For many Americans, New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection, celebration and dedication. Whatever the previous 365-plus days have sent our way are looked back upon with some level of wisdom hopefully gained, while the upcoming calendar is anticipated in the most innocent way possible. The entire event is capped off with a tradition popularized by a newspaper man but invented for the sea.
What you see in Times Square these days at the behest of Ryan Seacrest, and before that Dick Clark, is the brainchild of Adolph Ochs, who owned The New York Times and started the practice in 1908. Now commonly known as a ball drop, it’s an extravagant twist on a technological marvel that was initially invented for an entirely different purpose: marine chronometers.
Time balls, as they were known, helped boats set their clocks when they came to town. When ships pulled in, they knew what time it was, literally.
As 2023 comes to a close, there is not a more apt metaphor for what was the story of the year in Black America. A hundred years from now, its legacy will still stand.
The “Montgomery Riverboat Brawl” likely won’t be forgotten in the yearly cycle of another league or awards season. The when and where is as important as what happened that afternoon in Alabama.
To begin August, the National Association of Black Journalists’ national convention descended upon Birmingham, Alabama, a welcome sight for folks in town. The annual confab for the industry was met with open arms and the sense of community was about as good as it had been between town and function since I’ve been doing this job. Black people had a ton of fun with each other, shared generational experiences per usual, and because of where it is, returned to many historical places that are a part of our shared lineage, such as Selma, which is about 90 minutes away from Birmingham.
Quite a few folks took the trip. Little did they know that barely a week later, the city most famously known for the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Bloody Sunday of 1965, would be back in the news via a previously humdrum Facebook business page.
During that span in Birmingham, Major League Baseball unveiled the logo for their next special regular-season game, this time at the oldest ballpark in America. The game will officially be called MLB at Rickwood: A Tribute to the Negro Leagues. It’s a genuinely magical place, for sure. As the state capital, Montgomery is home of the Montgomery Biscuits, the Tampa Bay Rays’ AA affiliate, which will be playing against the Birmingham Barons two days prior to the MLB game at Rickwood Field.
The Birmingham Times, the local Black community weekly, dedicated its issue to the NABJ conference entirely, with the headline reading, in part, “Birmingham welcomes the voices of a generation.”
Indeed, it did.
In a summer in which blockbuster flicks made $500 million a pop, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé gracefully allowed us in their orbit in their different ways, and hip-hop celebrated its 50-year anniversary, the place known as the “Cradle of the Confederacy” sparked one of the most important historical moments this journalist can think of in many years, on many fronts.
ABC News
You could teach an entire university class about the multiple layers of generational trauma unleashed in the confrontation. The immediacy of the news connected to the history of the site and the legal untangling that followed (six people were charged in the incident, including Reggie Bernard Ray, known best as the Black man swinging a chair) are the kinds of things people make entire seasons of longform podcasts about. If I were an author, I’d write a book about it.
Montgomery itself is like a choose-your-own-adventure of the most horrifically f— up racist s— you can imagine. All the American classics are there: First confederate capital. Vicious redlining and economic apartheid for generations. Domestic terrorism. It took 200 years for them to elect a Black mayor. That was four years ago.
In specific to the brawl, it’s borderline bizarre how on the nose the whole incident was. The night before, 45 held a campaign rally at that very spot. On the very day of the fight, a group of Black women concluded a two-day healing event with a ceremony sharing their happiness and thanks by laying flowers in the water at the Riverfront.
Two hours later, the pop-off heard around the nation went down. All of course happening at the very spot where enslaved people were brought to town. The very dock. On a boat, likely of the same name.
Of course, there are a million wild things that we could talk about the proceedings but those are for other avenues. What I simply cannot get over is how direct the line is between the very specific interaction of these people and where they came from most immediately.
The white folks were friends and family of an owner of a mini-mart in Selma, having a lovely day until they decided to get drunk and basically show their behinds. There are a trove of angles, deep dives, rumors and other things about this specific unfolding that are one thing. Here’s one, two, three, four … nine, if you need that.
But I can’t get past the riverboat. The carrying joke of the moment is that the boat was named the Harriet, like Tubman, making the whole situation much funnier as a solid pop culture joke of what happens when you get your a– whipped. The reality, while far more grim in its origins, not unlike the pugilistic proceedings themselves, makes me laugh a lot more.
That riverboat is named the Harriott II. It’s ostensibly a lovely time just like any other water cruise deep in the American South. It was dedicated in 2008. When it arrived, a lot of people showed up to watch. It aired live on local news. Sure, great. It was named after a boat that famously was the first riverboat that made the trip from Mobile to Montgomery to pick up cotton. … OK. In EIGHTEEN TWENTY ONE. Good lord.
The beatdown boat is named after a boat which a.) definitely carried enslaved people, but b.) was clearly a literal part of the economic engine that fundamentally disenfranchised Black Americans economically, nevermind tried to destroy us humanistically. And guess what that boat was likely named after? You guessed it.
Well, you can just continue down the river, a.k.a. the supply chain in those days. There were not one but two slave ships, each at one point named Harriott or some variation thereof, that were active in triangular trade. Naming a boat after any of these vessels is certainly a choice.
There was a time when those white men would have been fully within their right to effectively single out and proceed to hurt that boat captain to their heart’s content. And way further back than Jim Crow. Look up Virginia’s “casual killing act” of 1669 if you want to ruin your day. But these days, not even close. Those same negroes who you dragged across the ocean on boats named Harriott are now jumping out of boats named Harriott to administer the fade of a lifetime when you wrong our people.
As many of my friends from other lands say often: Only in America.
Julie Bennett/Getty Images
Perhaps most satisfying about that entire ordeal is that so much of it was very specifically a function of social media. We learned about this through various posts that not only showed but featured incredible contextual narrative provided inherently from those documenting it. We learned everything we know about the offending parties from their posts earlier in the day.
Aaren Rudolph, aka Aquamayne, has a whole new future to consider. The fact that this news was spread, nevermind occurred, due to just the regular tendencies of Black folks just trying to be themselves and stay prudent is incredible to me. Black Twitter, which was once ruled dead but now has come to include basically the combined algorithms of our diaspora across platforms, had a legit rebirth. We told y’all the truth, showed it, too, and people just had to wear it.
Alabama has been about that action. Fun fact: The Black Panther Party began in nearby Lowndes County, too. None of this is news in terms of the resistance, but it was also a reminder that while we have a collective experience that we share and cherish, there is also very much the importance of understanding individual communities for themselves.
Yet, as my FYPs say — a win is a win.
It was a role reversal that was almost too fantastical for Forrest Gump, which won six Academy Awards but these days is widely regarded as hokey but touching. Too over the top, too conveniently aligned with too good of an emotional ending. In the 1994 Tom Hanks movie, Gump, the main lovable character from Greenbow, Alabama, plays college football, becomes an All-American and meets the president.
Perhaps the most laugh-out-loud scene comes when the title character makes good on his word to pay back his best friend. Their shrimp company blows up and Benjamin Buford Blue’s mother faints on the porch when she gets a check from a white man from a fictional town in Alabama.
In the following scene, there’s a reversal from when we are introduced to her as part of a generation of Black women whose lone job it is to serve white men shrimp in dining rooms dating back to plantation days. Now, Blue’s mother is the one getting served shrimp and it’s a white woman doing it. The joke obviously being that after years of having no option but to serve white folks, it was time for that to change. The role reversal is so swift and direct that you can’t help but laugh.
Montgomery, the town affectionately known as “The Gump,” is now ground zero for one of the most serious but somehow hilarious exchanges of the year. Last month, the man who threw his hat in the air — signaling he was in distress to his fellow people — held a press conference. One of the humans in the altercation has pressed charges against the boat co-captain, but the city has not.
“It was just so shocking. Now, for me to get charged for something I do every day, it’s my job? It’s just shocking to me,” Damien Pickett II said in November. “For me to get charged for something I do on the regular [to] make people happy, put smiles on their face?”
The last five years in the United States of America have felt like quite a bit of a reckoning. Over time, the long slow institutional battles we’ve fought to untangle have come to light, and many people understand what an uphill battle there is for any sort of sanity in society, nevermind justice.
For a non-fictional event to play out so poetically, violently and publicly — while leaving many feeling like the result was satisfactory — speaks directly to the lived existence of millions of humans who call this country home by choice or by force. ChatGPT could not have created a scenario this complete.
Someday many years from now, someone will consider acting a fool on the dock again. And on that day, deep inside, something will tell them that’s probably not a smart plan.
When the ancestors speak to you, it’s a good idea to listen. Lesson learned for 2023.
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