GONNA NEED MORE CHAIRS:

Then a song comes along like country singer Jason Aldean's risible "Try That in a Small Town." The lyrics and accompanying video are layered with references to Black Lives Matter protests, sundown towns ("see how far you make it down that road"), and white protectionism ("good ol' boys ... we take care of our own"). The video's main location was no less than the site of historical lynchings, a particularly unsubtle jab.  [...]

The white boaters, coming from nearby Selma, had allegedly repeatedly caused trouble at the dock by parking their pontoon illegally in the spot reserved for a large tourist riverboat, the Harriott II. On Sunday, August 5, the riverboat had been waiting for around 45 minutes, with passengers aboard, to dock. Damien Pickett, the riverboat's first mate and co-captain, disembarked in order to move the pontoon boat himself. In response, according to reports, at least three of the boaters attacked Pickett, punching him in the face, beating and kicking him.

This sounds like an all-too-familiar tragedy in progress: white-on-black violence, motivated by a sense of racist entitlement. Speaking to the Daily Beast after the incident, the boat's captain, Jim Kittrell, stressed that the only motive appeared to be racial: "It makes no sense to have six people try to beat the snot out of you just because you moved their boat up a few feet. In my opinion, the attack on Damien was racially motivated." Kittrell's assumption seems to be bolstered by eyewitness testimony: One bystander, a victim's family member, said in a sworn statement that she heard one of the white men drop the n-word before the fighting began.

It's important to consider this incident in the broader context of Montgomery's history, as well. Montgomery, one of the major historical fronts of the civil rights movement, is no stranger to racialized violence. It was there, in 1954, that a young Martin Luther King Jr. took up pastorship at a local church, where he became a spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycotts alongside Rosa Parks. Through boycotts and years of sustained activism amid tense civil unrest, Montgomery protesters successfully challenged the rule of Jim Crow in the South and ultimately changed the nation. Montgomery also saw devastating segregationist violence throughout this period, including one of the most violent moments in the civil rights movement, "Bloody Sunday."

In 2023, coming after a cultural period of intensifying racialized protests, a group of white people whaling on an unsuspecting and defenseless Black man could have led to tragic consequences or, at the least, traumatized victims and onlookers.

What the video shows happening next, however, flipped the script: Seeing one of their colleagues being attacked, other Black boat workers rushed in to defend him and fight back. Bystanders also joined in, with one teen now known as "Black Aquaman" famously jumping into the water and swimming across the dock in order to help. One man, a person known to the internet as "Folding Chair Guy," gained instant fame when he went after the three attackers with, you guessed it, a folding chair.

The suddenness of the fight, combined with the enthusiasm of the brawlers, the glee of the onlookers, and the fact that everyone had phones out recording the incident, made the Montgomery brawl -- dubbed the Alabama Sweet Tea Party -- into an immediate viral sensation. It produced everything from evocative Twitter reactions to a live swimming pool reenactment to a remix of Ernie Barnes's iconic painting of Black partiers, Sugar Shack. The folding chair was instantly memorialized.

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