Freaknik promoters say Hulu documentary doesn’t tell the whole story

When “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” debuted on Hulu earlier this year, the usual cast showed up to reminisce about the documentary.

Luther Campbell (Uncle Luke), Jermaine Dupri, Killer Mike and other celebrities and artists who performed or perhaps frequented Freaknik in the 1990s. The original founders of Freaknik, who started the event when they were 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 to from an HBCU spring break event. into something that would attract hundreds of thousands of students from across the country each year.

All of these parties have valuable insight into what Freaknik was and what he has become. But there are other aspects of the story that don’t often get a second look.

Ronn Greene began promoting events at Freaknik in 1992 – most notably, he said, co-producing a large event each year at the Lakewood Fairgrounds where artists like Uncle Luke would perform (Memories of Freaknik’s first year this event vary – Greene remembers 1992. In the documentary, Uncle Luke remembers his first year in Freaknik in 1993, the year the music video for his song “Work It Out” debuted, which was filmed in Lakewood).

Greene then invited his friend Tommie Butler to join the event. But quickly, the developers’ relations with the city began to deteriorate.

“For me, it was truly a social phenomenon,” Butler said of Freaknik in the 1990s. “For me, the story is: why is something so big, so dynamic, why is it ‘has apparently gone badly?’

According to articles from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives, in early 1994, efforts to manage Freaknik more than in previous years failed. The lead organizer at the time, the Atlanta Student Forum – which included student, community, business and police leaders – was not moving very quickly in its efforts to finalize plans for this huge event. Butler and Greene reportedly worked with the forum initially, but parted ways due to frustration with the slow progress.

By the time Freaknik came and went in 1994, many promoters claimed their events were poorly attended, in part because of the city’s strict traffic plan and municipal police that kept traffic away from their venues (although, in Regarding Lakewood in particular, other articles cite the lack of artists scheduled for low attendance). At the time, Butler claimed his company lost $100,000 during CollegeSuperFest ’94, the event held that year at the Lakewood Fairgrounds.

In that same article, Carolyn Long Banks, a former Atlanta city councilwoman, said that in 1995 the city planned to examine two or three key sites capable of accommodating larger and larger crowds rather than issuing permitted to anyone who requested it. But later in 1994, Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell announced his decision to crack down on Freaknik activities by more aggressively enforcing traffic control and alcohol laws. Campbell faced pressure from all sides – from the Olympics just a few years away, to white residents and business owners who didn’t want the event to return, to black students and of those who were looking for a way to do it. work with the city to make the event manageable.

In March 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 granted permits or not .

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Butler said. “Why don’t they even try?”

The city has chosen to put its name on other high-profile events, including the 1996 Olympics and music festivals like Music Midtown. The Hulu documentary briefly touches on how the Olympics may have contributed to Freaknik’s downfall, with the city choosing to prioritize an event that would ultimately raise around $5 billion.

However, Freaknik was no slouch in the economics department, bringing in around $20 million at its peak – a figure that Greene and Butler say is underestimated, as is the number of people actually in attendance.

The more Butler and Greene talk about Freaknik, the more the Olympics becomes a major player. Traffic is a big talking point at any event in Atlanta, especially at Freaknik, with how many people were walking and hanging out in the streets when traffic came to a standstill. According to records, plans were in place for Freaknik, but heavy traffic persisted. Butler said that at one point he submitted his own traffic plan to the city for Freaknik, claiming to have a solution for transportation associated with the event. He said the city did not respond and so gave its information to Deloitte, which he said was working with the city on a traffic plan for the Olympics.

“We gave them our own research because we had used it in an earlier proposal that we had submitted to the city to say that the traffic problem was not a real problem,” Butler said.

Butler says Deloitte used his research for this traffic plan. Multiple records requests to the city of Atlanta resulted in no such records, and a Deloitte representative said it was unable to “validate or otherwise clarify” whether the whether or not the company had a relationship with the city of Atlanta. during the 1996 Olympics. A city representative said that in 2018, several departments were hit by a cyberattack and some records were never recovered, and did not respond to questions about the issue of whether or not the city had a relationship with Deloitte at that time.

According to a 2015 Atlanta Magazine retrospective, the city used Freaknik in 1996 as a test run for traffic control at the Olympics. Some reports from the time suggested 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 saying to the city: You keep complaining about this traffic problem, and we can solve it if we all sit down,” he said.

In Atlanta Magazine’s 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 got even worse. The Retrospective reports that Grady Memorial’s rape unit treated ten victims this weekend and police made 93 arrests. In 1996, Toomer reportedly submitted a proposal to the Atlanta City Council attempting to rename Freaknik, including a website with information for participants. The city did not accept the proposal, but adopted a website where it attempted to rename the gathering 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 remember the site launching in 1996, but according to an April 1997 article, the site had launched earlier that year. This article states that the website has had 13.7 million visits since its launch, although Butler said the site would receive 20 million in its first full year. The website reportedly included posts 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 to the Internet,” Greene said. “It was an informational website about what to expect when you come to Freaknik in Atlanta. We were making music videos… we had this thing called a wall, and the wall was the place where you could say, “Hey! It’s (me), and I’m coming to Atlanta for Freaknik.’

Butler and Greene both have their own theories about why the city was unwilling to try to make Freaknik a better event, ranging from white Atlantans being afraid of black students coming to the city in large numbers, to politicians wanting increase their own event. capital, to look good for the Olympics. Greene said that when disrespect towards women started to become more prevalent, he wasn’t really interested in continuing with Freaknik. But he and Butler said they think there was a time when Freaknik could have been a positive event for Atlanta if the city cared enough to put effort into it.

“There was a social, economic and political problem from the city and citizen perspective, and Freaknik was standing in the way of the regentrification of Atlanta,” Butler said. “That put us in the right place.”

Both Greene and Butler were at the heart of the battle between the city and the developers and said they don’t think the Hulu documentary, or any other documentary about Freaknik, ever got the full extent of this story. Rough Draft Atlanta reached out to the film’s representatives to see if the filmmakers had ever considered speaking to promoters, but did not receive a response.

“Not once did they get the story right,” Greene said. “You know why? Because they never talk to the people who did it.