Why Did Keisha Lance Bottoms Quit?

The mayor of Atlanta was a rising star in Democratic politics. Then the crime wave hit.

- By Zak Cheney-Rice

ON A SUNNY WEDNESDAY in November, Keisha Lance Bottoms went to the Atlanta City Detention Center, a water-stained hulk of concrete with slits for windows glaring out over Peachtree Street. She was there on a kind of valedictory tour, showcasing her accomplishments as she gets ready to leave the mayor’s office. “I thought this one was dead in the water,” she would tell me later of the deal that is turning part of this facility into a “diversion center”—a place where cops can bring people with behavioral problems that is not jail or the hospital. The floor inside was a ratty mix of linoleum and pilling brown carpet, and a podium had been set up for the event. That’s where Bottoms started to cry. “I’ve been crying a lot lately,” she admitted, wiping away tears.

The tears could mean a lot of things at this point: pride or disappointment or relief that it’s all going to be over soon. Bottoms’s time in office has been marked by dizzying highs (she was on the shortlist to become Joe Biden’s vice-president in 2020) and shocking lows, like her sudden announcement in May that, after a solitary term, she wouldn’t run for reelection that fall. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. When she took office in 2018, magic was the theme of her inauguration, a term she used liberally to describe the election that lifted her, “a girl named Keisha,” to the highest office in America’s so-called Black mecca. “I truly believe it was the energy and inspiration of generations of Black-girl magic that fueled our victory,” the mayor said in her first big speech, at Morehouse College. “I am Atlanta magic. You are Atlanta magic. We are Atlanta magic.”