Denton Tall Tales #34

During my sophomore year of high school there was a big fight. It was between a couple of black students and some redneck kids. It was a bad fight and was the talk of the school.

I’m not quite sure what happened next exactly, but I think the black kids got suspended and the white kids didn’t, or they got suspended for different amounts of time, or something similar to that. Apparently the punishments were unfair or unjust.
Well, the black kids went home and told their parents, who in turn told their friends, who in turn told their friends. The students lived in a small housing project called Riverview Gardens that was known as a rough neighborhood. The families gathered the community together in a small courtyard at the bottom of the apartments, so they could tell their story. Soon the crowd grew and also became quite angry at what they were hearing. The cops were called and they went to go check out what was going on. The cops tried to disperse the crowd but they weren’t having it. What was once a peaceful community gathering soon turned rowdy, and someone threw a brick through the cop cars windsheild. More cops came, more people from the apartments came down, and the scene soon grew ugly. Rocks and bricks were thrown at all of the cops and they had to retreat and call for more assistance. Cops from neighboring counties arrived to assist with the situation. The mob marched down the street chanting stuff, and a mobile police station, which was parked on the corner to monitor drug trafficking, was burned down. Another small vacant house was also burned down. This was too big for the police. The local National Guard was called in.

I remember watching all of this go down on the news. Not the local news but the Baltimore news. We had made it big time.

The following day at school there was a lot more fights. They lasted through the week, and the racial tension was extremely high. When we were leaving school, one of the rednecks had parked his truck across the street, so he wasn’t on school property, and was waving a huge confederate flag. He got his ass beat the next day.
That was the Denton Race Riots of 1995.