Shocked by the Montgomery brawl video? Perhaps you’re lucky

As someone descended from slaves in Alabama, videos like this inevitably bring up memories

When I first saw the fight in Montgomery on social media, I laughed along with the memes and jokes. But, as someone descended from slaves in Alabama, a feeling of dread soon crept in. Had the crowd not intervened, the video may not have shown a fight - but a lynching.

Now an infamous brawl, the incident started when a group of white people began beating a Black male security guard who told them to move their illegally-parked boat. After Black people from the riverfront and other areas nearby noticed, they sprang into action, some even swimming to join the fight and defend the guard. Multiple social media videos show that the white assailants were quickly outnumbered, one even being hit by a folding chair repeatedly and others thrown into the water. So far, the only arrests have been of the white assailants.

As Black people, our ability to turn our trauma into something humorous is unmatched. Within 24 hours, memes of folding chairs took over the internet, and we all breathed a sigh of collective relief that we could joke about something that could have easily turned into yet another moment of mourning, or perhaps even more devastatingly, a name that few would remember, a death that the news would not cover, an injustice that the world wouldn’t burn for. As Dr Stacey Patton pointed out on Twitter, the hate crime against the security guard occurred right after a Trump rally, events which have documented consequences of violence. How many stories have gone untold just from these rallies?

And the significance of the hate crime and resulting outburst of rage and resistance occurring at a former slave port - where steamboats transported the enslaved from Mobile and New Orleans up the Alabama River to Montgomery - made this moment all the more enraging, all the more cathartic.

If it sounds dramatic to hear someone describing a brawl as something almost holy, then perhaps you are lucky. You likely have never had to live in a country where evidence of the past and ongoing genocide against your people is everywhere, even celebrated by some. You likely have not lived with the fear that you or someone you love could be lynched by a police officer or a subway passenger. You likely haven’t had to contend with the unsettled spirits of those who had their lives taken.

As someone whose maternal family is from Alabama, this ancestral trauma lives inside of me, and videos like this bring up inevitable memories. I grew up with my grandmother telling me that people on both sides of my maternal family — the Guytons and the Thompsons — had been lynched. But I was raised in the North, and although I believed her, this felt somewhat unimaginable to me. But seeing the evidence was different. In 2019, I went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, to see the memorial for victims of lynching. Walking among the jars of dirt, all various shades of red, brown, and black, collected from sites where Black people were lynched along with their names and date of birth and death. Suddenly, I saw the name of one of my ancestors — which felt like a strong word since he was born only slightly before my own grandmother – on a jar of red dirt.

I remember collapsing and heaving and sobbing, a heaviness I didn’t even know I was carrying, somehow releasing uncontrollably. My body didn’t feel like mine anymore, it had been completely invaded by this ancestor, by this trauma, by my sadness and rage.

It is easier to dismiss the Black people who fought that day as brawlers, as people itching for a fight. But I and other Black people from the South know that not only is what they did an example of bystander intervention in hate crimes, it was justice. Justice for the enslaved, justice for the imprisoned, justice for all our dead and all our living.

It is easier still perhaps, to languish in the victory. But the Black people of Alabama, whose labor and blood built a national and state economy, are some of the most oppressed in the nation. We have and continue to be denied clean water, abortion care, and our own freedom. The South is a site of fierce resistance, but that resistance has so far to go. This fight is not a first step nor a last one, but it is so much more than just memes.