Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says decision not to run for reelection was "made from a position of strength" - CBS News

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced Thursday she won't seek a second term, an election-year surprise that marks a sharp turnabout for the city's second Black mayor who months ago was among those President Biden considered as a possible running mate.

"This has been my highest honor to serve as mayor of this city," she said.

Bottoms said that her decision was not due to family reasons, but in large part because of the upheaval during her term.

She also said that she would try to "leave the city better than I left it," and would work through the end of her term to "continue to do every single thing in our power to make this city safer.".

"It is with deep emotions that I hold my head high and choose not to seek another term as mayor," Bottoms wrote, saying she'd prayed about the decision with her husband, Derek, an executive at the Home Depot Inc.

CBS Atlanta affiliate WGCL-TV spoke with political analyst Rashad Richey, who said crime rates in the city could have led to Bottoms' decision.

Bottoms' tenure has been a mix of rough-and-tumble City Hall politics and an ever-brightening national spotlight for her.

Yet Bottoms met criticism herself just weeks later when an Atlanta police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks.

The Atlanta Civil Service Board on Wednesday reversed the firing, finding that the city didn't follow its own procedures and failed to grant Rolfe due process.

The mayor didn't mention Floyd or Brooks in her announcement letter, focusing instead on having giving the city's police and firefighters raises and alluding to a "social justice movement (that) took over our streets ….and we persisted.".

The "far-reaching and ever-growing" investigation, she said Thursday, "consumed City Hall, often leaving employees paralyzed, and fearful of making the smallest of mistakes, lest they too be investigated, or castrated on the evening news."

Early in her term, Bottoms eliminated cash bail in Atlanta and ended the city jail's relationship with federal immigration enforcement agencies, joining big-city mayors around the country in criticizing then-President Trump's hardline immigration policies

An Atlanta native and graduate of Florida A&M University, a prominent historically Black college, Bottoms is just the second Black woman to lead the city

"My ancestors, direct descendants of the once enslaved, traveled by horse and buggy from the cotton fields of east Georgia in search of a better life for themselves and their children in Atlanta," she wrote