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[Image: The design from Atena’s Montgomery Pride collection depicts a white abstract boat dock next to black waves, with a white silhouette of a Black power fist swinging a white folding chair downward. Images of a boy climbing onto the dock and of a group of white people attacking a Black man are superimposed onto the image.]
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[Image: Atena, wearing a yellow t-shirt, white headphones, and beaded watermelon earrings, smiles at the camera, holding her Montgomery Pride collection coffee mug in one hand.]
Co-captain Dameion Pickett’s hands articulate urgency: firm claps, and punctuating points, as he addresses another man about something that looks to be quite serious. The man he is talking to is white and he also points and shakes his head, appearing to argue as he walks along the Montgomery Riverfront dock in step with the uniformed Black man. Co-captain Pickett is so intent in his conversation that when his assailant, a shirtless man in a white cap with a complexion of skinless baked chicken, comes in fast and shoves him in the chest with the momentum of his entire body, Pickett doesn’t appear to notice him until the moment before contact. Perhaps because he is an older Black man, co-captain Pickett receives this unexpected (though likely expected) violence with commendable calm, fluidly pulling the black cap of his black-and-white uniform from his head and tossing it high above the scene. In the time that it takes for Pickett’s hands to return from that action, his attacker has pulled back to deliver the first of many punches. Another white man barrels in, and another and another, and what began as a disagreement about riverfront dock traffic becomes an alcohol-fueled four-on-one attack, with co-captain Pickett on the ground. One Black man in the watching crowd sees this and runs down the ramp toward the pile-on; he does not attack anyone upon his arrival but approaches with hands and arms out in what appear to be attempts to placate and separate. He speaks, does not throw any punches. More Black men can be seen approaching rapidly from the decks above. From across the way, a figure with dreadlocks appears in the water, cutting a straight line toward the mounting action with a steady freestyle stroke. And so, it unfolds; through the responses of the Black men who are steadily approaching the scene and the Black women recording and narrating from a distance, a white gang attack on Co-Captain Pickett blossoms, in fits and starts, into a melee, and then into something much bigger.
Let’s talk about Fade in The Water.
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