Uncle Luke’s documentary about the rise and fall of Freaknik echoes Miami Beach spring break

There’s a misconception that Freaknik was a haven of debauchery.

Its origins, however, were rather innocent: a spring break alternative in Atlanta for Black college students not interested in going to Daytona Beach and Galveston. Started by four students at Spelman and Morehouse colleges from Washington D.C., Freaknik only later evolved into the citywide party that Atlanta’s political arm eventually shutdown.

And though it was an Atlanta event, make no mistake: Freaknik wouldn’t be the same without Miami bass and Uncle Luke.

“I felt like we’re the freak kings of music – that’s definitely a weekend we got to be a part of,” Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell told the Miami Herald.

The full story of Freaknik will be explored in the new documentary “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” available March 21 via Hulu. Executive produced by Uncle Luke, Jermaine Dupri and 21 Savage, the documentary explores the history of the event but also the factors that simultaneously led to its downfall and Atlanta’s explosion of Black culture.

“Freaknik took a lot of turns,” Uncle Luke said. “It reminds me a lot of what’s going on on Miami Beach. When I thought about producing this documentary, I wanted to make sure that similarity was in there.”

Started in 1983, Freaknik began as a small cookout in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, in an idyllic time before camera phones, Wifi and social media. That allowed Freaknik – a portmanteau of “freaky” and “picnic” inspired by the late ‘70s classic “Le Freak” by Chic – to grow organically. Word of the party in Altanta spread across the country the old fashion way: word of mouth. Very soon, it became the go-to spring break destination for Black college students.

By the early ‘90s, Freaknik transformed into showcase of Black culture, attracting hundreds of thousands of people at its peak. There was a curiosity factor too, primarily driven by the allure of the Atlanta University Center, a consortium made up of Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College, but also the widespread popularity of “A Different World,” which exposed the nation to HBCU culture. You had the cars. The clothes. The dancing in the street. And of course, the music.

Enter Uncle Luke.

The Miami native’s first Freaknik was in 1992, and by then he was already a bonafide star. “As Nasty As They Wanna Be,” the 1989 record that featured the hit “Me So Horny,” had transformed 2 Live Crew and the group’s frontman into the hottest group out of the South as well as First Amendment warriors. What Luke saw, however, was something closer to a gathering of HBCU students from across the country.

“We basically went there to turn up and turn it out and be apart of the freakiness we thought was happening,” Uncle Luke recalled. “But lo and behold, it wasn’t really that. But we still made something out of it. Just imagine: we’re this big, controversial band and we’re telling all our fans ‘We’re going to Atlanta for Freaknik.’ So all of our fans followed us there and we turned it into something different.”

At times, the streets of Atlanta could resemble an Uncle Luke music video with the amount of booty shaking.

“Freaknik was a form of expression but I would actually say liberation,” filmmaker and Spelman professor Anjanette Levert said in the documentary. “It was an opportunity for them to express themselves without fear of backlash.”

With the ’96 Olympics on the horizon and the need for good press, the city of Atlanta decided to sponsor the event. It proved to be a huge mistake. That encouraged even more people – many of whom weren’t college students and came to Atlanta with negative intentions – to make the trip. The result totally altered the fabric of Freaknik, according to Spelman graduate Mikki Harris, who recalled seeing an increase in traffic and the objectification of women.

“Nobody was prepared for or knew that you would just have a straight lockdown of traffic. You can’t even get to the park. You can’t get to even the highway,” said Harris, now an associate professor in Morehouse’s Journalism in Sports, Culture and Social Justice department. Harris had somewhat fond memories of her first Freaknik in 1994 but by 1995, she and her friends were getting flashed by men in the middle of traffic. “Every road, everything was shutdown and it was just a parking lot because they had not anticipated the crowds when they marketed this as a weekend for visitors to come to Atlanta and party.”

As the phenomenon grew, so did the number of arrests – ranging from indecency to sexual assault – though perpetrators represented only a small fraction of attendees. Still, in subsequent years, the city made it very clear that the Freaknik was no longer welcome: police presence increased significantly, traffic patterns were altered and it became virtually impossible to move about the city. After 1999, Freaknik was no more.

Again, Luke compares the fall of Freaknik to South Beach’s ongoing campaign to “break up with spring break,” which the hip-hop legend has repeatedly deemed as racist.

“There’s a direct correlation in government police and no programming,” Uncle Luke said. He argued that the Atlanta government secretly didn’t want Freaknik so they devised a plan to get rid of it, similar to what’s currently happening on South Beach. “You had no where to put the people so they just sat in traffic all day. And when they sat in traffic all day, they got creative. You sit a bunch of people in the middle of the street and you open up the liquor stores and the people turn it into a street party and before you know it, some s*** happens.”

Though Freaknik might only be remembered for its notoriety, Luke also wants viewers to understand how integral the event was to building Atlanta into the Black entertainment capital of the world. Miami was the first southern city to have an established hip-hop scene but by the early ‘90s, Atlanta had begun to emerge thanks to Dupri and later Outkast. Fast forward less than three decades later and Atlanta has become a thriving place for not just music but also film and TV.

“Southern hip-hop was started in Miami but it was Freaknik that created Atlanta’s entertainment scene,” Uncle Luke said. “Artists would come there, stay there, now they started to record there, building studios and Black Hollywood comes because of the tax credits and incentives to stay there and do more work.”