A look back at 2025 with UATL’s Ernie Suggs
As the year winds down it’s time to rejoice, recap and reflect.
UATL’s staff members are looking back at Black culture and remembering what mattered in 2025. In this story, senior reporter Ernie Suggs shares memories of the year that was.
What was one of the biggest moments in Black culture in Atlanta in 2025?
The 2025 Super Bowl halftime show. (Gun to my head, I don’t even remember who won the game.) But the halftime show — headlined by the great Kendrick Lamar and featuring SZA, Serena Williams and Uncle Samuel L. Jackson — was unforgettable.
Built on stark, cinematic imagery, military-style formations, symbolic staging and deliberate pacing, it explored themes of surveillance, power, resistance and Black self-definition, firmly placing hip-hop at the center of America’s biggest stage.
K. Dot used the Super Bowl platform — once commanded by Beyoncé, Prince and Michael Jackson — to remind millions that Black music still has the power to challenge, unsettle and redefine the center of gravity in American life.
And he reminded us all, including Drake, of a simple truth in A-minor: “They not like us.”
Name someone who mattered in Black culture.
Dre. Not that one, but Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.
What stands out about Dickens is that he is always smiling — but never casual. Always serious. Always focused.
In 2025, he stood at the crossroads of Atlanta’s defining tensions: growth and gentrification, policing and public safety, and the weight of the city’s Black political legacy. He cruised into a second term carrying both momentum and expectation. Dickens won reelection with more than 80% of the vote and raised more than $4 million, a clear measure of his political strength, even after a turbulent 2024.
What comes next is the real test. With the 2026 World Cup headed to Atlanta and billions of dollars reshaping downtown, the stakes for his leadership are enormous. Still, if history is any guide, Dickens is ready — steady, smiling and locked in — to meet the moment head-on.
What was one of your favorite albums released in 2025?
“Cabin in the Sky” — De La Soul.
Who else opens an album with a conversation featuring Giancarlo Esposito, calmly unpacking “perceptions of life and the hereafter”?
At the end, Esposito performs a roll call, calling out every featured artist. Posdnuos answers. DJ Maseo answers. Both are marked present. Then he calls for Dave — Trugoy the Dove, also known as Plug Two — and he lingers.
The pause is quiet but devastating, a subtle reminder that the legendary third member of De La Soul died in 2023 while this album was still being made.
I’ve been a De La Soul head since they dropped the masterpiece, “3 Feet High and Rising,” while I was in college in 1989, followed two years later by the equally brilliant “De La Soul Is Dead.”
“Cabin in the Sky” is not their greatest work, but it took me back to a time when hip-hop — in my opinion — felt pure.
In its tribute to Dave, it echoes the spirit of A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 farewell to Phife Dawg, “We Got It from Here … Thank You 4 Your Service.”
“Cabin in the Sky,” which borrows its name from the all-Black 1943 musical that explores the afterlife, feels like a proper hip-hop repast: reflective, generous and full of grace.
Just like Trugoy the Dove.
Tell us which movie you loved most this year.
It would be easy to point to “Sinners” or to salute the return of my guys Spike and Denzel with “Highest 2 Lowest.”
But I’m going back to the 2025 special IMAX release of Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times.” I remember seeing it in 1987, and somewhere I still own a bootleg DVD. But watching what is essentially a cult classic — and the best of Prince’s three films — on a massive screen, with premium sound and pristine visuals, brought me to tears.
You have to understand: As great as Prince always was, 1987 captured him at his artistic apex. “Sign o’ the Times” is his best album, and the accompanying film stands as the most complete, single expression of his genius.
The concert film, featuring an expanded band with horns, the incomparable Sheila E. on drums and Cat Glover dancing, showcases that creative peak through iconic performances of “Housequake,” “The Cross,” “Forever in My Life,” “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” and the breathtaking “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.”
The night took me back to everything we once knew and loved about Prince. It was beautiful.
What do you think changed in Black culture for the better in 2025?
Nothing really changed. Black people been dope forever. We just continue to evolve.
What is something you hope to leave in 2025 and not revisit in 2026?
Reality shows. If for nothing else, so I can stop watching that mess. (And I think Porsha Williams has me in her grip).
What was something that people should have paid more attention in 2025, in your opinion?
Kamala Harris. Raphael Warnock. Barack Obama.
In 1936, Allen Foster, a 19-year-old in North Carolina, became the first person in the state to die in the gas chamber. As legend has it, when the potassium cyanide pellets dropped into the vat of hydrochloric acid beneath his chair, he cried out, “Save me, Joe Louis!”
The moment captured Louis’ near-messianic status as a Black hero and symbol of protection against racial injustice and despair. Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. later wrote about the episode in his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” using it to illustrate the depth of hope Black people invested in figures they believed could shield them from the worst abuses of power.
Nearly 100 years later and after the 2024 election, Black Americans lost control of their historical narrative. They watched the continued rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across government, higher education and corporate America. Jobs disappeared. Programs were renamed, hollowed out, or quietly dismantled. Economic footing slipped and with it, patience wore thin.
And like Allen Foster in 1936, many were left calling out for familiar protectors. Not because they were naive, but because history has taught Black people that when institutions fail, hope is often placed in the few figures believed strong enough to stand between them and the machinery of injustice.
What do you expect Atlanta to be like during the World Cup?
It should be fun. Atlanta is already ready — and the AJC will cover it like the dew.
About the Author
Ernie Suggs is an enterprise reporter covering race and culture for the AJC since 1997. A 1990 graduate of N.C. Central University and a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow, he is also the former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. His obsession with Prince, Spike Lee movies, Hamilton and the New York Yankees is odd.
