When Freaknik started, my brothers were in college. He grew up here and attended Howard University, where, as a college freshman in 1988, he came home to attend Freaknik (though he’d also attended while in high school). They brought their grills, their blankets, and, of course, their coolers.
Nobody was counting heads, but it was a large turnout I’d say a good 5,000. Marcellus Barksdale: They had a big picnic at John White Park on Cascade Road. For several years, the party hopscotched from park to park on the Westside. As talk of Freaknik spread, it drew students from far beyond the AUC-and a fair share of non-students. Over the years, the spelling morphed into Freaknik and the event’s timing shifted from spring break-usually in early March-to the “reading week” period before final exams (generally the third weekend in April). Sharon Toomer: It was a student called Rico Brown who suggested, “Let’s call it Freaknic,” putting together picnic and freak. Marcellus Barksdale: There was that song, “Superfreak.” And was like, “This is where we were going to be able to get freaky.” Rick James and all that just became our theme. It was really around the dance at the time, which was “Le Freak,” the Chic song. That year, we had a theme called “the Freak.” We had the “Freak Dance,” which was close to the holidays. Sharon Toomer now lives in Brooklyn and is the publisher of. The DC Metro Club was made up of students from Spelman and Morehouse who were from Washington, Virginia, and Maryland. At that time, the “state clubs” were real popular. Marcellus Barksdale came to Morehouse as a history professor in 1977 and still teaches history and African American studies. In those days, Piedmont Park was shabby, the picnic area little more than a vacant lot. “A lot of us came by bus no one had cars back then,” she says of the gathering in the field at the corner of 10th Street and Monroe Drive. It was a simple event-sandwiches, coolers, boom boxes, that sort of thing, recalls Sharon Toomer, then a Spelman College freshman and one of the organizers. That spring, members of the DC Metro club threw a picnic in Piedmont Park for students who found themselves stuck on campus over spring break. The clubs held social events during the school year and served as pre-Facebook clearinghouses for shared rides home. As at other historically black colleges and universities, AUC was home to “state clubs” made up of students with common home states. It all started in the spring of 1983 with a picnic organized by students attending the Atlanta University Center.
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