Freaknik, the historically famous and sometimes notorious spring celebration for Black college students in Atlanta, didn’t start as front-page news in Atlanta. It started small and then grew.
What is perhaps its first mention in the newspaper came in a notebook story about the college campuses that call metro Atlanta home. The best party of the year for Morehouse students, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 1990 was an annual picnic where “Atlanta University Center students join students from other Black schools on a May day.”
The event was called Freaknic, starting with a small spring break event in 1983, according to Spelman alumna Sharon Toomer, a founder of the event who told its origin story in a 1994 article for the AJC. It was a picnic (that was the “nic” in the name) with music, she wrote, organized at Spelman by the Atlanta University Center’s Washington, D.C. Metro Club., a social club for DC students attending college at one of the Atlanta HBCU campuses.
“The first Freaknic took place on the AUC campus. About 50 to 60 students turned up,” Toomer wrote. “The second year, we moved to Piedmont Park, and the next year — the last time I participated — we celebrated our annual picnic in Adams Park.”
By the mid-1990s, it was a mobile party on wheels, accompanied by massive traffic jams from long lines of cars cruising areas of downtown, Midtown and Buckhead, loud music coming from the vehicles and sound systems. And in the slow-moving traffic, partyers videotaped each other as some displayed public behavior that ranged from flirty to lewd. An AJC article from the 1993 event called it a “spring break frenzy of sleek cars, rowdy rap and galloping hormones.”
Freaknik officially ended in 1999.
Here are two AJC articles from 1993, one focused on the party and the other on the traffic challenges for the city and police.
Freaknik ‘93: City becomes Daytona Beach of sorts as students kick it up, max and relax
Yo, how far will tens of thousands of folks travel for a party? An impromptu roll call of a group of brothers chillin’ Thursday on the corner of Fair Street and James P. Brawley Jr. Drive across from Clark Atlanta University gives some indication.
“I’m from Kent State,” said one. “I’m from Cleveland,” said another from Ohio before his fraternity brother kicked in with, “I’m from Southern Illinois University.”
The party they’re traveling from as far as Cali (California for rap and hip-hop illiterates) to attend isn’t just any party - it’s Freaknik ‘93.
Considered “the Daytona Beach for African-American college students,” the three-day megagathering that jumps off today is expected to attract as many as 60,000 brothers and sisters ready to kick it up, max and relax at the end of the school year. READ MORE.
Traffic Jamming: Hard-partying Freakniks clog city streets
From downtown to Midtown and winding into Underground, Atlanta freaked out Saturday night. Tens of thousands of college students from all over America fell upon the city in a spring-break frenzy of sleek cars, rowdy rap and galloping hormones called Freaknik ‘93.
There were reports of sporadic violence — including a shooting on Ralph McGill Boulevard — and widely scattered rudeness spawned by the most horrendous nighttime traffic jam in recent memory.
“It’s just crazier than hell out there,” said Chris Smith, an Atlanta police officer recruit stationed at the command post on Ponce de Leon Avenue. “It’s wall-to-wall young people. They’re partying down, man. They’re dancing in the streets. They’re riding in the streets. And when the traffic backs up, which it always does, then they get out of their cars and, well, they are dancing in the streets again.”
Said Maj. Lee New: “Take a normal weekday rush hour, and triple or quadruple that and that’s what you’ve got. I don’t know if you can prepare for this.” READ MORE.
— Amanda Henry contributed to this article
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