Good evening and welcome to our very first episode of Love and Respect.

I'm Michael Render.

I'm so proud to be here on ATL PBA because Pbs' helped raise me Mister Rogers Sesame Street, the electric company.

These were the shows that gave me a window into a wonderful world featuring people and mentors that helped teach me about love and respect.

Tonight, I'm honored to kick off our first show with the mayor of this great city, Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Mayor Bottoms tonight on her time in office.

Her decision not to run for reelection.

And her plans for the future.

Thanks for joining us.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Coming up right now.

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New Orleans.

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The coast.

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You have to go off script.

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Wow.

You gave me.

Welcome to love and respect.

The honorable Keisha Lance Bottoms, our current mayor, I think one of our most dynamic mayors, thank you for being the first guest on my show.

Thank you for having me as the first guest on your show.

This is incredible.

I'm so happy for you.

I appreciate you.

I want to ask this question quick because I got to lay out the groundwork for who you are before beyond mayor.

All right.

So you are a 60th mayor, right?

I am.

60th Mayor, second female mayor.

70% approval rating well-funded.

Why not run again?

You know, I wish I had a single answer for that because it would have been easier for me and it would be easier to convey to people like you, my my friends and my family.

But it really was not anything one single thing.

And you know, you are seeing these articles about the great resignation.

So I know, like the rest of the universe, we've all been reevaluating, over the past almost two years now.

And for me, it really was very personal in that my dad died suddenly when he w as 55.

So being over 50, you just start doing that soul searching on how you want to spend your days.

And if these were my last days on Earth, how would I want to spend them?

And I love my job.

It's been my highest honor to be the mayor of Atlanta, but there's so much more.

And I wanted to take the opportunity to explore more so voters get to decide every four years and so do candidates.

I tell you this what the last 20 months have taught me is my job.

I love, right?

I love singing and dancing to get paid a lot of money for it.

But I have a child that's on dialysis.

I have.

We're awaiting kidney transplant boy.

Our two boys, two girls.

And I realized that I have spent most of their life chasing my dream or accomplishing my goal.

Now is their dad.

They weren't secondary, but they definitely a lot of times were in league with whatever I was in league with and doing.

And this last 20 months allowed me to reset and say, Well, I'm only gonna do five shows this year.

I'm not going to try to do that.

I'm not going to.

So I definitely identify with you on that and I can.

That's probably one of the best answers I've heard of all the speculation that I never realized your dad died so young.

And when you do and when you get over 40, I would say you start thinking about your mortality difference, so thank you for it.

Now I understand I really get it.

And you talk about your children and your husband often and it you're...

Besides being a mayor, you're a heck of a mom and a wife is seems.

So I would imagine they're happy.

They're going to have you a lot more around home, I would imagine.

Well, two of my four kids are happy.

I mean, they were.

Split up like the electorate.

Two of the four were like, What now?

What are you thinking?

And the other two just wanted me to be happy, but they kind of aligns with their personality.

That's kind of like at home, too.

So we're from a place called the Collier Heights - Collier Heights, Adamsville community.

It's a and that's special because in 1948, a group of black folks decided, You know what?

We don't want to argue with you.

We don't want to fight for bussing integration.

We want our rights.

We want equal rights, one of those things.

But we're going to carve out a piece of the West Atlanta for ourselves.

They carved out this beautiful community that had everything from working class family like your parents and my grandparents to state representatives Cynthia and Billy McKinney.

Dr. King's parents live there.

Herman Russell lived there, so it really was a mixed income.

Our whole totality was black.

What was it like growing up a young African-American woman in that community in that time?

And did it do something for your confidence that it gave you something that helped propel you to who you are and what was that like?

So people get to know you beyond being mayor?

Well, right across the street from me directly across the street was Coach McAfee, who was the coach of the Morehouse basketball team.

So you're right, there was just this incredible presence around us at all times, and I remember going to the grocery store, seeing a white woman in the grocery store and we had just moved from.

We had just moved back from England.

And I remember asking my dad, How did that white lady get here?

Because I thought all white people lived in England.

And I thought all black people live in Atlanta.

And so I remember that moment of being aware that we weren't just an all African-American community, but the beauty of it was, we believe we could do anything.

Yeah, because there were people around us doing everything.

And it has everything to do with who I am today.

I mean, when you instill that type of confidence in children and you're offering children the best education.

Not the best education for black kids, but the absolute best education, I remember when Douglass High School was awarded the National School of Excellence.

You would have thought we had won the World Series.

I mean, it was such a big deal, but you know that that confidence and that love and just that inspiration, just to have this community of people cheering you on and slapping you on the hand or with Mr Hill's case, our assistant principal throwing some keys this big at you.

Yeah, when you did wrong.

I think it's the reason you are who you are, and that's the reason I got to be the mayor.

And believed I could be the mayor.

You're not honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. And the civil rights movement.

You're not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands breaking windows in this city.

Atlanta is a place where we can set an example of prosperity, and we've done that for generations.

People like Dr. King Maynard Jackson, Ambassador John, have paved the way for us.

It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy.

Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize.

I think what we showed in that moment was that Atlantans black and white and otherwise can come together and do what's right for this small town growing into a big city.

I had to chuckle because I remember talking to my team saying we got to get some people down here because we were seeing something we had never seen before in the city.

And I was thinking about my 19 year old, who was then 18, and I knew he wasn't going, you know, listen to me on a good day.

So I thought, Well, who will our kids listen to?

And they said, Well, we talked to TI but Killer Miker says he ain't coming.

I was like, what now?

And of course you came.

And you know, in that moment, I probably learned more about leadership in that hour than I learned my entire life.

The cops were ready to go in earlier, and I knew it was real and I knew I was looking at Keisha Lance, not just the honorable mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms.

When I saw you turn and tell the cops, Stop, wait, and you weren't... you were yelling and yelling at them, but you were yelling that I'm the authority in this room.

We will not blindly send them into there until these people have had a chance to speak.

And I've always wanted to congratulate you and let the public know that because oftentimes it feels as though the political class in the cop class is in collusion against the constituents or the proletariat.

And I saw you in that moment stave off the police to say, hold on.

We're going to let logic have an opportunity to prevail.

So I just got to say thank you for that.

And this is a son of a police officer, cousin of police officers.

So I know cops a lot of times they ain't...they want to go ahead and get it done.

After I spoke, and I looked at you and T.I.

and I said, I don't know, like, y'all got something.

Like if you both stop, you were like.

And then you came and gave probably one of the most impactful speeches of the last 50 years.

In that moment.

And it was so heartfelt.

And when I asked for for us to go before the cameras, I thought the kids may not listen, but if their parents are listening, they'll call and say, Where are you?

Come come home.

Stop.

Because we knew and you know this because you were a mentee of Reverend Orange?

Absolutely.

It's about planning.

And it's, you know, you look at the civil rights movement, they will plan to go and then they will say, not today.

Today is not the day and that day in our city was not the day.

So I thank you for coming.

Absolutely.

And I got a thank Tip for nudging you to come.

You did something very brave in a moratorium on building.

You realized it right on the west side of Atlanta.

That much like in other cities, if you look at what happened in San Francisco and poor people being pushed out, if you look like even places not as progressive like Austin is, richer people are moving in and is pushing working class people out.

You said that the legacy residents in places like Center Hill Grove Park, Evansville Heights, they need an opportunity to to catch up to pay their taxes, their children, their grandchildren, an opportunity to keep their properties.

You said very bravely, don't sell your parents house.

You said that as a mayor.

That's home for me.

So I can't tell you how many Saturdays I spent standing in line at Bankhead Seafood with the orders from the hair salon because they were only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday and for the first time, I cried during a check presentation.

We were at Carter G. Woodson Elementary School or what used to be the elementary school just a couple of weeks ago, and a grant was given to the Grove Park community.

And you know, again, it's I'm not making these decisions from afar.

This is not my team telling me about it.

I know these places, and I'm sorry I've cost you and Tip, sounds like a few million dollars.

But and again, I appreciate everything that you all are doing for the West Side because the other side of that you're opening up reopening this business.

Tips new and affordable housing on the west side and and you talk about how you show up every day.

Well, my grandmother used to ride the bus every day to Lenox Mall from her home on Lenox Square Mall, her home of off M.L.

King.

And we get that 20% discount at Davison's.

And then Macy's and my dad used to always say, no matter how bad your day is, you better always show up looking like everything is OK.

So I think that that's what you get from us when we show up in our communities.

But again, the redevelopment of Atlanta in and of itself is not a bad thing.

The bad thing is when our communities get left behind.

You also brought $42 million to combat homelessness, and homelessness is exploding.

The vast a country, not just in Atlanta.

Where do we find 42 million?

What happens with that 42 million?

And what made you say, let me try to get ahead of this because I see this happening now and I don't want to wait and become another city where you just have people literally lying on the streets.

Well, what as Ambassador Young describes as the Atlanta way where you have this coming together government, the philanthropic community, the corporate community, and we solve issues.

So it's not just me alone.

There's a whole group of people working on making sure that people need to have the resources to address their needs and the irony of it.

We've made tremendous progress in terms of our homeless population.

You think about that old model of keeping people in, sometimes like a warehouse type situation.

That's a very antiquated model because what you want to do is make sure that when you get that touchpoint with people that you have something to offer them to address those systemic issues that are leading them to be homeless.

Are you a veteran suffering with PTSD?

Are your LGBTQ youth who's been put out of the house and need some support?

Are you a working mother who doesn't have child care?

And so it's a much more thoughtful approach.

But what's happened over the past year and a half plus... we had a lot of providers who stop accepting people, and a lot of people did not want to go into congregate living settings because of where we were with COVID.

We did open up a hotel at one point, which was a great success, but unfortunately that hotel has now been sold.

So we're continuing to try and make sure that we can provide the services that we're not just going to accept that it's OK for people to have to live on our streets.

I think that there's a humanity that no matter what people think of you as mayor, there's a humanity you brought to that office that I probably hadn't seen since Andy.

You know, Andy wasn't an Atlanta native, but he knows Perry Homes won him that one of his first elections.

So he understood that taking care of northwest Atlanta, the bottom of northwest Atlanta, taking care of those people was the environment that grew strong children in that group.

People who are on City Council now, people who get elected mayor.

And then I see that there's something that I thought very quickly, though this isn't have to be fast.

But the All-Star Game, we lost the All-Star Game.

I felt like that was one of those times where we let national politics decide what we did locally, and I thought that was a big mistake.

We probably lost about $40 million in terms of losing the All-Star Game.

It didn't feel very good to me, and I felt like, you know, some people didn't say like, Man, we should have thought about that a little longer before we called for boycotts in Atlanta and in Georgia.

Because in losing the All-Star Game, I felt snubbed by the MLB because they took it not to Saint Louis, not to wear the Negro League Hall of Fame is or any place like that.

They took it to Colorado.

How important is it that the mayor of Atlanta understand the balance of wanting civil rights, wanting equity and good business?

My good friend.

Michael Hancock is actually mayor of Denver, so I was I was happy that if it were going somewhere.

I was not.

I was not happy for Michael.

Michael got a chance to own it.

But ironically, I just had a conversation last week at the Braves game with MLB commissioner.

And what I shared with him is that I appreciated the thought behind supporting our state.

But I personally did not like the boycott of our state.

A couple of reasons.

My husband works for a corporation.

Yeah, and there are many people whose families are fed, whether it be because your husband or your wife is an executive, or if they're somebody who's coming in and cleaning up at night.

So we have roughly, I think we're number three in terms of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Atlanta, Metro Atlanta.

So this is going to be a tough hit for not just these companies, but for our families as well.

That being said, I think the the the messaging was clear then when you make decisions, there are consequences.

I don't want a boycott of our city, I don't want a boycott of our state.

But I think leaders across the state have to understand you don't make decisions in a vacuum And that when you make these decisions in the same way that North Carolina was boycotted and many other places have been boycotted when they have made bad policy decisions that could and did happen to us here.

So we need to think very carefully about how we are making decisions for the people of this state.

Yeah, it feels good to snub a corporation when you've been wronged feels very bad to see one mother sleeping in cars.

Yeah, and there is definitely a tie between being able to bring commerce to the state and people getting jobs.

So thank you for helping us understand that better because I like baseball, but I like jobs.

I like people being able to support themselves.

So I appreciated that.

Your mother and father are someone I want to talk about because again, a lot of times the assumption is when you see articulate, smart, brilliant, competent, confident black children, you assume they've had it easy.

You think sometimes they form a free family up north, or they had the easy way.

You didn't.

Your mom's a hairstylist.

A cosmetologist... and she fly to this day.

She just got of the hospital... from Emory.

So welcome back, mama.

Your mama fly.

Every time I see her she got the gray hair, she swag.

I know when she was young she was super fly.

Your daddy was so clean you could eat off the floor he stood on.

He was clean.

Yeah, man, his his.

He he was a musician.

Much like myself.

You know, I had the best family ever and just an exciting family, as I would imagine your kids have experience.

And my mother was very free in that you would come home and your bags would be at the front door.

You're like, Oh, where we're going, Oh, we're going to England.

You know, she because someone a teacher at Collier Heights, one of either my sister or brother's teachers tol her our better education was to travel than to sit in the classroom.

So it was extraordinary.

And my dad, I remember the end of the second grade.

Collier Heights used to have what they call sock hop.

And my mother asked my sister to take me up to the sock hop.

The movers were coming and we were moving.

So back then you didn't really tell.

The kids didn't really have a lot of saying anything, and we left my dad at the house and moved all our stuff into an apartment, and I later learned we were... the house was about to go on foreclosure.

And so my parents separated.

They eventually my dad had a silver tongue.

He sent us to Chicago and I came back and my parents were living together again.

Yeah he had to get his old lady.

Something happened while we were away.

But because my dad was an entertainer and when I would come home from school every day, he was home because he worked at night.

And I came home one day in third grade and he was in handcuffs and they were taking him out and he said, Babies, it's going to be OK, I'll be back.

And I remember these offices all over the house and we had a bunch of boxes because we were packing up to move again.

We were moving into another house and they had torn up all of the boxes, including the box set my toys were in because they were looking for drugs.

And they tell me and my brother and sister, we have to stay on the sofa.

We couldn't call anybody.

Couldn't move.

And I remember at some point my sister and brother got up and I stayed there for hours because I thought they would you know?

And that essentially was the death of our family.

So this very privileged life of ballet and traveling and doing all these extraordinary things then became every Saturday and Sunday.

I would go to a different prison to visit my dad.

And it was nothing but other black men and other black kids around their dad in these prisons.

And I think in a way, it did propel me in that I never wanted that to be my life.

I never wanted to have to struggle like I saw my mother struggle.

I didn't want to run out of gas.

I didn't want my water to be turned off.

I didn't want to have to make a decision to do something like sell drugs because I couldn't eat that day.

So in a lot of ways, it probably was the worst thing that ever happened.

Aside from losing a loved one, but also that thing that has always driven me.

Yeah.

And then just what my my mother just was a really hard working woman.

My grandparents were hard working, like being lazy and not doing your best, it was never an option.

You can see your mother's pride in you.

Yeah.

And you know, I don't know believes in ancestors and, you know, good energy of spirits following you.

But I know your father's somewhere.

Oh my God.

We talk about that all the time.

I know that man got heaven lite with, That's my girl.

I mean, he was if I walked in the room, he was proud because I walked in.

Did you see my baby?

And then he gave me that.

You asked about my courage.

It was, you know, I'd say something happened.

And he said, Well, did you ask, Did you try?

Did you use my name, baby?

Did you use my name?

He'd say, Always use my name?

And all they can do is tell no after.

And that I keep that in my heart.

I appreciate them both for making love and making you.

Aw, thank you.

Think they did an amazing job.

What's next for Keisha Lance?

What's next for Keisha Lance Bottoms?

What's next, my former mayor?

What's next for my forever leader from the West Side What's next for you?

And what will you miss about office?

Oh, I have.

A lot of options, and I'm grateful for that.

So you're going to get the bag.

Huh?

You're going to get the bag.

No.

I honestly don't know.

I don't know.

And that's scary a bit, but I trust God and I trust in the same way he ordered my steps to be mayor that it's going to all work for my good.

So but it is frightening because I've had two jobs since I was 15.

Being mayor is actually the first time I've ever had a single job in my life, always had multiple jobs.

So that's a bit frightening.

But I am going to miss that.

I get to make a difference in the lives of people in Atlanta.

And this term was not as I would have scripted it.

I would have never asked for all the things that we face as a country over the past few years.

But I do know I was built for it.

Yeah, and I'm thankful that I got to lead our city during this time.

I don't even have to ask, What advice would you give a young woman or young man seeking office of what to do next?

If they simply follow your interviews and understand your story.

So I want to thank you duly for being on Love and Respect.

I want to thank you for handling me lovingly and respectfully, and I will always do the same with you and I'll be as supportive of you as always.

And I love you.

I love you.

Thank you so much.

Love and respect what Killer Mike is made possible by.

Regina approaches the all electric Cadillac Lyriq.

It's a sunny day now.

A stormy day.

Classical music plays a brass band.

She drives hands free.

Coast, make it Palm Springs.

Cadillac is going electric.

If you want to be bold, you have to go off script.

To experience the all electric Cadillac Lyriq.

We.

You gave me.

Missed.

You gave me.

Famous.