The hat-toss heard ’round the world and other peak Blackness: Remembering the Montgomery Riverboat Brawl a year later
OPINION: By the time the sun set on Aug. 5, 2023, Montgomery, Alabama, was again the epicenter of racial division, with new heroes, tools and merchandise.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
I remember exactly where I was when I heard about the Montgomery Riverboat Brawl, the now-infamous fight that changed the way Black America would interact with hats, folding chairs and swimming. In a nutshell, some white folks wouldn’t move their pontoon from a space reserved for a riverboat, the co-captain went to see why, and the white folks started a melee because those particular white folks were the kind who start such things. The white folks jumped the Black captain, Dameion Pickett, who tossed his hat in what would forevermore be viewed as the “Black Bat Signal,” causing bystanders to get involved, including Pickett’s co-worker, then 16-year-old Aaren Hamilton-Rudolph, who jumped in the water from the stalled river boat and swam to the dock to help Team Black. He became a legend and was donned “the Black Aquaman.” Somebody get that kid all of the scholarships for all of the things.
A Black dude hit some white folks with folding chairs and had the entire community looking at our folding chairs with a new purpose. To call it glorious might be an overstatement — there’s nothing glorious about Black people getting punched for doing their job by some racists — but the way that community of Black folks coalesced on that day to stand tall is the stuff of legend. We talked and argued and laughed and cajoled and brought folding chairs and hats with us everywhere we went. I wear hats regularly, but now I wear my hat realizing that if anything goes down, and white people are present, my hat can serve as a rallying cry. Hosannah in the highest.
Oh, where was I? I was in Alabama actually, about 100 miles north of Montgomery, in Birmingham, for the National Association of Black Journalists Annual Convention. You know the one; this year, the leadership of NABJ looked incompetent (really, like opps) as former President Trump was platformed and used his time to, well, be Donald Trump. But last year in Birmingham, I was sitting at a bar with my colleagues, Michael Harriot, Touré and the homie Damon Young as our phones started to light up non-stop. We started reading our notifications and Twitter/X to get real-time updates of what was happening just down the road. I had just left the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum dedicated to the role Black Birmingham played in the Civil Rights Movement, so my heart was already in take-no-prisoners mode. The videos from the brawl, the hat toss, the folding chair and the Black dude swimming to provide assistance all looked like additions to the continual march for freedom.
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It’s a year later in African America, and I can’t say that much has changed. At this year’s edition of NABJ, Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ Blackness. In a room full of Black people, a whole organization allowed a white man to question a Black woman’s Blackness. I’m going to have to say that white entitlement and audacity are probably at an all-time high. Did the Montgomery Riverboat Brawl change Black America or America as a whole? Eh, maybe, maybe not. I don’t know that white people are following directions any better than they used to or deciding against causing racial strife for literally everybody else.
But, what we do have is instant recognition and recall of that fateful day in August 2023 when Montgomery, Alabama, became ground zero for Black pride and served as a reminder to the Black community that when the time comes, we all need to make sure we understand the assignment and have each other’s back. In 1990, the “West Coast All-Stars,” a collective of the biggest names in California hip-hop at the time released the record, “We’re All in the Same Gang.” All of the artists got together to promote a message of anti-violence. While the messengers of said message would go on to continue to create some of the most violent and misogynistic music known to man — just a year later, participants Dr. Dre, Eazy E and MC Ren would, with NWA, would release “EFIL4ZAGGIN,” easily one of the most violently ridiculous albums ever — the point remained, we’re all in this together, and if we realize that fact and act upon it, we will be victorious. That’s what the Montgomery Riverboat Brawl gave us, a moment in time where people who didn’t all know one another came together against a common enemy, not just those white people on the dock, but the system of whiteness that caused the problem in the first place. It was like the O.J. Simpson trial all over again. For the record, I think O.J. did it.
Everybody didn’t need to know each other; they just needed to see that one of our own was under attack. Sometimes you do have to squeeze first and ask questions last. Black history is a living, breathing thing and in so many instances, we join the annals of it as ancestors. In this case, those brave souls out there on that dock in Montgomery did, indeed, get there with the rest of us to the other side of that mountaintop.
Because the only person to go to jail in a situation where white people and Black people were on different sides of the fracas, was a white man.
Hosannah in the highest.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
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