Montgomery Dock “Brawl” Was an Incident 400 Years in the Making

It was a day 400 years within the making.

On August 5, 2023, a troop of Black bystanders walked, ran and swam to the protection of an African American riverboat co-captain. Known as a “brawl” in each mainstream press and on social media platforms, the occasion was way more than a struggle, greater than a spectacle, and undoubtedly not a free-for-all. The occasion that occurred on a Montgomery dock of the Alabama River was a sort of reckoning. The protection of 1 Black man merely doing his job occurred on probably the most notorious websites of human trafficking, youngster separation and torture, the historic portal to a sort of hell, the place a whole bunch of 1000’s of enslaved African People landed after they had been actually “bought down the river.”

As varied media shops have reported, Captain Damien Pickett was attacked by a bunch of white boaters who refused to maneuver their pontoon so a city-owned riverboat, the Harriott II, might dock. As of press time, 4 of the white attackers have been charged by the Montgomery police for assaulting each Captain Pickett and the 16-year-old white deckhand who transported him. In response to a report filed by his mom, the deckhand heard the attackers use the N-word as they beat Pickett.

The confrontation started when the white boaters refused to maneuver their illegally docked pontoon, stranding the 227 passengers on the Harriott II for about 45 minutes. In response to Shelly Eversley, interim chair of the Black and Latino Research Division at Baruch School, their refusal to maneuver framed her preliminary response to the occasion, as now-viral movies first started to populate her feed. Like many African People, Eversley says she “was struck by the impunity the white attackers appeared to own as they (1) parked their boat in an unauthorized place, and (2) assaulted a Black man. Each are unbelievable indications of how white privilege features.”

Eversley posits that the battle appears to be about rights. “The white attackers appeared to consider they may dock their boat (break the legislation) and assault a person (break the legislation) with out consequence. This sense of impunity, of freedom from punishment for breaking the foundations helps inform how they perceive the privileges related to being white,” Eversley mentioned. “What these white people didn’t anticipate was that, on this up to date second, Black individuals are empowered to actually struggle again. The viral second is a second of Black resistance.”

This “Black resistance” surfaced in a properly of ancestral reminiscence. The primary moments of the video captured scenes not in contrast to the numerous mob assaults, public lynchings and on a regular basis assaults of Black our bodies that invested the Montgomery attackers with white privilege within the first place. Their lawlessness and abandon are emblematic of the white supremacy that engenders white privilege. Their insistence that they actually take area that belongs to others evokes the theft of Indigenous land, and their violent bodily assault of Captain Pickett evokes the brutalization of Black our bodies by means of the up to date Black Lives Matter period, the assaults on Black our bodies by means of segregation and the failure of Reconstruction — all of which stem from the policing of Black our bodies in the course of the period of enslavement. Due to its location in Montgomery, Alabama, which was one of many largest inner slave ports within the U.S., it’s inconceivable to view the so-called brawl as nothing in need of an act of resistance meant to defy this centuries-long dedication to white brutality.

The phrase “they bought him down the river” is broadly used to establish the sufferer of another person’s wrongdoing, however the phrase originates within the home slave commerce. For enslaved Black individuals, being “bought down the river” was a death sentence that is still so highly effective in Black individuals’s ancestral reminiscence, that the idiom was usually expressed with nice solemnity even when used as a flip of phrase as lately because the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Fueled by the demand for extra enslaved Black individuals after america banned the importation of Africans in 1808, the home slave commerce relied on the pressured copy of Black our bodies by means of rape and the sale of Black individuals at public sale blocks situated in the course of the nation, alongside the water programs of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and their tributaries.

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a Montgomery-based group dedicated to racial justice, prison authorized system reform, anti-poverty and public schooling by means of The Legacy Museum and The Nationwide Memorial for Peace and Justice. In response to the EJI’s 2018 report titled, “Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade”:

Over the last twenty years of American slavery, no slave market was extra central or conspicuous than the one in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery’s proximity to the fertile Black Belt area, the place slave house owners amassed giant slave populations to work the fertile, wealthy soil, elevated Montgomery’s prominence within the slave commerce. By 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the Home Slave Commerce in Alabama, one of many two largest slave-owning states in America.

The report additionally paperwork the overwhelming significance of the Montgomery dock:

In 1820, 41,879 enslaved Black individuals lived in Alabama; by 1860, this quantity had elevated tenfold to 435,080. Historians estimate that 70 % of the brand new arrivals resulted from slave buying and selling and 30 % resulted from the relocation of white slaveholding households. In different phrases, not less than 300,000 of the 435,080 enslaved individuals residing in Alabama in 1860 had been within the state because of the Home Slave Commerce.

The EJI report paperwork the parade of enslaved Black individuals to containment services in Montgomery, the haunting wails of individuals whose kids and different family members had been bought away from them, the sexual exploitation of these captured, the torturous march to public sale blocks miles away from the river, even the kidnapping of free Black individuals within the North who had been “bought down the river” to public sale blocks just like the one in Montgomery. In response to Anthony Browne, the previous chair and an affiliate professor of the Division of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Research at Hunter School, “Throughout enslavement, docks on Montgomery’s riverfront had been websites of unimaginable Black struggling and humiliation.”

This violent historical past, which enriched Montgomery’s elite, knowledgeable the rebellion towards white brutality on August 5. “This space of Montgomery was an entry level for the interior slave commerce and as many as 400,000 African descendent/Black individuals disembarked there as part of the chattel slavery system that drove the financial system of the nation, this area, and created the spine of America’s wealth,” says Merle McGee, a nonprofit chief with greater than 25 years of expertise doing racial justice, fairness and gender justice work. “From this dock location, enslaved individuals had been marched alongside and positioned in slave depots that line Commerce Avenue, the place they waited to be bought at what’s now a fountain,” she provides. This aptly named avenue slaps the face of each Black particular person dispossessed of their very own wealth-building potential as a consequence of theft sanctioned by legislation and normalized by customized. Certainly, the ornate ironwork and exquisite structure of Montgomery are sturdy testimonies to the resilience of Black individuals who actually constructed this nation’s wealth.

A co-founder of The BIPOC Project, a company that gives sources and gatherings to assist undo Native invisibility, anti-Blackness and white supremacy, McGee had lately traveled to Montgomery earlier than the August 5 rebellion to be taught extra concerning the reproductive violence perpetrated towards enslaved ladies. “Montgomery is the place slaveholder J. Marion Sims operated a hospital within the metropolis the place he carried out experimental surgical procedures with out anesthesia on enslaved ladies (Betsey, Anarcha and Lucy) and developed gynecological devices nonetheless in use right now,” McGee factors out. The Moms of Gynecology monument paperwork the experiences of simply three enslaved Black ladies whose our bodies had been tortured — and whose torturer continues to be revered. Sims is taken into account the daddy of recent gynecology, however he was really a slave proprietor, invested within the trafficking of human flesh, which he sliced and experimented on to realize not solely monetary wealth, however social foreign money so wealthy that there nonetheless are statues in his honor in locations like Columbia, South Carolina, and, till it was moved to New York City’s Green-Wood Cemetery in response to public protests led by Black women, New York Metropolis’s Central Park.

Actually, not one of the Black individuals who rose up in protection of Captain Pickett on August 5 had been consciously considering of Sims, inner slave-trading routes, or the exploitation of Black individuals to create white wealth, however these realities assist form the ancestral reminiscence of African People. “Black ancestral reminiscence and the persevering with linked fates of Black individuals compelled those that witnessed the assault on the co-captain to honor the sacrifices of their ancestors by collectively combating again and reaffirming their dedication to stay in dignity,” Browne says.

A member of the Affiliation of Black Sociologists, Browne provides, “On condition that the victimization of so many Black individuals has been captured on heartrending movies as they suffered alone, usually with deadly penalties, the battle in Alabama represented a gratifying change as Black individuals collectively fought again towards the forces of white supremacy. The Alabama incident additionally occurred towards the backdrop of a Trump rally that occurred within the metropolis the day earlier than, in addition to main Black losses together with rollbacks of civil rights laws by the Supreme Courtroom and the banning of African American Research in various states. As such, for a lot of Black people across the nation, the Alabama battle offered an exhilarating expertise of Black individuals combating again and successful towards the forces of anti-Blackness.”

Eversley notes how the violences of slavery and state-sanctioned white supremacy manifest in our up to date tradition. “As an example, the scene of a mob of white individuals attacking a single Black man is as iconic to the historical past of america as it’s to our up to date tradition. For some, the repetition of this violent anti-Black imagery empowers logics of white supremacy. For others, the repetition is the reminder that the sins of the previous nonetheless require decision and restore.”

Montgomery has an extended historical past of resistance, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott as maybe essentially the most iconic instance. But, as a result of there was no restore within the type of reparations, a lot much less a whole disinvestment from white supremacy, Alabama stays a state emblematic of hate. Witnessed in abysmal state statistics are the centuries-old penalties of perpetual marginalization of Black individuals, in varied iterations and thru time, from enslavement to segregation to mass incarceration. Alabama is among the poorest states within the U.S. Its literacy charges are among the many lowest within the nation. It has a few of the strictest legal guidelines limiting reproductive rights, and it has one of many highest incarceration charges on the earth. As Eversley factors out, “All of this stuff level to a state that doesn’t worth equality, alternative or human rights.”

Browne provides, “Anti-Blackness stays pervasive within the U.S., and Alabama is a microcosm of the bigger society the place Black individuals are topic to ongoing disregard for his or her civil and human rights.”

The location of the rebellion of help for one Black man in Montgomery has every little thing to do with the 400-year undertaking to dehumanize Black individuals in essentially the most heinous acts of self-aggrandizement and parasitic exploitation. Even the identify of the riverboat traces a line straight again to the enslavement of Black individuals. The Harriott II is known as after the unique Harriott, which, in 1821, turned the first riverboat to go from Mobile, Alabama, to Montgomery to pick up a shipment of cotton.

“Historical past and place matter. Each form our understanding of who we have now been, who we’re and the way the previous and its unresolved ghosts sign how we deal with each other within the current,” McGee says. “That is particularly the case as individuals witness this incident and grapple with why the household who wrongfully docked within the location felt compelled to dispute their potential to be there and bodily assault a person, a Black man holding them accountable.”