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Photo: Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images
The breakout star of the Montgomery brawl is a white folding chair. I know this because her name is in Sheryl Lee Ralph’s mouth. “I have one thing to say,” the Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary actor began her remarks on the altercation that saw multiple Black bystanders come to the defense of a Black riverboat captain after white pontooners attacked him. “Lift every chair and swing,” Ralph sang in the tune of the Black national anthem, per the video she posted on Twitter on August 8. Her lyric change refers to the famous piece of portable furniture that a Black man wielded during the brawl, an object that has now become a symbol of rising up against oppressors by grabbing the nearest weapon and joining the fight. A day before Ralph’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” remix hit the Twitter timeline, “Big Gretch” rapper Gmac Cash found the chair to be a source of inspiration for his viral song “Montgomery Brawl,” recounting the events at Riverfront Park on August 5. “Ayy, I’m really proud of y’all (Montgomery Brawl, bitch) / Not one, but them all (Montgomery Brawl),” Cash raps in the chorus. “Shout-out bro with the chair (Montgomery Brawl) / Everybody that was there (Montgomery Brawl, all of y’all).” The first verse sees him prophesize about the significance of the object. “Unc came with the chair like I got some action (bitch),” he describes. “That chair goin’ out in history.” The 16-year-old whom Cash calls “the first Black man to swim to a fight” does get a salute in his track (and many a nod online), but it’s clear that the chair has taken on an importance beyond wildest dreams.
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