Beyond the brawl: Montgomery’s Black community has always fought back

  I’ve consumed much of the media spun off from the Montgomery Brawl. 

  The poolside re-enactment. The video setting the fight to the “Good Times” theme song, with associated credits. (“Created by Consequences and Repercussions.” Perfect.) 

  The national reaction to the battle in the city’s Riverfront Park has been remarkable. Even for a state that rivals Florida for footage of shirtless men embarrassing themselves. 

  Writers inside and outside Alabama have made the point better than I could: seeing Black men and women defend a Black man under attack from a group of white people — at a time of ceaseless attacks on Black history, Black voting rights, and Black bodies — felt cathartic. Inspiring, even. 

  Moreso because it took place in Montgomery. The first capital of the Confederacy. A brutal nexus of the domestic slave trade. One of many places where racists bombed the homes of peaceful protestors, and where George Wallace proclaimed “segregation forever.”

  So it’s no surprise that the fight has resonated with so many people. 

  But let’s not overlook a crucial point. No matter the risk; no matter the odds of success, Black Montgomerians have always fought back.

  Open a local paper published on Oct. 25, 1854, and you’ll see enslaved people refusing to bend to their oppressors. Two men named Moses and Stephen escaping from a local farm. A woman named Emeline Johnson, using forged documents to elude her enslavers. 

  Fast forward to Montgomery after the Civil War, and you can find Black men voting and taking office, often in the face of physical harm. And even after the white “redeemer” government came to power in 1874, violently depriving Black Alabamians of their rights, the community continued to organize. In 1889, a convention in the city demanded voting rights, greater aid to education, and an end to lynching and sharecropping. 

  When white elites dropped all pretensions to democracy and fraudulently created an authoritarian government in 1901, the first challenge to it didn’t come from a northern city or an outside group. It came from Black Montgomerians, led by an activist and postal worker named Jackson Giles. With the quiet help of Tuskegee educator Booker T. Washington, Giles took a lawsuit against the state’s Jim Crow constitution all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

  Montgomery activists like Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon challenged Jim Crow from the 1930s on. Arthur Madison, a native of Montgomery County and a Harlem attorney, worked with Nixon to organize a voter registration drive in Montgomery in 1944, despite the extreme dangers. Law enforcement arrested Madison. A state court disbarred him. But his work led to a significant increase in the number of registered Black voters in Montgomery over the next decade. 

  When the Montgomery Bus Boycott launched in 1955, younger activists — people like Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Fred Gray — could count on seasoned local veterans like Parks, Nixon, and Jo Ann Robinson. 

  That’s not how the schools in New York taught me the story. In the version I got as a kid, Parks — an experienced fighter whose arrest was part of a well-thought-out strategy — was a nice, well-meaning seamstress who defied segregation because she was tired. In this version, a younger generation of activists like King, a native Georgian, had to give these individuals direction and purpose. 

  This idea that the local Black community had to be roused and rescued took hold early.

  “The young people taught everybody else a lesson, all the older people who learned how to compromise and learned how to take it easy and be polite and move along,” Pete Seeger once told an audience while performing We Shall Overcome.

  In fact, many older people in the city never compromised. Parks, Nixon, Robinson, and other Montgomerians fought Jim Crow for years before the Bus Boycott. If you’ve ever wondered why the modern civil rights movement began in Montgomery, it’s because it never really stopped. 

  And it continued amid extreme physical danger. In Montgomery County alone, at least 12 people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. The Boycott participants faced bombings and physical and economic harassment. 

  Yet the oppression didn’t break the community. It kept producing people willing to say no; willing to stand — and yes, willing to fight. 

  Montgomery’s history is America’s. The awful and the inspiring, standing side-by-side. From the top of the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, Jefferson Davis went to war to defend the physical and sexual exploitation of his fellow Americans. A century later and a few dozen steps below, King told a crowd of thousands to march until the nation affirmed “the dignity and worth of all God’s children.” 

  “The climatic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil,” he said.

  A fight on a wooden pier doesn’t have the same stakes. But it reflects the same dogged spirit that led Montgomery’s Black community to rewrite history. 

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006, and worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. His work has won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector.