Before diving into this, let me start out by saying that it’s still unclear what actually took place in Douglasville, Ga. on Saturday, July 25. What we know is that an African-American family was hosting an outdoor birthday party at a park off Chapel Hill Road and then became embroiled in an altercation with a bunch of people whose trucks had Confederate imagery pissed all over them.
Cell phone video shot at the park shows the group hosting the party upset and combative while police held them back. The video also shows a convoy of trucks leave the area in all of their moronic glory. What happened before is still a mystery and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Douglasville police are investigating the incident.
“Whatever they show, the two cellphone videos from the Saturday afternoon incident off Douglasville’s Chapel Hill Road have been seen more than 200,000 times on Facebook. Authorities are now reviewing them to see if anything criminal occurred.”
Melissa Alford, one of the adults hosting the event, claims that those in the convoy interrupted the birthday party with threats and racial epithets while Levi Bush, one of the truck drivers, claims that the altercation was started by those at the party. The incident has, at this point, effectively become a “he said, she said” incident.
I’m not going to lie. I’m not confident anything will come from this. This did take place in the American South, after all.
Another cell phone video shows the confederacy of dunces parked in a field and at least one racial slur can be heard in the footage. According to Alford:
“‘One had a gun, saying he was ‘gonna kill the [racial slur],’ Alford told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. ‘Then one of them said ‘gimme the gun, I’ll shoot them [racial slur].'”
Bush, on the other hand, claims that those hosting the birthday party started yelling at the trucks while they left a nearby event, then proceeded to throw rocks at the vehicles, ultimately leading to Bush’s truck succumbing to a flat tire. He claims that when he pulled into a driveway, the partygoers swarmed and threatened him.
“‘Basically about eight of us had to hold 15 to 20 of them back,’ Bush said, admitting that a specific racial slur was likely used by members of his group.”
Whatever happened here speaks volumes to the racial hostility that has erupted in the American South since the June 17 shooting at Emanuel AME in Charleston, S.C. We don’t know whether the people hosting the birthday party started the altercation or the guys waving the hateful symbols did, but at the end of the day, the American South is looking less and less like 2015 and more and more like 1915.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ1lbt1CdPI