Here’s Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About Folding Chairs This Week
Assholes probably shouldn’t try jumping a Black man, even in a small town.
Last weekend, a Black first mate at Montgomery’s Riverfront Park in Alabama asked some entitled white people to move their illegally parked pontoon boat that was blocking dock space needed to park a larger vessel. Rather than politely comply, one man outright attacked him and soon his friends joined the beatdown.
Multiple videos on social media captured the brawl. However, the tables soon turned when several Black people rushed to the first mate’s aid. While bystanders cheered, they beat the crap out of the three white men and two women, of which as the Guardian reports, “at least one of whom could be seen first striking others by running up and throwing her body into them from behind.”
These were not pleasant people. Even before the Black first mate spoke to them, they had ignored 45 minutes of the larger boat’s captain begging them to move, which they refused to do.
The first mate’s 16-year-old coworker, who social media has dubbed “Black Aquaman,” dived into the river and swam with a swiftness to defend him from these jackals.
I don’t support or condone violence, but I must disagree with those who suggest that there were no heroes in this incident. People rushed to the aid of a fellow human in trouble. They weren’t looking for a fight but they damn well sought to finish it. It’s important to put this in historic context, as many posters on “Black Twitter” have done. “This is not … 1963 anymore,” someone commented, recalling a not-so-long-ago when Black people were expected to grin and bear constant indignities, because the price of standing up for themselves was literally their lives.
This was known in the Deep South as “Jim Crow etiquette.” Here’s a sample of those very real rules from what Matt Walsh types would call “the good old days.”
Almost always, however, the rules of racial etiquette required blacks to be agreeable and non-challenging, even when the white person was mistaken about something. Usually it was expected that blacks would step off the sidewalk when meeting whites or else walk on the outer street side of the walk thereby "giving whites the wall."
These Black folks did not surrender the wall. In fact, one Black man delivered a folding chair unto a white guy’s head. This soon sparked an onslaught of memes, and apparently folding-chair inspired merchandise.
Reggie Gray was identified as the man wielding the now legendary folding chair, and the Montgomery authorities have asked that Gray “contact the Montgomery Police Department for further interviews and as part of this investigation.” The police confirmed in a press conference that so far three of the actual aggressors in the riverfront battle have been charged.
For many reasons, this incident reminds me of Jesse Thornton, a 26-year-old Black man from Luverne, Alabama, known as “the friendliest city in the South.” On June 21, 1940, Thornton referred to a white police officer by his full name, Doris Rhodes. Thornton quickly corrected himself and added the requisite “Mr.” but that wasn’t good enough. Rhodes attacked him while shouting a racial slur, then took Thornton to the city jail where a white mob waited for him. He tried to escape, but the mob followed, firing guns and hurling bricks, bats, and stones at Thornton, who eventually collapsed from his wounds. The mob dragged him to a nearby swamp and shot him again. A local fisherman found his decomposing body, ravaged by vultures, a week later in the Patsaliga Creek.
We don’t know what those people would’ve done to the Black riverboat worker if others hadn’t intervened. We also don’t know that it was overtly racially motivated. However, there was a time in Alabama when they could’ve killed him without any legal consequences, and any Black men who tried to stop them would’ve signed their own death warrant.
That’s progress, I suppose, no matter how meager.
A parting note, however, about folding chairs. Although John Cram created an armless chair that resembled the modern folding chair in 1855, it was Nathaniel Alexander, a Black man from Lynchburg, Virginia, who improved on Cram’s design and patented a superior version in 1911. His design was thinner, with arms and a backrest. He built it specifically for churches and auditoriums, and it proved useful for a choir and congregation to rest their prayer books, music sheets, and of course their backsides.
Hilarious memes aside, Alexander didn’t create the folding chair as a tool for WWE-style violence. That’s not what the great Shirley Chisholm meant when she said, “If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
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This is exactly the kind of folding chair that makes my pacifist ass uncomfortable. For that reason, it's more important for me to read, not less. I want so badly a world without violence that it is hard for me to admit sometimes that responding with defensive violence is one necessary part of how we reach that world, whether it's Ukraine showing that warmongers aren't going to profit starting wars in Europe anymore, or tiny trans-masculine guys using a knife to defend against a bare-handed aggressor (and getting imprisoned for it), or giving these white thugs the chair.
I honestly don't understand the mindset that aggressors have, but aggressors who must themselves face "massive resistance" seem certain to be less likely to start shit.
Really tired of all the pearl clutching about violence. Violence far from never solving anything, frequently solves lots of things. Solved the shit out of the nazis, for the biggest, clearest example. Obviously, it should not ever be the first resort. But sometimes, some people make it necessary. And abusers are always depending on the abused to not resort to it.