Montgomery's Viral 'Jerry Springer' Moment
60 years after Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream Speech,’ the brawl on Montgomery's riverfront is not a microcosm of America
Here we are, approaching the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington — and the most talked-about subject in America is The Brawl.
And for good reason. The racially charged incident struck a chord that reaches deep into the reptilian brain, triggering visceral fight-or-flight reactions: in those involved, folks watching from the riverboat, and the distant onlookers of meme culture who couldn’t resist weighing in on social media. From TMZ and Tik-Tok to the Today show and the platform formerly known as Twitter, everybody wants to get in the act.
We all know the facts by now
Several white people in a pontoon boat, which was improperly docked along Montgomery’s Riverfront, refused to move out of the way so the three-decked Harriott II Riverboat could dock.
When the captain used a public-address system asking them to leave, the folks in the pontoon boat gave him the finger. After the riverboat’s co-captain moved the boat himself, one white man lunged forward and punched him in the face. The co-captain was soon surrounded by six of seven other white people who beat him while he was on the ground.
In response, several Black men — some of them crew members from the riverboat — jumped in to help out the co-captain, one of whom swam from the riverboat in order to join the fray. The brief free-for-all was soon stopped by police.
Three of the white men were arrested along with several others, including a Black man who struck a woman and at least one other person with a folding chair. A Black woman, who had just started a new job on the Riverfront that day, was immediately fired for pushing a white woman into the water. One white man who tried to help the attacked co-captain was pushed away by one of his attackers.
Not a hate crime?
Although the battle broke along racial lines, Montgomery police, after conferring with the FBI, decided not to charge the whites who started the brawl with a hate crime. That may change if additional evidence shows that racial slurs were used.
This decision has added additional fuel to a story that keeps on giving, with some online posts tossing in references to Jason Aldeen’s “Try That in a Small Town,” Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign (code for anti-Black as well as anti-LGBTQ). And even Donald Trump, whose campaign stop in Montgomery that day included his usual negative references to Critical Race Theory, Affirmative Action, the Muslim Travel Ban, immigrant border-crossings, and “racist law enforcement.”
A far cry from O. J. Simpson
But unlike reaction to the O. J. Simpson verdict, this story did not break along racial lines. Even though Black people and white people often observe the world through different lenses, some of the funniest takes on the brawl came from white YouTube and Tik Tok users who joked about redneck MFs getting instant karma and a full-on ass-whipping.
When African Americans see a group of white people beating up a Black person, a host of ugly historical images come to mind. Rodney King. George Floyd. Any number of videos depicting white cops detaining motorists for driving-while-Black, killing some of them in the process. The entire history of lynching.
But this brawl took place in Montgomery, bedrock of Civil Rights activism. Home of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white bus passenger. The destination of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, which led to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The brawl took place on the very same Montgomery riverfront where slaveholders once unloaded Black people to be sold into slavery. Enslaved people were removed from steamboats there and taken three blocks along Commerce Street to the slave market at the corner of Dexter Avenue.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery was one of the most important and conspicuous slave-trading centers in the United States. There were three slave depots on Dexter Street, another on Monroe Street, and a slave pen at Dexter and S. Decatur.
Before the Civil War, Montgomery had as many slave markets as it had hotels and banks. With its 164 licensed slave traders, Montgomery’s enslaved population was larger than that of New Orleans, Mobile, Alabama, and Natchez, Mississippi. Between 1833 and the end of the Civil War, the only legal status for a Black person in Alabama was slavery. No free Black people were allowed to live there.
But not today
Today, Montgomery has a Black mayor, Steven Reed, who has a Bachelors degree from Morehouse and an MBA from Vanderbilt. Mayor Reed referred to the brawl as “unfortunate” and promised to get through the incident as a community.
Today, Montgomery has a Black population that stands up for each other. “Y’all help that brother,” shouted passengers from the riverboat. “Get on up there, young buck.” And the rest, as they say, is meme-history.
White privilege & Dr. King’s Dream
There is no question that a sense of white privilege was on display at the Montgomery riverfront during the brawl. To attack a Black riverboat co-captain who was only doing his job shows a patent refusal to accept a Black person as an authority figure.
But the misguided racists who started the fight do not represent a microcosm of American race relations as some have claimed. Although a few in the news media have referred to the riverfront incident as a “massive brawl,” online videos show only about 20–30 people were involved in the melee. It only seems massive because viral video spread the incident around the globe.
That’s not a knife — this is a knife
A few drunken white folks do not a majority make. You want to see a majority, wait till the end of August when photographs and videos of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom begin to reappear everywhere. The National Parks Service estimates that about 250 thousand people showed up at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th sixty years ago this month—190 thousand African Americans and 60 thousand white people.
It was on that day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told the world about his dream that “one day down in Alabama… little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
As Dr. King spoke those words, which have been repeated and studied all over the globe, not a punch was thrown. Not one fist fight or brawl ever took place. Americans of every race and age came together to support a just cause, which led to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act the following year.
In the 60 years since then, we’ve had a Black president, three Black Supreme Court Justices, numerous Black federal judges, mayors, congressmen, millionaires, and television news anchors.
The Montgomery riverfront brawl is not a microcosm of America. Or its race relations. All it shows is that some white folks haven’t gotten the memo yet. Or maybe they’ve been emboldened by the dog-whistles of political candidates who cater to the reptilian brain whenever they gets a chance. But it’s going to take a lot more than a few drunken racists on a pontoon boat to undo all of that good history from the last 60 years.
©2023 Andrew Jazprose Hill | All rights reserved.
Thanks for reading
I thoroughly enjoyed this, Andrew!
Your take on this is (as always) thoughtful, and looks at the big picture through an historical lens. I especially love the last sentence of the essay: It’s going to take a lot more than a few drunken racists on a pontoon boat to undo all of that good history from the last 60 years.