Montgomery Riverfront Park Brawl: What We Know Today About Fight Videos, Warrants
Jeremy Gray and Lawrence Specker, AL.com, August 7, 2023
A Saturday night brawl at Montgomery’s riverfront captured in multiple videos was national news Sunday but many questions still surround the incident.
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Multiple videos posted to social media suggest the brawl started when a pontoon boat stopped at the riverfront, preventing a riverboat from docking there.
A Black versus White brawl took place at Montgomery Alabama, racial tension erupted when a black securiry guard was attacked by a group of white men.
[TSHEGO] pic.twitter.com/EY7QzM6Tgx
— TSHEGO (@TSHEGOMEDIA2021) August 7, 2023
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A video clip shared by Josh Moon, a reporter for the Alabama Political Reporter, shows the scuffle beginning as a Black man who appears to be in a docks worker uniform talks to a white man.
Another white man — shirtless — strikes or shoves the Black man.
The incident appeared to unfold largely along racial lines.
The dock worker and the man who struck him engaged in a shoving match before the first white man placed a hand on the Black man in an apparent effort to separate the two.
Two more shirtless white men charged in, one tackling the Black man to the dock and the other piling on, rapidly joined by a fourth shirtless white man, one of whom shoved away another white man who seemed to try to intervene.
Two white women also were there, though it wasn’t clear whether they were supporting the four-on-one fight then in progress or trying to intervene.
A large and vocal audience, consisting of people on the riverboat from which the first video was shot, gathered, as did a crowd overlooking from the dock.
In the first video, the fight begins to break up as a Black bystander joins in. Another jumps off the riverboat, swimming to join in.
The first Black man, identifiable by his black shorts and white shirt, is physically confronted by one of the women.
A second video, taken moments later, shows a group of Black men running off the riverboat.
They converge on a pontoon boat that apparently carried some of the parties involved in the incident.
Within seconds fighting erupts again, between two white men and white woman who were on the pontoon boat, another white man and white woman who appeared to be trying to get to it, and more than a dozen Black men and women.
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A 67-year-old man on Monday “The Think Tank” with Chris Coleman on V 99.5 in Birmingham he was onboard the riverboat as part of a class reunion from Robert C. Hatch High School in Uniontown.
The man, who did not give his name, said the incident “made me proud of Black people … that privilege thing is over with.”
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