Tag: Freaknik

Hulu’s new original documentary Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told tells the story of how a 1983 picnic for Atlanta HBCU students in the meadow at Piedmont Park became, by the mid-1990s, a national Spring Break destination for hundreds of thousands of young people each April. Here’s five things highlighted in the new Hulu doc that even long-time Atlantans might not know about Freaknik’s enduring legacy.

Before Vincent “Pudgy” Richardson and brothers Kevin and Travis Denson helped turn Bankhead into a hip-hop landmark, they sold CDs and white tees out of a bread truck outfitted with 15-inch rims. How they got the bread truck, or why they chose that specific mode of transportation, only Kevin knows. But this mobile operation—the humble beginnings of Toe Jam Music—made a lot of business sense in spring 1998.

The city booms after the bust, the South more powerfully confronts its past, Stacey Abrams plans a progressive revolution, Josef Martinez is king, and Staplehouse emerges.

Juvenile, Trina, and Ying Yang Twins headline the Freaknik Festival 2019, while the rescheduled Atlanta Moon Ride gets a new date.

From hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands, Freaknik grew, but during its first decade, almost all white Atlantans—and many black Atlantans over the age of 40—were oblivious. Then came Freaknik 1993.

Most notable was a little-known young lawyer—a janitor’s son from Raleigh, North Carolina, who’d worked briefly in the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice before being elected. He was earnestly pushing (though getting nowhere) for the city’s first comprehensive code of ethics. His name was Bill Campbell.