PicoBlog

When I was around 20, I went to the legendary/infamous Kappa Beach Party in Galveston, Texas for the first and only time. For those who might be unfamiliar, the Kappa Beach Party, or “The Kappa” as it was also referred to, is a Spring Break-style event curated by the Black Greek letter fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi that coincides with the annual Black Beach Weekend, a rotating series of events that lays claim to being “the livest party” in the South.

Before I ever attended The Kappa, I heard countless stories about its debauchery. And as a young Black man in college, with a penchant for underage drinking and regularly drunk off toxic masculinity, I couldn’t wait to indulge in a weekend of booze, bikinis, and tomfoolery.

The homies and I stayed at a beach house about 30 minutes from Galveston Beach. On the day of the beach party, we got up dressed in an assortment of cargo shorts, straw hats, flip flops and bright-colored t-shirts with intentions of getting into whatever adventures awaited. The drive to the beach wound up being about an 8-hour excursion as traffic on the small bridge heading there was backed up for miles with thousands of college-aged Black kids getting out of their cars to dance on the bridge, pass joints between vehicles, film moments of nudity, and take pics with disposable cameras.

This was in the year 2000, and our phones could hardly send text messages, let alone take pictures or video record anything.

I remember finally arriving at Galveston Beach just before the sunset, and being pretty underwhelmed by the atmosphere. The ride there was for all intent and purpose, the party itself, but after sitting in traffic all day for a trip that should’ve only taken a half-hour, I was all but ready to head back to where we were staying to pack up and go home.

I was by no means a prude but by the time I went to The Kappa, I was somewhat at a crossroads in my college career as it pertained to what I was entertained by. I absolutely was still about “party and bullshit,” drinking alcohol and whatnot, but I had also gotten into the more mellowed and culturally evolved world of spoken word poetry, and artsy events. Whatever wild, intoxicating, hyper-sexual fantasies I might have had about what would go down in Galveston did not materialize, and by the time I got back home to Baton Rouge, I had already made up my mind that I wasn’t interested in attending The Kappa again, or any event that was similar to it.

I can’t really remember what the dudes I went to The Kappa with thought about our time there. It seemed like they had a good time that weekend, or at the very least highly enjoyed the traffic-jammed ride to the beach.

I believe we all went to Galveston with the hopes of living out our version of the iconic ‘Freaknik’ events that used to pop off in Atlanta in the mid-late 90s. We were teenagers in middle and high school when Freaknik was in its heyday, and by the time we were old enough to attend, police and elected officials in Atlanta had brought what was known as the city’s “most infamous street party” to a halt.

An adapted, “family-friendly” version of Freaknik came back to Atlanta in 2019, almost two decades after I graduated from college, and upon hearing that it was making its grand return, I thought about some of the controversial tales I had heard regarding what caused the event to be banned for 20 years (1999-2019). And now, a Hulu documentary about Freaknik called The Wildest Party Never Told is reportedly in the works with the intent of chronicling the years and activity from the event that led to its removal.

Initially, when the news of The Wildest Party Never Told being created broke the chatter around social media was how the documentary would bring shame to Gen-X aunties and mothers if their late-millennial and Gen-Z children were to catch their matriarchs being “fast and loose” in the footage acquired for the film.

But now, after a couple of weeks since the announcement of the documentary, a new conversation has come to the forefront that is exposing an ugly open secret about the Freaknik era — which is that throughout its initial run, there were often numerous reports of sexual assault that took place during the festivities.

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