Brawlin' On the River Why So Many Black Folks Are Reacting To the Alabama Riverboat Brawl

After a massive riverfront brawl in Montgomery, Ala., put his city in the spotlight, the city’s mayor stepped into the fray. “Justice will be served,” said Montgomery Mayor Steven L. Reed in a statement last Sunday.

So exactly what does justice look like in the context of a racially-motivated brawl in a deep southern city in 2023?

For a lot of Black folks, justice took place right there on the dock when scores of Black folks came to the aid of an unarmed worker who was being beat down by a gang of Whites.

If you missed the video a group of White boaters attacked a Black riverboat worker who told them to move so another boat – the riverboat Harriott - could dock. That’s when he was attacked for doing his job.

Then a group of Black people came to the rescue, including a 16-year-old who jumped in the water and swam to the worker’s aid. He’s being hailed as a hero.

The video went viral. It’s still a hot topic of conversation.

-Tweets & Texts-

The Griot, in commenting on the incident, quoted Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prizewinning writer and author of 1619 and MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

“If you understand the history of Montgomery — one of the most prolific slave-trading cities in the US turned brutally repressed apartheid regime after … it gives so much more perspective to this video,” tweeted Hannah-Jones.

Reid, in a text to the Griot, said that there was “Something deeply satisfy about that (event) for a lot of people.”

She wrote: “The video is getting the visceral reaction it’s getting from Black folks because we know our history. White men (and women) for centuries had the unchecked power to brutalize any Black person they wanted to for any reason or none at all — for looking them in the eye, for not calling them ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’, for trying to register to vote. You name it. There were no consequences for them and deadly ones for us if we tried to fight back."

It was also a myth dispelling moment and a Black history lesson.

The 16-year-old swimmer, Aaren, who in the face of adversity, jumped in the water swam like an Olympian to join in the rescue, dispelled the myth that we’re supposedly unable to swim. He’s being celebrated and said what he did was only “what I was taught to do.”

We also learned that the folding chair which was used in the fray – wielded by a Black man in the fight, was invented by a Black man named Nathaniel Alexander.

-A New Day-

In Montgomery, Alabama, nearly 60 years after a White supremacist bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little Black girls, nearly 68 years after Rosa Parks and others led the Montgomery bus boycott to challenge segregation in the South, and 73 years after the last documented lynching in Montgomery, White Alabamians thought they could sail into a Black city and assault a Black city worker with impunity.

Concluded Joy Reed in her statement: “Well that era is done and it ain’t coming back, no matter how many sundown-town fantasy songs their country singers make. Seeing Black folk come as a community to that security guard’s rescue, one guy even swimming over like Aquaman to help him, was a ‘Wakanda Assemble’ moment, in which a group of old school southern bullies effed around and found out.”