And they said Black folks don’t stick together.
A viral video clip of a melee that broke out at a dock in Alabama puts that entire myth to bed. The story begins with a Black man working security—literally just doing his actual job, and ends with several men in handcuffs and a scene that looked like something out of the WWE. Folding chairs were swung. There were several run-ins by folks not involved in the original fight but just had to get themselves a piece.
There was a brother who swam across the river to jump in the fight. The end result was this: Black folk showed that wherever we are, we won’t stand by and watch another one of us get mollywhopped by a crew of drunken white dudes for shits and giggles. Not on the Lordt’s Sunday (technically this happened on Saturday but…). Not in 2023. Not in the name of Malcom, Martin or any Madame C.J. Walker. Just no.
We can’t independently confirm how it all started but the best available reporting from local news sources has it that the unidentified security guard—who is Black—asked a group of white boaters to move a pontoon they’d docked to allow an entire riverboat full of people to have enough room to dock. Instead of doing that, they bucked, apparently not noticing the gathering crowd had a lot more knuck in them, and were sympathetic to the home team. The video explains what happened next:
To be clear, we at The Root do not advocate violence. Solving your differences with fisticuffs is never the answer, unless your name happens to be Bud Crawford, in which case it’s pretty much always the answer. We don’t believe you should dive in a river and swim to a fight that wasn’t originally yours. We don’t think you should go all Bill Goldberd with a steel chair on folks in public.
Source: White Alabama Boaters F Around And Jumped A Black Man; Promptly Found Out
