love and respect. i'm michael render. i'm so proud to be here on atlpba because pbs helped raise me. mr. rogemesersee t shesa hr atic gave e me a window el thth into a wonderful world, featuring people and mentors that help teach me about love and respect. tonight, i'm honored to kick off our first show with the mayor of this great city, keisha lance bottoms. mayor bottoms, tonight on her time in office, her decision not to run for reelection, and her plans for the future. thanks for joining us. atlanta mayor, keisha lance bottoms coming up right now. - love and respect with killer mike is made possible by: cadillac. monster energy. ledger. and by, ressler gertz family foundation. together we are proud to bring more love and respect

into our collective conversation. ♪♪ - welcome to love and respect. the honorable keisha lance bottoms, our current mayor, i think one of our most dynamic mayors. thank you for being the first guest on my show. - thank you for having me as the first guest on your show. this is incredible, i'm so happy for you. - i appreciate you. i want to ask this question quick. 'cause i got to lay out the groundwork for who you are before and beyond mayor, right? so you are our 60th mayor, right? - i am. - [mike] 60th mayor, second female mayor, 70% approval rating, well-funded. why not run again? - you know, i wish i had a single answer for that because it would have been easier for me. and it would be easier to convey the people like you, my, my friends and my family, but it really was not anything.

one single thing, and you know, you are seeing these articles about "the great resignation". so i know like the rest of the universe, we've all been reevaluating over the past almost two years now. and for me it really was very personal in that my dad died suddenly when he was 55. -yh. - so being over 50, you just start doing that soul searching on how you want to spend your days. and if these were my last days on earth, how would i want to spend them? and, and i love my job. it's been my highest honor to be the mayor of atlanta, but there's so much more. - yeah. - and i wanted to take the opportunity to explore more. so voters get to decide every four years. and so do candidates. - i tell you this, what the last 20 months has taught me is my job, i love, right?

i love saving the day. i still get paid a lot of moneyor it, but i have a child that's on dialysis. i have, who we are waiting a kidney transplant, called, pony boy. i have two boys, two girls. and i realize that i had spent most of their life chasing my dream or accomplishing my goal and i was their dad. they weren't secondary, but they definitely, a lot of times, were in league with whatever i was in league with and doing. and this last 20 months allowed me to reset and say, well, i'm only going to do five shows this year. i'm not going to try to do more, now, i'm not going to. so i definitely identify with you on that, and i can, that's probably one of the best answers i've heard of all the speculation that, man, i never realized your dad died so young. and when you do, when you get over 40, i would say, you start thinking about your mortality different. so thank you for it. now i understand. i really get it. and you talk about your children and your husband often, and, you're, besides being a mayor, you're a heck of a mom and a wife it seems. so i would imagine they're happy. they're going to have you a lomore around home.

- well, two of my four kids are happy. i mean, they were split you know, like the electorate, two of the four, two were like, what now? what are you thinking? and the other two just wanted me to be happy, but that kind of aligns with their personalities. - that's kinda like at home too. so we're from a place called, the collier heights. collier heights happens to be a community. it's a, and that's special because in 1948, a grp of black folks decided, you know what? we don't want to argue with you. we don't want to fig for bussing and integration. we want our rights. we want equal rights, it's one of those things, but we're going to carve out a piece of the west atlanta for ourselves. they carved out this beautiful community that had everything from working class family, like your parents and my grandparents, to state representatives, cynthia and billy mckinney, dr. king's parents lived there, herman russell lived there. so it really was a mixed income. our whole totality was black. what was it like growing up a young african-american woman

in that community in that time? and did it do something for your confidence? did it give you something that's helped propel you to who you are and what was that like so people get to know you beyond the mayor. - well, right across the street from me, directly across the street was coach mcafee, who's the coach of the morehouse basketball team. so you're right. there was just this incredible presence around us at all times. and i rememberoing to the grocery store, seeing a white woman in the grocery store and we had just moved from, we had just moved back from england. and i remember asking my dad, how did that white lady get here? cause i thought all white people lived in england. and i thought all black people lived in atlanta. and so i remember that moment of being aware that we weren't just an all african-american community, but the beauty of it was we believed we could do anything. - yeah. - because there were people around us doing everythi.

and it has everything to do with who i am today. i mean, when you instill that type of confidence in children and you're offering children the best education, not the best education for black kids, but the absolute best education. i remember when douglas high school was awarded the tional school of excellence, you would have thought we had won the world series. i mean, it was such a big deal, but you know, that confidence and that love, and just that inspiration just to have this community of people cheering you on and slapping you on the hand or with mr. hill's case, our assistant principal, throwing some keys this big at you of when you did wrong. i think it it's the reason you are who you are and it's the reason i got to be the mayor. i believed i could be the mayor. - you're not honoring the legacy of martin luther king jr.

and the civil rights movement. you're not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands, breakg windows in this city. - atlanta is a place where we can set an example of prosperity. and we've done that for generations. people like dr. king, maynard jackson, ambassador young, have paved the way for us. - it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize. - i think what we showed in that moment was that atlantans, black and white and otherwise, can come together and do what's right for the small town growing into a big city. - i had to chuckle because i remember talking to my team, saying, we gotta get some people down here because we were seeing something we had never seen before in the city. and i was thinking about my 19 year old, who was then 18.

and i knew he, he wasn't gonna, he doesn't listen to me on a good day. so i thought, well, who will our kids listen to? and they said, well, talk to ti, but killer mike said he ain't coming. (laughs) - so i was like, what now? and of course you came. - yeah. - and you know, in, in that moment i probably learned more about leadership in that hour, than i learned my entire life. - the cops were ready to go in earlier and i knew it was real. and i knew i was looking at keisha lance, not just the honorable mayor, keisha lance bottoms. when i saw you turn and tell the cops, stop... wait. and you weren't, you were yelling and not yelling at them, but you were yelling that i'm the authority in this room. we will not blindly send them into there until these people

have had a chae to speak. and i've always wanted to congratulate you and, and let the public know that because often times it feels as though the political class and the cop class is in collusion against the, the constituents in the proletariat. and i saw you in that moment, stave off the police to say, hold on, we're going to let logic have an opportunity to prevail. so i just got to say, thank you for that. and this is a son of a police officer, cousins of police officers. so i know cops a lot of times they ain't, they want to go ahead and get it done. - after i spoke, and i looked at you and ti, and i said, i don't know, like, y'all got something to say if you both stop, you were like, and then you came up and gave probably one of the most impactful speeches of the last 50 years in that moment. and it was so heartfelt, and when i asked for, for us to go before the cameras,

i thought kids may not listen. but if their parents are listening, they'll call and say, where are you? - yeah. - come home. stop. because we knew, and you know this because you were a mentee of reverend orange, it's about planning. and it's, you know, you look at the civil rights movement, they will plan to go, and then they would say, not today, today is not e day. and that day in our city was not the day. so i thank you for coming. - absolutely. - and i gotta thank tip for nudging you to come. - yeah, you did something very brave in a moratorium on building. you realized that right on the west side of atlanta, that much like another cities, if you look at what happened in san francisco and poor people being pushed out, if you look like even places that are progressive, like austin is, richer people are able to move in. it's pushing working-class people out. you said that the legacy residents that are in places like center hill, grove park, adamsville, carter heights, they need an opportunity to, to catch up,

to pay their taxes, their children, their granhildren, need an opportunity to keep their properties. you said, very bravely, don't sell your parents' house. you said that as a mayor. - that's home for me. so i, i can't tell you how many saturdays i spent standing in line at bankhead seafood with the orders from the hair salon, because they were only open thursday, friday, and saturday. and for the first time, i cried during a check presentation, we were at carter g. woodson elementary school, or what used to be the elementary school, just a couple of weeks ago. and a grant was given to the grove park community. and, you know, again, i'm not making these decisions from afar. this is not my team telling me about it. i know these places and i'm sorry, i've cost you and tip, it sounds like a few million dollars, (laughing) but, and again, i appreciate everything that you all are doing for the west side,

because the other side of that, you're opening up, reopening this business, tip's, doing affordable housing on the west side. and, and you talk about how you show up every day. well my grandmother used to ride the bus every day to lenox mall from her home on, lenox square mall, her home off of ml king. and we'd get that 20% discount at davidson's, and then macy's. and my dad used to always say, no matter how bad your day is, you better always show up looking like everything is okay. so i think that that's what you get from us when we show up in our communities. but again, the redevelopment of atlanta in and of itself is not a bad thing. the bad thing is when our communities get left behind. - you also brought $42 million to combat homelessness. and homelessness is exploding across the country, not just in atlanta. where do we find 42 million?

what happens with that 42 million? and what made you say, let me try to get ahead of this, because i see this happening now, and i don't want to wait and become another city where you just have people literally lying on the streets. - well, it's what ambassador young describes as the atlanta way, where you have this coming together, of government, the philanthropic community, the corporate community, and we solve issues, so it's not just me alone. there's a whole group of people working on, making sure that people need to have the resources to address their needs and the irony of it. we've made tremendous progre in terms of our homeless population. you think about that old model of keeping people in sometimes like a warehouse-type situation. that's a very antiquated model because what you want to do is make sure that when you get that touch point with people that you have something to offer them to address those systemic issues that are leading them to be homeless.

are you a veteran suffering with pt or your lgbtq youth who's been put out of the house and needs some support? are you a working mother who doesn't have childcare? and so it's a much more thoughtful approach, but what's happened over the past year and a half plus, we had a lot of providers who stopped accepting people. and a lot of people did not want to go into congregate living settings because of where we were of a covid. we did open up a hotel at one point, which was a great success, but unfortunately that hotel has now been sold. so we're continuing to try and make sure that we can provide the services that we're not just going to accept that it's okay for people to have to live on our streets. - i think that there's a humanity that no matter what people think of you as mayor, there's a humanity you brought to that office that

i probably hadn't seen since andy, you know, andy wasn't in atlanta nate, but he knows perry homes, won him that one of his first elections car. so he understood that taking care of northwest atlanta, the bottom of northwest atlanta, taking care of those people, which was what's the environment that grew strong children and that grew people who are on city council now, people who get elected to mayor and i see that, i see that in you. there's something that i thought very quickly, oh, this doesn't have to be fast, but the all star game we lost the all star game. i felt like that was one of those times where we let national politics decide what we did locally. and i thought that was a big mistake. we probably lost about $40 million in terms of losing the alstar game. it didn't feel very good to me. and i felt like, you know, some people didn't say, man. we should've thought about that a lile longer before we called for boycotts in atlanta and georgia, because in losing the all-star game, i felt snubbed by the mlb because they took it not to st. louis, not to where the negro league hall of fame is

or any place like that. they took it to colorado. how important is it that the mayor of atlanta understand the balance of wanting civil rights, wanting equity, and good business? - my good friend, michael hancock is actually mayor of denver. so i was, i was happy that if it were going somewhere that michael... - i was not , i was not happy for michael at all... - michael got a chance to own it, but i ironically, i just had a conversation last week at the braves game with the mlb commissioner. and what i shared with him is that i appreciated the, the thought behind supporting our state. but i personally did not like the boycott of our state. a couple of reasons my husband works for a corporation and there are many people whose families are fed. whether it be because your husband or your wife is an executive, or if there's somebody who's coming in cleaning up at night. so we have roughly,

i think we're number 3 in terms of fortune 500 companies headquartered in atlanta, metro atlanta. so this was going to be a tough hit for not just these companies but for our families as well. that being said, i think the, the, the messaging was clear. then when you make decisions, there are consequences. i don't want a boycott of our city. i don't want a boycott of our state, but i think leaders across the state have to understand you don't make decisions in a vacuum. and that when you make these decisions in the same way that north carolina was boycotted and many other places have been boycotted when they had made bad policy decisions that could and did happen to us here. so we need to think very carefully about how we are making decisions for the people of this state. - yeah, it feels good to, to snub a corporation when you've been wronged, it feels very bad to see what mother's sleeping in cars.

and there is definitely a tie between being able to bring commerce to a state and people getting jobs. so thank you for helping us understand that better because i like baseball, but i like jobs. i like people being able to support themselves. so i appreciated that your mother and father are someone i want to talk about, because again, a lot of time, the assumption is when you see articulate, smart, brilliant, competent, confident, black children, you assume they've had it easy. you think sometimes they form a free family up north or, or they had the easy way. you didn't, your mom's a hair stylist, a cosmetologist, and she fly to this day. she just got out the hospital. she just got out of emory. so welcome back, mama. yo mama fly, every time i see her that gray hair, she swag it,o i know she was your momma. woo. i know she was super fly. your daddy was so clean, man. you could eat off the floor he stood on, he was clean, man. he, he was a musician, much like myself. - my, um, you know, i had the best family ever.

and i'm just an exciting family, as i would imagine, your kids have experienced. and my mother was very free in that you would come home and your bags will be at the front door and you're like, oh, where are we going? oh, we're going to england. or, you know, she, because someone, a teacher at kaia heights, one of either my sister or brother's teacher had told her our better education was to travel than to sit in a classroom. so it was extraordinary. and my dad, i remember the end of the second gre, kaia heights. used to have what they call sock hops. and my mother asked my sister to take me up to the sock hop. the movers were coming and we were moving. so back then, you didn't really tell the kids.dn diand 'twe r leaefllt y myha dae and moved all our stuff

into an apartment. the house was about to go ainto foreclosure.d we were, and so my parents separated. they eventually it's, my, my dad had a silver tongue. he sent us to chicago and i came back and my parents were living together again. so something happened while we were away, (laughing) but because my dad was an entertainer and when i would come home from school every day, he was home because he worked that night and i came home one day in third grade and he was in handcuffs and they were taking him out and he said, babies, it's going to be okay, i'll be back. and i remember thewas officers all over the house. and we had a bunch of boxes because we were packing up to move again. we were moving into another house and they had torn up all of the boxes, including the box that my toys were in. cause they were looking for drugs and they told me

and my brother and sister, we had to stay on the sofa. we couldn't call anybody, couldn't do, couldn't move. and i remember at some point my sister and brother goup and i stayed there for hours because i thought they would know. and that essentially was the death of our family. so this very privileged life of ballet and traveling and doing all these extraordinary things then became every saturday and sunday, i would go to a different prison to visit my dad. and it was nothing but other black men and other black kids around their dad in these prisons and i think in, in a way it did propel me in that i never wanted that to be my life. i never wanted to have to struggle. like i saw my mother struggle. i didn't want to run out of gas. i didn't want my water to be turned off. i didn't want to have to make a decision to do something

like sell drugs, cause i couldn't eat that day. so in a lot of ways, it, you know, probably was the worst thing that ever happened aside from losing a loved one. but also that thing that has always driven me. - yeah. - and then just what, i mean, my mother just was a really hard working woman. my grandparents were hard working. like being lazy and, and not doing your best, what, was never an option. - you can see your mother's pride in y. and you know, i don't know. we believes in ancestors and you know, good energy of spirits following you. but i know your father's somewhere. - oh my gosh, we, we talk about that all the time - i know that man got heaven lit with that's my girl. - i mean he, he was, if i walked in the room, he was proud cause walked in, did you see my baby? and then he, he gave me that, you asked about my courage.

it was, you know, i'd say something happened. and he said, well, baby, did you ask, did you try? did you use my name baby? did you use my name? he said, always use my name and all they can do is tell you no, and that i keep that in my heart . - well, i appreciate them both for making love and making you, - thank you - they, they did an amazing job. what's next for keisha lance. what's next for keisha lance bottoms. what's next for my former mayor. what's next for my forever leader from the west side. what's next for you, and what will you miss about office? - oh, i have a lot of options and i'm grateful for that. - so you going to get the bag? - huh. - you goin' to get the bag? - i honestly don't know. i don't know. and that's scary a bit, but i trust god and i trust in the same way he ordered my steps to be mayor that it's gonna all

work for my good, so, but it is frightening because i've had two jobs since i was 15. - yeah. - being married. it's actually first time i've ever had a single job in my life, always had multiple jobs. so that's a bit frightening, but i, i am going to miss that i get to make a difference in the lives of people in atlanta. and this term was not as i would have scripted it. i, would've never asked for all the things that we faced as a country over the past few years. but i do know i was built for it, and i'm, i'm thankful that i got to lead our city during this time. - i don't even have to ask. what would advice would you give a young woman or young man seeking office on what to do next. if they simply follow your inner views and understand your story. so i want to thank you duly for being on love and respect. i want to thank you for handling me lovingly and respectfully.

and i will always do the same with you and i'll be a supporter of yours always. - and i love you. - i love you. thank so much. - love and respect with killer mike is made possible by: cadillac. monster energy. ledger. and by, the ressler gertz family foundation. together we are proud to bring more love and respect into our collective conversation. ♪♪ ♪♪

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♪ >> good evening. on "the newshour" tonight, a federal judge limits the biden administration's contact with social media companies over concerns about censorship and free speech. americans contend with the aftermath of fatal shooting's at july 4 celebrations across the u.s. as the 2024 presidential race heats up, a group of ohio voters works to bridge the widening partisan divide. >> we need to start to bridge personal bridges with each other by listening better, being more curious about what the stories are behind our positions.