Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on the Arbery killing and Biden's vice-president pick
Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, comes on the line, introduced by one of her communications team, with a non-committal, “Hi there. How are you?”
Her tone is light yet detached after weeks of phone and video interviews.
But when the topic turns to her four children, the motherly lilt returns to her voice. She’s having a hard time keeping her kids off YouTube and TikTok, she says. “Thankfully, there’s one week left of school. So I think I’m more excited than they are.”
Like millions of other Americans, Bottoms has juggled working from home while keeping her children educated and entertained. Unlike most other Americans, Bottoms is running one of America’s largest cities, Atlanta, in the middle of a pandemic – one that has disproportionately affected African Americans nationwide and in her majority-black city.
On top of those worries, she’s been involved a public disagreement with Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, after he embarked on a controversial plan to reopen the state – despite its infection rate still rising. The plan was seen as so risky even Donald Trump urged him not to do it. It also pitted a white governor against a black mayor.
Now Atlanta’s plight under Bottoms has been in the national headlines for weeks as millions of Americans monitor its trajectory of coronavirus cases and deaths. Bottoms has made the rounds on TV expressing her opposition to Kemp’s proposals.
“I don’t think it was appropriate to begin with tattoo parlours, massage parlours, bowling alleys and barber shops, and so on. I think a more thoughtful approach would have been in cases where people could socially distance,” she says.
In response to her criticism of Kemp’s partial reopening, Bottoms received a racist text calling her the Nword, which, she says, her daughter saw over her shoulder.
She has tried bringing up concerns with Kemp, she says, requesting he require people to wear masks in places it might be impossible to socially distance, or where there might be crowds of 10 or more people in Atlanta, Georgia’s capital and largest city. But he refused, she says.
Bottoms in 2017 became the mayor of Atlanta – a city that has only had exclusively black mayors since the mid-1970s. Her victory came from predominantly black neighborhoods in the city’s southern half. In the celebrated cultural capital for African Americans, she spoke about an “enormous amount of racial distrust”. Now, as she gains national attention for denouncing Kemp’s leadership, her name has come up as a potential running mate for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
Bottoms is the daughter of the famous R&B singer Major Lance, and was born and raised in Atlanta. In her YouTube video biography, she tells the story of how her grandparents came to Atlanta on a horse and buggy. Her childhood was far from idyllic, and something she has not shied away from speaking about on the campaign trail in 2017: she came home from school aged eight to her father being led away in handcuffs, later jailed for drug dealing.
She graduated from high school and went to university in Florida before returning home to study law. She became a prosecutor and then a judge before entering city politics representing her south-western, predominantly black corner of the city for eight years. Then she won the race to be mayor three years ago.
Racial disharmony seems to come with the job. This weekend, after a 36second video showed a black man shot by two white men as he jogged through a coastal Georgia neighbourhood, Bottoms called Ahmaud Arbery’s death a “lynching”, catching the nation’s attention as she accused Trump of inciting acts of racism.
“It’s so fascinating to me that it reverberates in that way, because from my lens it is the assumption that everybody recognizes that it is a lynching,” Bottoms says. “There’s more interest in what I have to say as an African American mayor of a southern city. But I think my voice reflects the feelings of many across this country.”
But when it comes to discussing allegations of voter suppression in Georgia in the 2018 elections, which primarily affected communities of color and garnered national attention, Bottoms dodges the conversation.
Kemp, then the secretary of state, responsible for overseeing elections, ran against Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s first black nominee for governor. Kemp beat Abrams by just under 55,000 votes amid allegations he purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls.
“You have to give people an opportunity to govern. So the results of these elections are: they were what they were,” Bottoms says. A moment later she adds: “Voter suppression is very real. We see it happening across this country. But I also think that there’s a responsibility for us to turn out in numbers across this country and vote in numbers so that there is no room for error.”
Mostly, though, Bottoms has embraced her role as a Democratic mayor in a blue city in a red state during the Trump era. She affirmed that Atlanta would continue to welcome refugees after Trump said state and local government both had to consent to continue receiving them. She rejected Trump-announced Ice deportation raids set to hit Atlanta, calling them “cruel”.
In 2019, she became one of the first Democrats to back a candidate to run against Trump, endorsing Biden hours after he floundered against Kamala Harris on the debate stage on the topic of “bussing” to end racial segregation. Bottoms joined Biden at national debates and joined him on the stump in the early primary states of Iowa and South Carolina.
She’s a devoted loyalist to the former vice-president, not wavering as she defends him when the topic turns to ex-Biden staffer Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations, which Biden has forcefully denied repeatedly. “The vicepresident has been very clear that women should be taken seriously and they should be believed, but their story should also be vetted and that’s what’s happened with Tara Reade,” Bottoms says firmly. “She’s not been vilified by the vice-president.”
No wonder her name has come up as a possible vice-president. Biden has committed to picking a female running mate.
The powerful South Carolina black congressman Jim Clyburn pointed towards Bottoms as a pick, saying: “There is a young lady right there in Georgia who I think would make a tremendous VP candidate, and that’s the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms.”
Bottoms said she was honored Clyburn spoke her name, but insists she hasn’t spoken to Biden or his team about the role.
“I think that the vice-president deserves the opportunity to have the person on the ticket who will best propel him to victory in November,” she demurs. “There’s a very accomplished list of women we’ve seen publicly mentioned.”