Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was elected to lead the city in 2017, announced Friday, May 7, 2021, that she will not seek a second term.
During a 40-minute news conference, Bottoms said her decision to not run for re-election was a “very difficult one” not made in haste but after “thoughtful prayer and consideration.” In fact, she said, she had been thinking about it for “a very long time.”
“This has been my highest honor to serve as mayor of this city,” said Bottoms, visibly emotional as she detailed her family’s deep roots and nearly-100-year history in Atlanta. “My love of this city was love planted in my heart long before I was planted in my mother’s womb. I wish that I could tell you there was a moment or that there was a thing, but when you have faith and you pray for God’s wisdom and guidance. In the same way that it was very clear to me almost five years ago that I should run for mayor of Atlanta, it is abundantly clear to me today that it is time to pass the baton on to someone else.”
Bottoms has been praised locally and nationally for her strong, principled and compassionate leadership of the city of Atlanta in good times and bad, but she also has faced criticism for not doing more to address surging violent crime across the city and, most recently, her abrupt firing of the police officer who shot and killed Rayshard Brooks.
She pointed to several factors that contributed to her decision to not run for a second term. “Three months into our term, there was the biggest cyber attack in the history of a municipality in America [and] a federal investigation that seemed to suck the air out of City Hall into the previous administration. There was last summer: there was a pandemic, there was a social justice movement, there was a madman in the White House.”
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