Originally published April 25, 1993
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.”
Lonzie Mosley, driver of MARTA’s No. 36 route, certainly wasn’t prepared for it. She wasn’t ready for the traffic that trapped her bus for two solid hours at Piedmont Avenue and 14th Street. And she definitely wasn’t ready for the young man who climbed onto the roof of No. 36 and then mooned the large and appreciative crowd - some of whom answered in kind.
“On my other trips, there’ve been police directing,” she said. “Now, they’re trying to get me someone, something out here to make them move on.”
The cars snaked down Peachtree to Five Points and beyond, then turned back and made the agonizingly slow trip back up to Piedmont Park. Finally, after 9 p.m., thousands made their way to Lakewood Fairgrounds and a series of Freaknik events there; at 11 p.m., a 5-mile chain of cars crawled from Downtown to the Club Excess on Moreland Avenue.
“Georgia has it going on,” said Roshonda Johnson, 18, an Elizabeth, N.J., resi dent who will be a freshman at Clark Atlanta University this fall. “It’s all this and then some. We’ve been walking in circles trying to find the statue of the Phoenix. But there’s wall-to-wall, bumper-to- bumper men. That’s what’s really great.”
By 12:30 a.m. today, Atlanta police had flushed most of the traffic out of the center city by putting up roadblocks on several key streets and funneling the kids into a tight, noisy, outbound knot.
The police doubled their complement of cops - at least 180 were held on indefinite overtime. “We never disassembled the Rodney King command post,” said one officer at headquarters, “so we’ve got plenty of officers on duty and on the ready - in reserve.”
Police Maj. Wayne Mock said officers fielded three reports of shootings in Piedmont Park, but all proved to be false alarms. A young partyer was shot during a brief melee on Ralph McGill Boulevard; he was not identified and was said to be in stable condition late Saturday at Grady Memorial Hospital.
Back on the streets, the locals were trying to make sense of the visitors.
“I wish somebody had given us a little warning that this nonsense was going on today,” said Michael Gilmore, who lives in Buckhead and found himself trying to navigate Freaknik on Ponce de Leon. “There’s great advertisement concerning next week’s bicycle race . . . but absolutely no word in the newspaper about 100,000 crazy people - goodness knows where they’re from.
“Who the hell selected Atlanta, and how do we get them not to come back next year? Why Piedmont Park? Why Midtown? For that matter, why Downtown?”
Since 1984, Freaknik has been an annual event for black college students that falls on the third weekend in April. Past Freaknik celebrations have a left a bad taste in the city’s mouth, and some residents weren’t too crazy about this one.
“I don’t feel safe in my home tonight,” said Midtown resident Miriam Center. “I’ve just bought this beautiful expensive home, but I’ve never felt like this before. . . . I’m literally a prisoner in my own home.”
She called it “absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever seen - the police were scared.”
For the most part, Freaknik was sort of like Daytona without the beach - a giant, quivering mass of college students rolling across the city. Kids spilled over onto Interstate 20, east and west, and onto I-75 and I-85, north and south. Young men, bare-chested, rode atop cars speeding at 70 mph; they blasted along, one youngster atop each car as they traveled together, headed west on I-20.
The parade of shiny new cars and other small vehicles spilled off Martin Luther King Boulevard and onto Ashby, and it snaked like a sluggish but loud dragon all the way through the Atlanta University Center, first past Morehouse College, then all the way to the Georgia Dome and beyond and eventually into Downtown and Underground.
“It’s just a crowd of young people having a good time and scaring a lot of the older residents,” said a female officer supervising 911 calls at Atlanta police headquarters. “But, really, they’re not as unruly as people think - and not near as bad as last year.”
Cab driver Segun Adejumo stood outside the Ritz Carlton Downtown, watching the unruly parade rolling past at Peachtree and Ellis. “I’ve been at this stand for two hours,” he said, a place where he usually can get a $10 fare in five minutes.
“These people are coming from out of state - California, Michigan, New York. And big cars, you know - Mercedes Benz, BMW. Where do they get these cars?”
