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A portmanteau of “freaky” and “picnic”, Freaknick instantly rings a bell for anyone who grew up with hip-hop music in the ’90s. For those who don’t know, Freaknik was hip-hop and one of Atlanta’s biggest festivals, featuring a veritable “who’s who” from up-and-coming hip-hop artists and established hip-hop artists. . Many people fondly remember that infamous festival, but its roots were steeped in some very humble beginnings.
Although officially launched in 1983 as a festival of food, drink and DJs, the Freaknik Festival was actually conceived a year earlier in March 1982 at Spellman College. Spelman College is a private, historically black women’s liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. She was founded in 1881 as part of the Atlanta University Center. Atlanta University Center is the oldest and largest consortium of African-American institutions of higher learning in the United States.
And like other AUC colleges and colleges, Spellman was home to so-called state clubs, made up of students from a common state of origin. Before carpool apps and Facebook became popular, clubs held social gatherings throughout the school year and acted as a central database for carpooling homes. In fact, Freaknik is a year older than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The festival was conceived in Spellman at the DC Metro Club meeting as a club-sponsored event challenging the California club’s biggest end-of-the-year party.
DC Metro Club President Schulya Goodson named the festival after CHIC’s Le Freak, a song and dance popular in the early 1980s. His first Freaknik was actually the same year he took place in April 1982. A group of students stranded on campus during spring break. And it was a simple picnic with a potluck, a cooler, a boombox, and two of his DJs. Both Nab and Daryl Baptiste Miller attended Morehouse College. About 50 students attended the event, but unconfirmed sources said as many as 150 attended.
The picnic was definitely a success. It’s unclear whether the 1982 event outstripped the California Club’s end-of-year party, but rumors of the picnic spread to other historically black colleges and universities, and locals organized by students who couldn’t afford to go. It also spread to picnics. The house turned into a black cultural phenomenon. As the word spread through the pre-social media vine, Freaknik steadily scaled up, reaching levels of participation by tens of thousands of students. It grew into something that the students in charge of the festival could no longer hold back.
And as Freaknik grew, the lack of management and formal structure became apparent. By 1988, the DC Metro Club was banned from participating in the festival by Spelman College President Johnnetta B. Cole for liability reasons. The DC Metro Club then asked independent national promoter Darryl Batiste Miller to promote the event, and Freaknik grew from about 15,000 attendees to he 300,000 in about four to five years.
By 1992, the picnic had turned into an unbridled full-blown street party, with both HBCU and non-HBCU students flooding Atlanta, now the epicenter of hip-hop culture. And with them came the money. By 1994, the event had earned an estimated $20 million and even stimulated the city’s economy. However, the lack of a formal structure usually meant traffic jams, severely impacting the city’s logistics, which local businesses depended on to make money.
By then, things worse than traffic jams started happening. Unsupervised large numbers of college students attending events with no formal structure, with lots of partying and drinking, are the best-case scenario for rowdy and rowdy behavior. Add in a pinch of local government oversight, perhaps for the aforementioned benefit, and we have a recipe for disaster.
The presence of hormone- and alcohol-stimulated young men and women, combined with abandoned reservations, throbbing libidos, and, in some cases, no clothes, led to rowdy behavior, and hip-hop was the sound of it all. It was the track. Atlanta residents and business owners slowly developed a negative sentiment toward the festival, with many trapped inside their homes every third week of April during the youth floods. was given.
Businesses were closed, traffic was jammed, and the city police were overwhelmed. So much so that, in fact, the violence was on the rise. By 1995, over 2,000 crimes had been committed, ranging from obscenity to sexual assault during festivals. So in 1996, Atlanta’s Bill and Mayor Campbell cracked down on freaks by increasing the police presence during them. City leaders also put up roadblocks to limit access to the city, eventually moving Freaknik out of Atlanta.
Freaknick’s collapse in 1999 was imminent as police activity and government action intensified. The year before, the Atlanta Commission for Black College Spring Break condemned the festival, saying it could not support events that resulted in obscene activity, violence, public safety concerns, and sexual assault. It also has the power to ban all freakkicking activities within the city limits, and Mayor Qasimreid issued a statement in 2010 that he would sue the organizers of freakkick-related activities.
Freaknik has attracted more than just fun-hungry crowds. It brought in quite a few big names in the hip-hop genre at the time. Bun B, Adina Howard, Uncle Luke, Killer Mike and Jermaine Dupri are all some of the notable artists who have performed at Freaknik. Dupri has actually made a documentary about the festival and its impact on his hometown, allowing those who missed the festival to at least see what they were missing.
The event was later reformed and Freaknik relaunched in 2019 after a 20 year hiatus. It pales in comparison to previous versions, but many of the 200,000 attendees were adults who attended the first annual festival of the ’80s and his ’90s. While it has a sleazy history, there’s no denying that Freaknik stands out in the history of both hip-hop and Atlanta as a festival too big for the city that hosted it and for young people who just want to have fun and get freaky. can not.
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