When “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” debuted on Hulu earlier this year, the usual players came out to reminisce in the documentary.
Luther Campbell (Uncle Luke), Jermaine Dupri, Killer Mike, and other celebrities and artists who played or maybe attended Freaknik back in the 1990s. The original Freaknik founders, who started the event as students at the Atlanta University Center with a picnic and the name “Freaknic” in 1983. Various city officials who interacted with the event in one way or another as it grew from an HBCU spring break event into something that would draw hundreds of thousands of students from around the country each year.
All of these parties have valuable insight into what Freaknik was and what it became. But there are other sides of the story that don’t often get a second look.
Ronn Greene began promoting events during Freaknik back in 1992 – most notably, he said, co-producing a big event at Lakewood Fairgrounds each year where artists like Uncle Luke performed (recollections about the first year of this event vary – Greene remembers 1992. In the documentary, Uncle Luke remembers his first year at Freaknik as 1993, which is the year the music video for his song “Work It Out” debuted, which was filmed at Lakewood).
Greene later invited his friend Tommie Butler to join in on the event. But quickly, the promoters’ relationship with the city began to deteriorate.
“To me, it was truly a social phenomenon,” said Butler about Freaknik in the 1990s. “The story to me is, why did something that big, that dynamic, why did it go so seemingly wrong?”
According to articles from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives, in early 1994, efforts to manage Freaknik more so than it had been in previous years were falling short. The main organizer at the time, the Atlanta Student Forum – which included student, community, business, and police leaders – wasn’t moving very quickly in its efforts to finalize plans for the huge event. Butler and Greene were reportedly working with the forum at first, but broke away due to frustration with the slow progress.
By the time Freaknik came and went in 1994, many promoters claimed that their events were sparsely attended in part due to the city’s strict traffic plan and city police steering traffic away from their venues (although, in regards to Lakewood specifically, other articles cite the lack of scheduled performers for the low attendance). At the time, Butler claimed his company lost $100,000 on CollegeSuperFest ‘94, the event that took place that year at Lakewood Fairgrounds.
In that same article, former Atlanta City Councilmember Carolyn Long Banks said that in 1995, the city planned to look at two or three key venues that could handle the increasingly large crowds rather than giving out permites to anybody who applied. But later in 1994, then Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell announced a decision to crack down on Freaknik activities by more aggressively enforcing traffic control and alcohol laws. Campbell was facing pressure from all sides – whether it be the Olympics Games just a couple of years away, or from white residents and business owners who didn’t want the event to return, or from Black students and those who were looking for a way to work with the city to make the event manageable.
In March of 1995, promoters told the AJC that Freaknik would continue regardless of the city’s wishes – repeating a common sentiment found in the archives, that students would show up whether the city worked with organizers and gave out permits or not.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Butler said. “Why are they not even trying?”
The city has chosen to put its name behind other large-scale events, including the 1996 Olympics and music festivals such as Music Midtown. The Hulu documentary briefly touches on how the Olympics might have been part of Freaknik’s downfall, with the city choosing to prioritize an event that would eventually bring in an estimated $5 billion.
However, Freaknik was no slouch in the economics department, reportedly bringing in roughly $20 million at its peak – a number that both Greene and Butler think is underestimated, along with the number of people actually in attendance.
The more Butler and Greene talk about Freaknik, the more the Olympics becomes a bigger player. Traffic is a big talking point when it comes to any event in Atlanta, in particular Freaknik, with the amount of people who were cruising and hanging out in the streets when traffic became deadlocked. According to the archives, there were plans in place for Freaknik, but heavy traffic still persisted. Butler said that at one point, he submitted his own traffic plan to the city for Freaknik, claiming to have a solution for the transportation associated with the event. He said the city did not respond, so he gave his information to Deloitte, who he said was working with the city on a traffic plan for the Olympics.
“We gave them all our own research because we had used it in an earlier proposal we submitted to the city to say, the traffic problem is not a real problem,” Butler said.
Butler claims that Deloitte used his research for that traffic plan. Multiple records requests to the city of Atlanta did not bring up any records of this sort, and a representative for Deloitte said they were not in a position to “validate or otherwise clarify” whether or not the company had a relationship with the city of Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. A representative for the city said that in 2018, several departments were affected by a cyber attack and some records were never recovered, and did not respond to questions about whether or not the city had a relationship with Deloitte at that time.
According to an Atlanta Magazine retrospective from 2015, the city used Freaknik in 1996 as a dry run for Olympics traffic control. There are reports from the time that suggest the Olympic traffic plan didn’t work as well as hoped, but Butler still wonders why the city wouldn’t take his suggestions seriously.
“We’re telling the city, you keep complaining about this traffic problem, and we can fix it if we all just sit down,” he said.
In the Atlanta Magazine retrospective, one of the co-founders of the original event, Sharon Toomer, said the city’s strategy was to make things so unbearable that people wouldn’t want to come back. But in 1995, things just got worse. The retrospective reports that the rape unit at Grady Memorial treated ten victims that weekend and police made 93 arrests. In 1996, Toomer reportedly submitted a proposal to the Atlanta City Council attempting to rebrand Freaknik, including a website with information for attendees. The city did not accept the proposal, but did adopt a website where it tried to rebrand the gathering as Black College Spring Break.
Greene and Butler had a similar idea, and launched their own website, freaknik.com, as a sort of social media site for the festival. Both men recall launching the site in 1996, but according to an April 1997 article, the site launched earlier that year. That article states that the website had garnered 13.7 million hits since it started, though Butler said that the site would go on to get 20 million in its first full year. The website reportedly included messages from well-known figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s son Dexter King and New York Giants running back Rodney Hampton.
“They said we introduced more African Americans to the internet than anything else before us, because we gave them a reason to come on the internet,” Greene said. “It was an information website about what to expect when you come to Freaknik in Atlanta. We were doing video clips … we had this thing called a wall, and the wall was where you could say, ‘Hey! This is [me], and I’m coming to Atlanta for Freaknik.’”
Both Butler and Greene have their own theories about why the city didn’t want to try to make Freaknik a better event, ranging from white Atlantans being afraid of Black college students coming to the city in large numbers, to politicians wanting to increase their own capital, to looking good for the Olympics. Greene said that when disrespect against women started to become more prevalent, he wasn’t really interested in continuing on with Freaknik. But both he and Butler said they believed there was a time when Freaknik could have been a positive event for Atlanta if the city cared enough to put the effort in.
“There was a social, economic, political problem happening under the view of the city, of the citizenry, and Freaknik was in the way of regentrification of Atlanta,” Butler said. “Which put us – bullseye.”
Both Greene and Butler were in the thick of the battle between the city and promoters, and said they don’t think the Hulu documentary, or any documentary about Freaknik, has ever gotten the full extent of that story. Rough Draft Atlanta reached out to representatives for the film to see if the filmmakers ever considered talking to promoters, but did not receive a response.
“Not once have they gotten the story right,” Greene said. “You know why? Because they never talk to the people who actually did it.”