It was late April in 1994, and Armstrong, then 25, had never been to Atlanta before — or on a plane.
Maybe it was the nerves or motion sickness. Either way, she didn’t think much of it — especially once she finally touched down in the city, made her way through a packed Atlanta airport and surveyed the crowd in astonishment.
“I had never seen so many Black people and so many fine Black men in my life,” Armstrong, now 55, said in a recent phone interview. “I said, ‘Oh if this is going to be Freaknik, I know I’m going to have a good time.’”
Throughout the 1990s, Freaknik was regarded as the wildest college spring break destination in the South, thriving at a time when clunky camcorders captured home videos more likely to gather dust in an attic than be broadcast to millions on the internet. At its peak, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors who poured into Atlanta’s streets — snarling traffic, thumping music and dancing on car hoods.
Now, a Hulu documentary premiering Thursday recounts its rise and fall — unearthing archival footage that chronicles Freaknik’s early cookout days, a growing hyper-sexualized environment, its impact as a bubbling cultural and music hub, and the tumult of violence and public safety problems that roiled the city as the event hit critical mass and pitted political leaders against Black Atlantans.
Executive produced by music mogul Jermaine Dupri, Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell and 21 Savage among others, “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” is a project many Gen X and boomer-age parents and their millennial kids have braced for.
Last year, a niche social media trend emerged in which kids asked their parents whether they went to Freaknik and shared the responses online. “I plead the 5th!” one mom declared in a text exchange with her daughter. But Armstrong, for one, was thrilled about the news. Unprompted, she texted her kids in their family group chat: “I was at Freaknik back then. I’m ready to tell my story.”
Armstrong’s destination that weekend was Piedmont Park. Music was blaring, and grills were smoking. And thousands of attendees were dancing and laughing — waving camcorders and microphones, drinks and cigarettes.
As one of Atlanta’s biggest public parks, Piedmont served as a central hub for Freaknik festivities since 1983, when college students from Atlanta University Center’s (AUC) D.C. Metro Club first organized the event.
The first Freaknik began as a small picnic for students from the area’s historically Black colleges and universities — including Spelman College, Morehouse College, Clark University and Morris Brown — who were not traveling home for spring break. Student organizers had been promoting a “return of the freak” theme during their events all year, inspired by a pair of popular songs: Chic’s 1978 funk-disco hit “Le Freak” and Rick James’s 1981 “Super Freak.” So they named the spring break gathering “Freaknic,” which was later respelled as “Freaknik.”
“The first one was relatively small, but then this event just evolved over a short period of time solely by word of mouth,” said Sharon Toomer, one of the original organizers. “We started seeing students from Tuskegee, from Hampton, from FAMU, from the region, and then throughout the ’80s, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
By 1994, the vibes had shifted drastically. “If you can picture a huge Uncle Luke party, that’s what it felt like,” Armstrong said, referring to the rapper and promoter known for throwing raunchy parties in Miami.
That same year, Naima Cochrane, then a student at the University of South Carolina, drove down for the parties.
“I went in one of the final years of what I considered [to be] the original Freaknik,” said Cochrane, now a music and culture journalist. “There were definitely artists and celebrities down there, but it still felt very much like a college-centered event.”
Back then, the Black college festival circuit ran up and down the East Coast — from Philadelphia to Florida — with throngs of students piling in their cars and making stops along the way.
“We would put a cooler in [the trunk] and just load it up with alcohol,” said Adrian Loving, a visual arts teacher who attended Freaknik as a Howard University student in the early ’90s.
A responsible driver would take the wheel of their Ford Escort GT, he said, and they would pump it to Atlanta — a 10-hour-plus trek.
“We would drive all night, and when we got there, it was on,” he said. “There were just goo-gobs of parties. There were probably like 30 or 40 parties that you could go to for the whole weekend. We would basically just party-hop.”
Students, he said, would meet at Atlanta University Center or another campus and figure out their move. “Paschal’s was always one of our first spots,” Loving said of the iconic soul food establishment. “During Freaknik, we would roll up … and it was just like a block party out in front. It was one of the big meetup spots.”
What Armstrong remembers most was a feeling of freedom.
“There was no violence, there was no fear of guns. There was nothing like that. It was just everybody being free,” Armstrong recalled. “It was the best time I ever had in my life. … It was a Black Woodstock.”
Freaknik played a pivotal role in establishing Atlanta as a force in the music industry.
“The years that Freaknik grew were around the same time that the Atlanta sounds were galvanizing,” Cochrane said. “It was happening simultaneously with Atlanta as a young music city — not just as a music city.”
The atmosphere for rising Southern hip-hop artists was electric. Rappers and promoters hustled through the streets and clubs, passing out sampler cassettes. Most notably, the Dungeon Family hip-hop collective, featuring acts such as Killer Mike, Goodie Mob and Outkast, was active in this scene.
Outkast, the acclaimed hip-hop duo consisting of rappers Big Boi and André 3000, even dropped their debut album, “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” the same week as Freaknik in 1994. “We launched our career off the back of Freaknik,” Big Boi said in a past interview commemorating the parties.
Dupri, meanwhile, was leveraging the annual event to promote So So Def Recordings, the record label he had launched in 1993.
Before Freaknik, Dupri said, Atlanta was largely perceived as “this country town that didn’t move like New York, Chicago, L.A. or all these other major places.” Even as White America started paying more attention to hip-hop culture, “the South was not ever treated as if it was supposed to even be here,” he said.
Atlanta was in an age of discovery, Dupri added. “Everything here was new, and … the discovery allowed people to be free,” he said.
The rich civil rights history, wealth of Black political power and network of HBCUs attracted visitors such as Armstrong to Atlanta — a city teeming with opportunity. “Atlanta felt like the mecca for Black people,” Armstrong said. “I was so impressed. And for the longest time, I was like, ‘I want to move to Atlanta.’”
Those factors laid the groundwork for Freaknik to flourish, said executive producer Geraldine L. Porras, facilitating connections through shared culture and experiences.
“But I think the real beauty was that [people] coming from these different cities throughout the country [were] also bringing pieces of their culture and their fashion and their hair,” Porras said.
“And you’re having a reunion of sorts. You’re having other people that look like you that you can relate to, but then you’re seeing the different styles from these different places.”
Freaknik attendance had peaked in 1994, attracting more than 200,000 people — and Piedmont Park couldn’t contain them. Crowds spilled into the streets and club venues all across town, blocking up Atlanta traffic.
Especially on Peachtree Street, the city’s most iconic strip, which stretches just over 18 miles — from downtown to midtown and up to Buckhead.
“On that street, it was nothing but cars lined up back to back,” Armstrong said. “Everybody was just hanging out of the window, going six miles per hour.”
The event’s most enduring footage was born during those traffic jams, revealing a clash of revelry and chaos: Drivers blasting their music. Women jumping out of cars to dance.
“Before y’all started twerking on headlights, we were twerking on headlights,” Armstrong said, and “twerking wasn’t even a word then, baby.”
Men swarmed them all weekend, Armstrong said, and they could get “a little handsy” and lewd. At one point, she recalled a male interviewer asking her a question. When she turned to answer, she realized that he was holding a penis-shaped microphone. “They thought it was funny,” Armstrong said. “Now, these days you couldn’t get away with that stuff.”
She and her friends held steadfast to a buddy system that weekend, Armstrong said. “We went nowhere alone.”
Freaknik’s legacy has long been riddled with incidents of sexual assault, some of which were caught on camera. “We wouldn’t be doing Freaknik justice if we didn’t show all parts,” Dupri said. “Because as exciting as it was for Black people … and music … this dark side of Freaknik was very loud, as well.”
By the mid-’90s, the event had morphed into a national destination, losing some of its early flavor, Cochrane said. In anticipation of the 1996 Olympics, the city implemented stringent measures to crack down on traffic and ensure public safety — dead-ending the festivities by barricading streets and interstate exits. By the turn of the millennium, cases of assault were reported frequently. In 1998, footage from a WSB-TV broadcast and MTV’s “True Life” showed women being groped and unclothed by mobs of men. That year, four rapes, six sexual assaults and four shootings were reported.
Black college students reportedly pushed back on negative characterizations of Freaknik, suggesting they were racially charged and citing other spring break parties that were fraught with similar reports.
By 1999, attendance had dropped to 50,000, before it finally fizzled in 2000.
“I think that ultimately what ended it is just a lack of organization,” Toomer said. “And then you had a lot of criminal activity going on in terms of the sexual assaults and rapes. It just became an event that you couldn’t really defend.”
Over the years, there have been efforts to bring it back, including an annual Freaknik-themed club event hosted by 21 Savage. “It’s never going to die,” Toomer said. “We’re talking about Freaknik 40 years later. So it truly is an indelible event in Black culture, but to recapture that moment I don’t think is possible.”
During her last day in Atlanta, Armstrong started feeling weird. She threw up again at a friend’s house where she and her best friend, Cheryl, were crashing for the weekend. This time, Cheryl convinced her to take a pregnancy test.
“It was positive, and I immediately fell out,” Armstrong said of her disbelief.
Suddenly, her life was entering a chapter in which she would need to leave the festival behind.
Her fiancé was thrilled by the news — and so was Armstrong after the initial shock. “It was a happy time for us,” she said, because it brought them Kamory Beale, her now 29-year-old daughter.
“Who knew, Kamory, the whole time you were at Freaknik with me?” Armstrong said.
Until her mom sent those text messages to the family last year, Beale said, she had no idea either had gone to Freaknik. “It’s fun to hear when my mom had a life — where she went out to parties, doing some of the things that I do now,” she said.
The two have plans to watch the documentary together. And if she’s lucky, Armstrong said, maybe she’ll even catch a glimpse of her former self.
“I wouldn’t be embarrassed at all,” Armstrong said. “I lived my life; I enjoyed it. I’m here to tell my kids and my grandkids about it.”
“I think it’s dope that you had an amazing time,” Beale replied. “I love that for you.”