What Happened in Montgomery, Alabama? Inside the Brawl

News of a massive brawl on the docks of Montgomery, Alabama has led many to wonder what exactly happened that led to such a massive fight.

The Gist:

• An altercation began after a riverboat attempted to pull into a dock in Montgomery, only to find that there was a pontoon boat in the way.
• A Black security guard told the white owners of the pontoon to move their boat. They refused and then began attacking the security guard.
• Several other Black people got involved in the fight, including one Black man who jumped into the water to swim toward the fight.
• Eventually, police showed up and arrested multiple people.

A particularly chaotic fight, or really set of fights, was captured on video on Aug. 5, 2023, in Montgomery, Ala. As video of the fight goes viral, many are trying to better understand the circumstances behind the encounter, and why such a massive fight seemed to break out so quickly.

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What's more, the fight broke down pretty cleanly along racial lines, leading to plenty of discussion online about the culture of the deep South, and America more generally.

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What happened in Montgomery, Alabama?

According to multiple eyewitnesses who are corroborated by the available video, the altercation started after a riverboat attempted to pull into a dock in Montgomery, only to find that there was a pontoon boat in the way. The owners of the pontoon boat were on the dock, and so a security guard on duty went over to them to get them to move their boat. The video doesn't make it clear what words were exchanged, but it does make it clear that these pontoon owners got violent quickly.

As the video shows, the white pontoon owners started attacking the Black security guard, and since it was a four-on-one fight, the security guard was quickly overwhelmed. Before long, several other Black people got involved in the fight, either attempting to break things up or just give the security guard a better chance. This included one Black man who jumped into the water to swim toward the fighting.

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While that initial fight broke up pretty quickly, it was far from the end of the altercation. Additional videos show that the Black men tracked down the men who owned the pontoon boat and confronted them again. This time, the white men were clearly outnumbered, and true chaos ensued. People were getting pushed over, punched, and even hit with a plastic folding chair.

Eventually, police showed up and arrested multiple people. As the fight started going viral, Montgomery's mayor Steven Reed, the first Black mayor in the city's history despite its majority Black population, made it clear that it was the White men who were the initial aggressors.

"[T]he Montgomery Police Department acted swiftly to detain several reckless individuals for attacking a man who was doing his job. Warrants are being signed and justice will be served," he said in a statement.

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The riverboat brawl has gone viral online.

As videos from the fight have continued to spread online, many have weighed in on the fight, and specifically on the important role that race played in the violence.

"If you understand the history of Montgomery — one of the most prolific slave-trading cities in the US turned brutally repressive apartheid regime after, and majority Black but JUST got its first Black mayor — it gives so much more perspective to this video. Trust," Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote.

The fight clearly shows that, in spite of what some may want to believe, racism is still alive and well in the deep South and across the country. The violence may have been committed by both parties, but it was the pontoon owners who started things.

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