Since 2018, Keisha Lance Bottoms has served as the mayor of Atlanta, but it wasn’t until two weeks ago that she was catapulted into the national spotlight—thanks to a speech that lasted a little more than four minutes.
On May 29, as some of Atlanta’s peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd turned violent, Bottoms delivered an impassioned—and completely unscripted—speech in which she spoke as both a mayor, and a mother.
“When you burn down this city, you’re burning down our community,” she said. “If you want change in America, go and register to vote. Show up at the polls on June 9th. Do it in November. That is the change we need in this country.” She later added: “I am a mother to four Black children in America, one of whom is 18 years old. And when I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother would hurt.”
That extraordinary moment of realness has resulted in some significant vice presidential candidate speculation. For the record, Bottoms has not confirmed if she is being vetted, but the 50-year-old told Vogue: “There are 330-million-plus people in America, and to have your name mentioned as a potential V.P.? That’s a big deal, and it’s a huge honor.” She's also made some equally big media appearances: In addition to writing an op-ed for the New York Times last week, she appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and will join Oprah for OWN Spotlight: Where Do We Go From Here?, a two-part town hall special (airing on June 9 and 10 at 9 p.m. ET) to address systemic racism in the United States, and the nationwide protests following George Floyd's death.
Ahead, what you need to know about the political standout.
She is the descendent of slaves—and the daughter of R&B singer-songwriter Major Lance.
Thanks to documents from the mid-19th century, Bottoms can trace her family’s history to a plantation near Crawfordville, Georgia, where her grandmother’s grandparents were slaves. “I stand here this afternoon carrying the hope of the slave,” she said during her 2018 inaugural address, drawing on a famous poem from the late Maya Angelou. It is believed that Bottoms’s great-great grandfather, Shephard Peek, may have served in the state legislature during Reconstruction.
“I’ve seen the slave registry. One-thousand-five-hundred dollars was his value,” she told Vogue earlier this month. “I have been thinking of him a lot and, the anger and the pain and humiliation and all the things that must have been a part of being enslaved, and how was he able to put that all aside and move beyond? It had to have been a belief that there was something better for tomorrow and something better for his children’s children.”
A century later, Bottoms was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to her mother, Sylvia Robinson, and her father, Major Lance, a soul singer from Chicago who had a number of hits in the 1960s (most notable: “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um”), once opened for the Beatles, and was backed by a band that included a young Elton John. After a brief stint living in England, Bottoms, her parents, and her two siblings moved back to Atlanta, settling in the Collier Heights community.
Unbeknownst to the family, Lance had started dealing drugs as a way to make money on the side, leading to what Lance has called the worst day of her life. "When I was eight years old, I came home from school one afternoon to see my dad being led away in handcuffs as police officers raided our home,” Bottoms wrote in an op-ed for CNN about criminal justice reform. “He served three years in prison, and it was the death of our family.” Her parents divorced following the arrest, and Bottoms was largely raised by her mother, who worked two jobs and went to cosmetology school at night before opening her own hair salon.
She attended a Historically Black College.
After graduating from Frederick Douglass High School in northwest Atlanta, Bottoms attended Florida A&M University, where she studied broadcast journalism. (She went on to study law at Georgia State University.) According to her college roommate—and fellow Frederick Douglass High School classmate—Chiquita Dent, Bottoms was an extremely diligent student who would wake up at 6:30 a.m. every day to make her 8 a.m. classes. Despite her busy schedule, Bottoms pledged Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, one of the nation’s first sororities founded for African American women.
Prior to becoming mayor, she served in all three branches of the government.
Bottoms never thought about running for office until 2008, when she was sitting as a part-time magistrate judge—a job that entails signing warrants, presiding over small-claims court, and filling in for state court judges—and decided to challenge a Fulton Superior Court judge she thought was doing a poor job.
According to an Atlanta Magazine article, Bottoms told her mother, “If I don’t make this, I’ll run for City Council.” Sure enough, Bottoms did end up losing, and when the longtime City Council representative retired the next year, she ran for the seat—just as she had promised. Bottoms won, and during her two-term tenure as a City Council member, she served on multiple committees—including the Public Safety Committee, the Zoning Committee and the Transportation Committee—and spearheaded an urban-planning initiative that expanded economic development within underserved communities.
In November 2015, after months of deliberation, Bottoms decided to run for mayor during a service at Impact United Methodist Church. “I wanted clarity and to feel comfortable,” Bottoms said in the same Atlanta Magazine article. “I immediately knew I had the confirmation to run for mayor. I was so overcome that day when the service was over, I couldn’t even get up out of my seat.”
She is Atlanta’s 60th mayor—and just the second woman to be elected to Atlanta’s highest office.
After defeating fellow City Council member Mary Norwood in a runoff election, Bottoms was sworn in as the 60th Mayor of Atlanta on January 2, 2018. “Black girl magic is something I have experienced throughout my life, and experienced daily during our campaign. I truly believe it was the energy and inspiration of generations of black girl magic that fueled our victory,” she said in her inauguration address. “We now have a new challenge in front of us. We must expand that magic and create an Atlanta magic in every community, school, and workplace across this great city.”
As mayor, Bottoms has pledged to deal with the city’s scarcity of affordable housing (she plans to invest $1 billion in affordable housing across the city, creating 20,000 affordable homes by 2026) and has pushed forward significant criminal justice reforms, including eliminating cash bail bonds for low-level, non-violent offenders and launching a reentry program for inmates at the Atlanta jail. “It’s really not a partisan issue,” she told Georgia Trend. “I think most people agree that mass incarceration is not the way to address the challenges we have as a society.
She’s been an outspoken critic of President Trump’s policies and rhetoric.
In the wake of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, which split up many immigrant families, Bottoms signed an executive order prohibiting the city’s jail from accepting new detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Three months later, she took that a step further and signed an additional executive order, transferring all remaining ICE detainees out of the city jail and declaring that Atlanta will no longer hold anyone for the federal agency.
“Atlanta will no longer be complicit in a policy that intentionally inflicts misery on a vulnerable population without giving any thought to the horrific fallout,” Bottoms said before signing her executive order. “As the birthplace of the civil rights movement, we are called to be better than this.”
In April, during the coronavirus pandemic, Bottoms sought support from her counterparts in major cities, rather than the federal government, according to Politico. “In the absence of leadership, we’ve all had to step up and into spaces that were unexpected for us,” she told Vogue. “We look for federal leadership, but I think it’s shown us all that we have to be prepared for any and everything. Even at the beginning of COVID-19, my lack of confidence in the administration was so strong, I said to my team, ‘God Bless the child who’s got his own.’”
She’s also been equally critical of President’s Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests. “He should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again,” she said during an May 31 appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. “He speaks and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet and I wish that he would just be quiet.”
The Mayor has been married to her husband, Derek W. Bottoms, for more than 25 years.
During her freshman year at Georgia State University, Keisha met fellow law student, Derek Bottoms, who was six years her senior. The day after his 28th birthday, the two went to dinner at St. Charles Deli in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland neighborhood, according to the same Atlanta Magazine article. They stayed together throughout law school, and Derek proposed after Keisha returned from a two-week program at Cambridge University. The pair got married at Atlanta’s Ben Hill United Methodist Church.
Today, Derek is vice president of employment practices and associate relations at Home Depot.
The couple has four children, all of whom were adopted.
In the early ‘90s, after unsuccessful rounds of fertility treatments, Bottoms learned she was unable to conceive. “It sounds really silly, but when you’re dealing with fertility and when you’re a woman of faith, [I worried] does this mean I’m giving up because I’m looking at adoption?” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Even though adoption was something I always wanted to do, I thought it would be in addition to biological children.”
In 1992, the couple adopted a six-month-old baby named Lance (now 18), followed by Langston (now 12), and twins Lincoln and Lennox (now 9). All of the adoptions were facilitated through Families First, a non-profit that helps youth and families build successful futures through mental health support, adoption services, and more. “It takes patience and knowing that when that match is made, you just know,” she said in the same interview. “With each of my children, I knew in my heart that they were the ones to say yes to.”
In December, Bottoms once again became a dog mom, after the family adopted two puppies—named Ace and Zeus—following the death of their longtime family dog, Logan.
She was at the center of a culinary controversy (yes, really).
In December 2018, Bottoms shared photos of her Christmas dinner spread, which included fried fish, asparagus and curried lentils, curried chicken, jambalaya, a leg of lamb, Brussels sprouts, and an astonishing number of desserts. But there was one dish in particular that got a lot of shade (to say the least): her mac and cheese. The more than 900 comments ranged from helpful (one tweet said, "The cheese sauce is missing. You can't just put shredded cheese on it and think it's mac and cheese.") to hysterical (another tweet: "This picture dried out my contact lens.")
Even Stouffer's joined in, tweeting: "Here for you next time, Keisha," along with a heart emoji. Luckily, the mayor has a good sense of humor. “Let me tell ya’ll something Black America, Black Twitter and Black Instagram,” she said in an interview with Ebony Magazine. “There is nothing that you all can say about my mac and cheese that will be far funnier or worse than my family.”
She is reportedly being vetted as potential running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
In June 2019, Bottoms announced she was endorsing Joe Biden for president in 2020—becoming the first big city mayor to do so. "For me, it was most important that we have a president who doesn't have to walk in the door and figure out where the light switch is, that we have somebody who can lead on Day One," she told the Associated Press.
In the following months, she’s served as a campaign trail surrogate for the former Vice President, appearing at events in places like Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas, and Iowa. But it wasn’t until her widely impassioned, impromptu speech on May 29 that rumors began swirling she was being considered for Biden’s veep spot. While neither Biden nor Bottoms have confirmed whether she is being vetted, Biden praised Bottoms for her response to civil unrest following George Floyd’s killing.
“I’ve watched you like millions and millions of Americans have on television of late,” Biden said during a virtual roundtable with Bottoms and other mayors. “Your passion, your composure, your balance has been really incredible.”
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