Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms opens up about the arrest of her father, R&B legend Major Lance.
ATLANTA — For decades, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms kept the story of her famous father, soul singer Major Lance, to herself. But after launching her political campaign in 2017, she decided the time was right to open up about his drug arrest and incarceration, when she was just 8 years old. That decision, while personally painful, helped spark a transformation that has led her to become one of the nation’s leading criminal justice reformers.
The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, born in 1939, Major Lance fled the Jim Crow South with his parents for Chicago in 1950, during what has come to be known as the Great Migration. As a result of federal redlining policies that kept African-Americans out of white neighborhoods, his family had few housing options and moved into the infamous Cabrini-Green projects.
“As I was walking to the door, they were bringing my dad out with his hands behind his back, and I just remember him telling me it was going to be OK,” Bottoms said. “There were just men all over our house, and they had torn everything apart. My toys were in a cardboard box, and they had torn that up.”
“I chuckle about this now, but wherever he was is where I would say he was living,” Bottoms said. “Oh, yeah, my dad’s living in Columbus now, or Jackson, or Eatonton. You talk about the shame of my 8-year-old mind.” “In terms of getting her to tell her story, I really see Marylin, and the way she tells her story without shame, as what’s made that possible for the mayor to move to a place where she can talk about it and make policy about it,” Bervera said as a MARTA train passed by the window along a section of elevated track.
“Every Friday we’d meet my grandfather at the store and I’d say, ‘Can I have this, can I have that?’ and my grandmother would say stuff like, ‘Eat it before you get to the counter or hide it,” Winn, 69, told Yahoo News at her East Point office — a converted two-story home with a creaky front porch. “It got to be where I stopped asking because I knew what she was going to say. It became a way of life for me.
As detailed in Michelle Alexander’s 2010 acclaimed book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Southern cities like Atlanta enacted a slew of ordinances in Reconstruction’s wake that codified racial segregation. Minor offenses like traffic infractions, panhandling and loitering frequently resulted in prison time for African-Americans while white offenders more often walked free.
Department of Corrections Chief Patrick Labat denies that ACDC was intended to help keep poor people out of public view. Labat gives the mayor credit for “thinking outside the box” and helping lower ACDC’s inmate population from roughly 800 prisoners per night to a low of 67 in August, leaving its cell blocks, exercise yards and hallways largely empty.
Of course, not everyone in Atlanta is happy about Bottoms’s vision of transforming ACDC from a jail into a place that helps people from ever ending up in one. At a February town hall meeting with residents of the mostly white and affluent Buckhead neighborhood, when she brought up her plan for the building, she faced an angry backlash.
Even before Bottoms began speaking publicly about father, Winn had already recognized her resemblance to Lance, whom she had met in the late ’70s, during “those dark days” of drug addiction.One day, when the two women spoke following an event, she decided to bring it up. “When I began running for mayor, what struck me was that I was misunderstood and I felt as if I had to be a lot more exposed for people to understand that when I talked about the sense of community that I wanted to help restore in this city and this notion of justice and creating this beloved community was more than something I just said,” Bottoms recalled. “People needed to know what it meant to me.
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