shows young Keisha—hands on her
hips with a tight half-grin, half-grimace on
her face—and her father working in their
backyard garden alongside soul icon Curtis
Mayfield, who grew up with Lance in Chi-
cago’s Cabrini-Green housing project.
Her public archive is an abundance
of feel-good riches, but it can also seem
at times to indicate a daughter trying to
reckon with a parental relationship that
was beset by loss. In 1978, 8-year-old
Keisha came home from school to find
her father being led away in handcuffs. By
the late 1970s, Lance’s music career, which
had taken him and his family to EnglandandbacktoAtlanta,hadlargelystalled.He
struggledwithaddictionandstartedselling
cocainetokeepthemoney flowing,which
ledtohisarrest. The“traumaofthat day
foreveralteredthetrajectoryofmy family,”
Bottomswroteofherfather’sarrest andthe
years-longprisonstintthat followed.
Hermother, Sylvia,workedtokeepthe
familyafloat.Sheheldmultiplejobs—at the
postoffice,anapartment-complexrental
office, theInternalRevenueService—
beforesheenrolledincosmetologyschool
andopenedherownsalonin1981.By1986,
she had moved her children into at least five
different homes, crossing town in a rickety
Ford Mustang that was often short on gas.
(In 2019, Bottoms told Atlanta magazine
that, to this day, the tanks in her family’s
cars are always kept full.) During Lance’s
incarceration, most weekends were spent
driving across the state to various prisons to
visit him, and the couple divorced aroundthe time he got out in 1982. His sporadic
presence in the lives of his children, on top
of the extra workload Sylvia had to shoul-
der in his absence, felt to Bottoms “as if
I had lost not one but both of my parents.”
She went from being a withdrawn child
to a private and reserved adult. Over the
course of her time at Frederick Douglass
High School, Florida A&M, and law school
at Georgia State University, the future
mayor earned a reputation as studious and
well liked—but also driven by a fear of pre-
carity, determined to outrun the loss and
instability that marked her childhood.
In 1994, the same year her father died,
Keisha Lance married Derek Bottoms, a
fellow law student. As a couple, they set
out to build the kind of life that could eas-
ily have been packaged in a brochure andmailedtoalltheyoungBlackprofessionals
atwhomsomuchofAtlanta’s cheerleading
is directed.Theyputintimeat theirrespec-
tivelawfirms.Shemadea careerchange,
becominga speechwriterforThurbert
Baker, thenGeorgia’sattorneygeneral.
Between 2002 and 20 18,shewentfrom
beinga magistratejudge,toa council-
member,tothemayor.Herhusbandis now
anexecutiveat theHomeDepot.Theyhave
fourchildrentogether.
ModernAtlantawasbuiltbypeoplelike
theBottomses.BythetailendofJimCrow,
Atlanta was known as “the city too busy to
hate,” a motto encouraged by local power
brokers to assure wary capitalists that for
all the tumult tearing across the South,
their city was still safe for business. Wealthy
white moderates, Black leaders, and white
officials agreed that profit and progress
didn’t have to be mutually exclusive—that
as long as the city desegregated in incre-DECEMBER 2020: Joe Biden and Bottoms after
a rally for U.S. Senate candidates Jon
Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock.
NOVEMBER 2021: Bottoms announcing
an agreement to put a pre-arrest diversion
center at the city jail.