Georgia’s next governor was 8 when police took her father, a soul star, from their home

Keisha Lance Bottoms was 8 years old when police raided her family’s home in Atlanta and arrested her father. He was Major Lance, a soul singer whose “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um” topped the R&B chart in 1964. Now she is Georgia’s governor-elect, and the story of that day is back in circulation as she prepares to take office.

Lance was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to 10 years. He served four, in several Georgia prisons. Her parents divorced while he was locked up, and he died of heart failure in 1994, at 55, after his release. Bottoms has said that watching it happen shaped her commitment to criminal justice reform.

The singer’s career is not a footnote. Lance recorded his first single in 1959, then signed with Okeh Records and worked with Curtis Mayfield. “The Monkey Time” reached the US top 10 in 1963, and the 1964 follow-up reached the top five. His 1970 single “Must Be Love Coming Down” was his last top 40 R&B hit. He later became a favorite of Northern Soul crowds in Britain, and his live album recorded at the Torch club is still counted among that scene’s best.

Black families know the arc: a name that fills rooms, then a raid, a sentence and a household that has to keep going. Bottoms did not treat it as a private shame for long. In a 2019 interview she said she had kept it quiet at first, then found that telling it connected her with people living something similar. “It wasn’t just my story,” she said. She added that “a lot of times, especially when we’re elected officials, we feel the need to dial back who we really are.”

As Atlanta’s mayor she made criminal justice reform a central part of her work. She has described the raid as police tearing through the house, her toys included, while she and her siblings were told to sit still on the couch.

A Georgia governor appoints the people who run the state’s prisons and its pardons board. What Bottoms does with those powers will show whether a childhood in that living room becomes policy or stays a good story told on the way to the Capitol.

Her term begins in January.