Like a hurricane, Freaknik swept through Atlanta like a cultural storm, bringing with it traffic and a bit of foolishness but leaving behind music, dance and tons of memories.

“I was there in the beginning when it was a simple cookout at John A. White Park,” said Monica Gayles Dorsey.

“I graduated from Spelman in ‘91. Went to the University of Maryland and finished in ‘93. Came home to Atlanta and got a job at CNN, and was shocked that it had become the infamous Freaknik. I honestly don’t know what happened but I truly believe it speaks to the phrase, ‘what is in a name.’”

Credit: JEAN SHIFRIN

Credit: JEAN SHIFRIN

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked dozens of people to recount their Freaknik stories.

They all wanted to talk, but few wanted to do it on the record. Even fewer wanted to share their photos or precious camcorder recordings.

“Photos of their ‘adventures’??? What kind of sting operation you running?” said Chris Preyor, a 47-year-old 1998 graduate of Clark Atlanta University, mocking the AJC’s query. “I was in Woodruff Library the whole time, so I’m good.”

“Ohhh my pictures are not to be revealed to the world,” said Trina Smalls, now a minister and life coach in Villa Rica, who also said she moved to Georgia in part because of positive Freaknik experiences.

“One of the things that stood out to me when I came to Atlanta for Freaknik was that young African-Americans were being embraced and encouraged to have fun,” Smalls added. “I never experienced my culture and my age group being embraced to that magnitude by a state. Seeing successful entrepreneurs that weekend made me know Atlanta was a place I wanted to move to.”

Credit: Trina Smalls

Credit: Trina Smalls

A prominent Atlanta attorney, who has tackled some of the city’s most important civil rights cases accused the AJC — slightly joking — of “trying to get folks in trouble.”

“Some things should go to the grave,” said filmmaker Wendy Eley Jackson, the daughter-in-law of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. “I was there. Lord, thank God cell phones did not exist. I’m in no photos. But John A. White Park has never looked the same for me!”

One thing seems clear: Everyone who experienced Freaknik will never forget it, even if they don’t want to admit it.

Here are a few stories we were able to uncover.

Andrea Carter: The energy and the spirit changed

By 1996, Andrea Carter had had enough.

Although she was on her way to becoming one of Atlanta’s leading Black female sports executives, she was no prude.

But when she walked through Lenox Mall and saw women walking around half-naked in the spirit of Freaknik, she knew things had changed forever.

Credit: Andrea Carter

Credit: Andrea Carter

“It was just a different spirit than what we had been used to,” Carter said this week.

It wasn’t always that way. Between 1986 and 1990, when she was a student at Spelman College, Carter was a regular at Freaknik.

“It was the early days and we would go to White Park,” Carter said. “It was a picnic. I remember going to KFC and getting food.”

Carter said it was a fun but low-key gathering of friends from Spelman, as well as Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College. Hand-written fliers, tacked on to bulletin boards across the campuses, announced events.

Credit: Andrea Carter

Credit: Andrea Carter

“Then my friends from Howard and Hampton heard about it and started coming,” Carter said. “It was fun, with no foolishness. It was so innocent. Before it sold out to promoters.”

After graduating and moving to Washington, D.C., for graduate school, Carter said she still made her way back to Atlanta to attend Freaknik, which was getting bigger but remained manageable.

“It was still fun, because it still had that core of fellowship and friendship. Just hanging out and having fun,” Carter said. “It was still a great big family reunion. I don’t want the innocence of what it was to get lost in what it became.”

By the time Carter moved back to Atlanta in 1996, everything had changed.

The punishing and intentional traffic jams. The glory of the biker shorts. Lots of twerking. Lots of skin.

“The energy and the spirit changed,” said Carter, who runs a consulting firm aimed at non-profits after spending 20 years as an executive with an Atlanta sports franchise.

Credit: Andrea Carter

Credit: Andrea Carter

Carter pulls out a photograph of what she describes as being from the classic Freaknik era. Not in her phone, but the kind that sticks to a photo album.

She and her friends are posing inside a gazebo at White Park. She is wearing a red blouse, and red and white striped pants down to her ankle. Someone has a plate.

It looks like she might have come from class.

“Those were the best,” she said. “But I had reached a point in my life where I didn’t want to be in bumper-to-bumper traffic, where chaos might break out.”

Anthony White: Like something we had never seen before

Anthony White came to Freaknik and never left.

Well, almost. White traveled from Washington D.C. to Freaknik for the first time in 1992. He was so struck by the spectacle of Black beauty, joy and excellence, that he vowed never to miss another one.

Credit: Anthony White

Credit: Anthony White

So he enrolled in Clark Atlanta University.

“Man, you can ask a lot of us who came to the AUC during that period. The older cats,” White said. “Everybody came here because of Freaknik. It was like something we had never seen before. Going to the AUC was like going to Freaknik every day.”

And White had seen a lot. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when HBCUs were hitting their cultural stride, the country was littered with major events designed to attract well-educated Black students for a weekend of partying and spending.

There was spring break in Virginia Beach and Daytona Beach. Georgia Avenue Day in D.C. The Greek Picnic in Philadelphia. Aggie Fest in Greensboro. White and his crew had been to them all.

“But to me, Freaknik had an energy that was so different,” White said.

Every year, White and his crew would pack a car and drive to Atlanta, always careful to avoid legendary speed traps in South Carolina.

Sometimes, they didn’t have a place to stay so they slept in their cars. The Waffle House, cheap and hearty, was the food of choice.

“You couldn’t wait for Freaknik to happen every year,” White said. “It was such an eye-opener.”

White said the difference between Freaknik and the other HBCU-centered events was an overwhelming sense of family and how many people came from all over the country.

“I never met a woman from Kansas before,” White said, adding that his goal was to get as many phone numbers as possible to later call women on a calling card.

Credit: Anthony White

Credit: Anthony White

He doesn’t remember violence or fights occurring and believes the image of overall debauchery is a bit overblown.

“I tell everyone that the greatest Freaknik was in ‘94. Everybody had gotten the word, so ‘94 was just different,” White said.

“That was the first time I experienced the South, and booty-shaking and dancing. But it wasn’t even really twerking then. I saw some raunchiness, but it didn’t feel like a stripper culture. It wasn’t all of the craziness that people tried to say it was. Most of us were chilling and having a good time. It was just a big fun college party.”

But that ‘94 Freaknik scared the city.

By 1995, the city of Atlanta started to crack down on the roving street party, by blocking streets and re-routing traffic. White said this pushed drivers to the Southside, where locals started mingling with the college students, changing the vibe of the event.”

“The traffic, I admit, was bad and I was a part of that,” White said.

White is older now. He has won 13 Emmys as a sports videographer. Traffic makes him mad and makes it harder for people to get to his food truck, Windell’s Seafood, which specializes in crab melts.

Credit: Anthony White

Credit: Anthony White

“Now when I see someone in the middle of the street, I’m yelling, ‘Get out of the street!’” he said laughing. “But back in the day, during Freaknik, I was outside my car dancing like everyone else.”

There will always be those who see Freaknik as something that happened in the 1980s — something Atlanta never fully recovered from. But those who attended the legendary event in its heyday clearly came away with lessons learned. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.