Yeah we knuckin’ and buckin’ and ready to fight…See me, I ain’t nothin’ nice.”
It was Saturday night, and Nathan P. Whitfield ’09 was ready to party. First, he was going to attend the Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers (HSBSE) step show, followed by a quick visit to the Heaven and Hell party in Currier House. The evening would close with the HSBSE after-party in the Lowell House dining hall, entitled the “NO HALF STEPPIN’ AFTER PARTY!!!”
The last part of the plan didn’t quite go according to schedule.
Whitfield was dancing at the after- party, when suddenly the crowd withdrew around a group of people fighting.
“It looked like massive chaos,” he said. “The next thing I know a chair flies by my face, literally three inches away.”
It was a chaotic night indeed, where “something of a melee”—as one police spokesman described it—broke out at the HSBSE after-party in Lowell. More than 20 police cruisers swarmed the scene, blocking a swath of Mt. Auburn Street. There, a police department’s German shepherd barked at students returning from nights of costumed revelry.
Time to go’
The party followed HSBSE’s sixth-annual step dance, which featured dancers from Harvard, Tufts University, and Boston University (BU).
In its third year, the party attracted at least 400 guests from Harvard and other colleges in the area, including BU, Boston College, Emerson, MIT, and Lesley University. Guests had to show a college I.D. in order to enter the party, according to HSBSE President Devin D. Smith ’09.
At around 12:40 a.m., the HUPD officer stationed at Lowell dining hall requested that the DJ announce that if any fights broke out, the party would be shut down. Earlier, Smith said the party organizers asked for an additional HUPD officer because there were “so many people” present.
Twenty minutes later, when the party was getting into full swing, the DJ played the popular hip-hop song “Knuck if you Buck,” according to Jarred M. Watson, a student at Northeastern. The song’s lyrics include “Yeah we knuckin’ and buckin’ and ready to fight…See me, I ain’t nothin’ nice.”