Bottoms early but she overcame mightily.
Although she was not the first African American woman mayor of The ATL (she was in fact the second), Bottoms was the first mayor of any race or gender to earn her stripes having served in all three branches of the city's government—and to be swept into office on a wave of jubilant hashtags.
#MyMayorsNameIsKeisha was a shout‐out to her hard‐earned victory as a Black Gen X woman with a Black name in a chocolate city whose politics sparkled like a bright blue star in the state of Georgia's crimson sky. And her 2018 inauguration, one year into Trump's America, was an early sign of stunning political changes yet to come.
In 2020, she became one of the first Black women in history to seriously be vetted by a presidential candidate as a potential running mate. And no wonder. Lance had survived an incredibly tight runoff election to become mayor, only to face a more daunting and complex set of issues than she or any of her predecessors could have imagined.
From multiracially charged violence and the local unrest that followed, to a hailstorm of sociopolitical battles in which her intersectionality as a Black woman both compounded her challenges and informed her responses, she was catapulted onto the national stage. And then there was the COVID‐19 pandemic, in which she opposed Republican Governor Brian Kemp over state protocols, drawing his ire even as she and her family personally contended with the virus at home.
When Bottoms announced that she would not seek reelection, she admitted that she didn't have a plan. But having had plenty more mom time during quarantine, her four children, ages 12 to 20, are anxious to see what she'll do next. They are not alone.
Someone said to me when I was running for office many years ago: “You've always got to be able to go back home.” What they meant by that was, no matter what decision you make, as long as you're doing right by your community and you can go back home, then you've done the right thing. I've always kept that in my heart. I don't ever want to not be able to walk down the street in my community or be ashamed of anything that I've done.
Home has always meant everything to me. [Growing up,] because my dad was an entertainer, he worked at night and our family's income was inconsistent. But he was the one at home when I came from school every day. He was the one to greet us and cook for us, then he went to work after my mom got home. He was a wonderful, good‐hearted person, and I was a daddy's girl.
One day, when I got home, the police were taking Daddy away. They had completely torn up our apartment. We were in the process of moving, so a lot of things were packed up. They had ripped up all the boxes, including the one with my toys. And I remember my dad saying, “Don't worry, it's okay. I'll be home soon.”
My brother and sister came home from school (I was the youngest), and I remember the police officers saying we couldn't move from the sofa, that if we moved they would know and we'd get in trouble. And we couldn't call anybody. This was before cell phones, so it wasn't until my mom got home from work much later that we could tell her what happened.
I was eight, and it shaped everything about me. When my dad went to prison [for four years after a cocaine possession conviction], that was the hardest time in my life. It made me so sad. At points, it made me angry, and I just missed him so much.
For a very long time after that, I didn't have any gray in my life. Everything was good or bad, it was right or wrong. In a lot of ways, it made me pursue perfection in an unhealthy way. I didn't want to have to struggle [when I grew up], I didn't want to worry about how my bills would be paid, I didn't want to ever be at the mercy of somebody else. So, there were a lot of lessons that were very rigid: “Do this, don't do that.”
With age, I learned to moderate those lessons, but I didn't always have the ability to do that. And when you see things in black and white, there's no room for empathy—especially with addiction. You don't understand that if they could stop, they would stop. Learning that has given me empathy for a lot of the circumstances and people that I dealt with as mayor. I completely understand that really good people sometimes make bad decisions, and then there's an impact on the family that you can't always make immediately right.
When I was a little girl and my dad was still actively touring, I envisioned us being this new version of Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole. Seriously. I knew I couldn't sing. But when you're five or six, what are limitations?
My mom always tells the story that I would go to my grandmother's house, dress up in everything I could find, and put on shows for her. So there was always this innate showmanship part of me, which is really interesting because it's one of the things that I don't like about the job of being mayor. It's also a reminder that I was just always different.
I majored in journalism at FAMU [Florida A&M University] and I really wanted to be a sportscaster, but at that time, there weren't many women doing that. Going to law school was kind of a fluke. I used to hang out with a group of friends from Morehouse, and they were all applying to law school. And I thought, Oh, that's what we're doing now? Okay. So I applied to law school, and with my journalism background, my plan was to be a legal analyst.
Before the kids came, I used to drive down to Macon, Georgia, and do a newscast [on the] radio in the morning [while] still practicing law full time. You know when we don't have kids, we have a lot of capacity. I think back on the schedule now and, my God, that's probably why I couldn't [conceive] a biological child. I was completely stretched.
I never really liked practicing law. So I always tried to do something different with it and at some point, I concluded that perhaps the whole point of my getting this law degree was that I met my husband, Derek, in law school.
It was not until I got on the city council that I began to see the value in my law degree. I realized lawyers really do think differently, they process differently and they plan differently. And I thought, Okay, well in addition to meeting my husband, this is what that was all about. It definitely helped me as a mayor, too.
I didn't write it down, but there was definitely a day, a date, a moment when I knew I had to run for mayor. I'd been praying about it. I have a great team and, from a data metric standpoint, I knew that I could win. The question was, did I want it? I'd been praying and talking, and praying and talking, and I was sitting in church one day and, at the end of the sermon, I couldn't get out of my seat.
Church was over, and I just sat there and cried because I knew that I was to run for mayor. In my spirit, I knew that it was going to be a heavy burden to run. But I also was just struck by the power of God for making my path so clear to me at that moment. And the reason I wanted to do it, selfishly, was that I wanted Atlanta to be better for my kids. The only way I could make Atlanta better for my children was if I made it better for everybody else's children.
It was such a hard, ugly, long race. One part was really countering the misconception that people had of who I was. Having the support of a previous mayor [Kasim Reed] was a double‐edged sword. It had its benefits, but there were cons as well. And the thing that used to really just irritate me was this notion that, somehow, I didn't stand on my own. I've been standing on my own for a long, long time, and this notion that someone else thought for me, or made me, was infuriating—and I still deal with that.
As mayor, I had people say—and this comes from men—“I don't know who's advising you, but…” or, when I endorsed Joe Biden, “Whoever advised you to do that…”
How about, I advised myself?
The other part was, as the only African American woman in the race, it wasn't just about me running for mayor, it was about how I represented Black women day to day. I have a very good sense of how people feel about me, and I always say to my team, “The streets don't lie.” I could feel it when I was running. You can feel
