Taking a Knee, Taking a Stand: African American Athletes and the Fight for Social Justice

INTRODUCTION

AMERICA LOVES ITS SPORTS. We love the highs of victory and the lows of defeat. The grace, intensity, and drama. The meritocracy of athletic competition: here, for once, is an arena where the best generally triumph. And many of us love the escape that sports offer—from workday stress to family tension to partisan politics. A football game delivers an emotionally unambiguous experience: This is my team. I identify with it. I celebrate when it wins and mourn when it loses.

And then there are the stars of the sports world. Our twenty-first-century obsession with celebrity, media, and instant communication has given sports figures fame and treasure beyond what anyone could have imagined a generation ago. Massive salaries, huge endorsement opportunities, global recognition. Yet these remarkably talented and famous men and women are close to us. We feel an intimacy, as if they are our friends. Our representatives. Not only do we want them to perform beautifully and to win, we want to like them. We want to feel as if we are part of their community.

This recognition and intimacy give the greatest of our athletes an awe-inspiring platform. Their influence is broad and deep. Millions of people attend to LeBron James and Serena Williams. They listen to Magic Johnson and Colin Kaepernick. And this mass attention affords those athletes a unique opportunity to shape our culture and our politics.

And let’s make no mistake: sports is political. There are those who would tell us that athletes should keep their mouths shut and play ball—that they are simply entertainers. NFL players are at it again, President Donald Trump tweeted in 2018. Taking a knee when they should be standing proudly for the National Anthem. Earlier he had called those who kneel during the playing of the national anthem before football games sons of bitches and said that if they won’t stand during the anthem, they should be fired. Of course, there are racial undertones to Trump’s disrespect. Historically, and especially since 2016, when Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem prior to an NFL preseason game, the protests that Trump hates so much have been almost exclusively by African Americans who made the risky decision to use their platform to draw attention to racism.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color, Kaepernick said after that first protest. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Kaepernick’s reference to black bodies and police cover-ups was pointed. It was a tough message, a raw message, delivered after two tragic years of high-profile police killings of unarmed black men, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014 to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in the summer of 2016—and many since. And Kaepernick has paid for being so outspoken. In spite of his obvious talent and leadership abilities, as well as his relative youth, he has not worked in the NFL since the end of the 2016 season. In November 2017, two months after Trump’s incendiary fire them statement, Kaepernick filed a collusion grievance against the NFL, accusing owners of working together to keep him out of professional football.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick (right) and free safety Eric Reid kneel during the national anthem before an NFL game between the 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams in 2016.

Kaepernick’s protest is part of a tradition. It is a necessary tradition, with roots in pre-Civil War slavery revolts and early twentieth-century activism against the steady erosion of what little gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction. The tradition includes heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson’s refusal to observe the rules of so-called polite society even though he was consistently harassed, berated, and imprisoned because of his race. It is a tradition that includes the sporting achievements and political bravery of those African American athletes, most of them from the South, who competed and stood up for themselves and their communities during the dark days of Jim Crow: Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, and countless others whose names are less well known.

It is a civil rights tradition of women and men who, in the face of antagonism from the white establishment, spoke and acted out of conscience, even though it harmed their careers—Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. And it is a tradition that has been revitalized in the twenty-first century not just by the NFL protesters, but by confident, outspoken athletes from the NBA to the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA).

These athletes are American heroes. In the fullest sense. They have refused to be intimidated. In the context of their times, which varied as the decades passed, they succeeded in spite of hardships and hatreds that, throughout the last hundred years and longer, have modulated in form and intensity but never gone away. Their heroism—and the heroism of so many who will remain unremembered—are more than athletic. Such heroism is cultural. It is political.

Because of this tradition of activism and protest, athletes now occasionally have more power than politicians. Whether it is the Missouri college football team protesting the university’s handling of racial tensions on campus, or LeBron James and fellow NBA players speaking out at the ESPY Awards, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leading the opposition to Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, black athletes recognize the power of their platform and feel empowered to speak out on social and political issues. And their message is clear: Racism is not dead. It remains a current problem. It is the responsibility of all Americans to admit this and to work to defeat it.

President Barack Obama, when talking about race, liked to quote the novelist William Faulkner: The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. American history is harsh and painful, especially for African Americans, and it is tempting for white Americans to assume that what caused that pain is long gone. But as Faulkner’s words remind us, history is a living force that carries forward. And the pain remains, in the form of discrimination, denial, and double standards. In mass incarceration and the extrajudicial killings of young black men. Past progress is welcome, but it cannot—must not—rule out the continued pursuit of justice. In fact, the past must inform the present. Otherwise, the legacy of denial will never be overcome. The great basketball player Bill Russell put it best: You only register progress by how far you have to go.

Taking a Knee, Taking a Stand celebrates these African American heroes for their athletic greatness, for the bravery and intelligence of their activism, and for their leadership. It is a book about the past and the present, a commemoration of some of the greatest athletes in the history of American sports, who also had the courage and determination to take a stand against racism—at times when it felt as if the whole country were against them. It is about African American women and men who became leaders—many reluctantly—because they recognized that their sporting prowess gave them a platform. This leadership took many forms. Sometimes it was quiet and subtle, as when Joe Louis worked behind the scenes to battle bigotry in a segregated US Army. Other times, it was loud and abrasive, as when Muhammad Ali publicly called out his country for requiring him to fight in a war that he considered immoral.

But Taking a Knee, Taking a Stand also looks ahead. Past leadership enables present activism, which leads to future progress. The heroes profiled in this book encourage today’s African American athletes to continue what Obama called the long march of those who come before us. They help all Americans recognize that history is dynamic and incremental. That those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat its mistakes.

Another way of describing the connectedness of past and present activism is to say that it is intersectional. The race, class, sexuality, religion, and gender of any individual or group cannot be separated from each other. They overlap and create, in a society that often lacks respect for those who are different, multiple avenues of discrimination. The journey of African American athlete activism over the last hundred years has been a gradual awakening of black male awareness to the challenges of other forms of bigotry: against all people of color, against women, religious groups, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) community, and those with physical disabilities.

So this book tells the stories not just of Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell and LeBron James, but of tennis stars Venus Williams and Althea Gibson and of Wilma Rudolph, the remarkable track star who overcame poverty and physical disability to become the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympics. Rudolph’s courage in facing down Jim Crow attitudes in her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, was as stirring an example of leadership under pressure as you will find.

History lives. Black Lives Matter takes up the mantle of the sixties civil rights movement. Today’s athletes—more prosperous and more secure than their forebears—stand on the shoulders of the giants of the past. Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the baseball color line was as vital to the civil rights movement as Brown v. Board of Education, just as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s challenges to the white establishment support progressive causes seventy years after Robinson, and Venus Williams’s actions are aimed at equal pay for women and the rights of working mothers.

But let’s not forget that these great athlete activists also happened to be the best in the world at their day jobs. Yes, they were political giants, but they also changed their sports forever on the field and the court, in the ring and the stadium. Louis, Robinson, Bill Russell in basketball, and Jim Brown in football were the kings of their professions, and Serena Williams remains the queen of her sport, tennis. They dominated and innovated. Tommie Smith and John Carlos will always be remembered for raising their fists on the podium during the national anthem after they had won the gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200-meter event at the 1968 Olympics. But their performances in that race were dazzling. Muhammad Ali, though he was robbed of the peak years of his boxing life by a government that refused to accept his intersectional protest to the Vietnam War, still put together a career that proved he was, by far, the greatest boxer, if not the greatest athlete, of all time.

The stories in this book, then, are both inspirational and aspirational. They honor the achievements of these great athletes, but stay mindful of the unnamed many who were denied their dreams because of the legal, cultural, and institutional legacy of racism. They further honor the women and men, white and black, who—though not central figures in this book—nevertheless played key roles in supporting the cause of justice. The sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards of San Jose State mentored Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gave forthright and unflinching advice about race to Major League Baseball and the San Francisco 49ers, and, a half-century after the 1968 Olympics, counseled Colin Kaepernick. Billie Jean King was one of the greatest tennis players of all time, yet she struggled while on top of the tennis world with the establishment’s belief that women players should not receive equal pay. Then, when her sexuality was publicized in 1981 against her will, she lost all of her endorsement deals. Yet discrimination made her more determined, and her crusade for equality never faltered.

No one fights alone. Within the broad tradition of African American athlete activism are specific lines of influence. In the tennis world, Althea Gibson inspired Arthur Ashe, who inspired Venus and Serena Williams. Bill Russell inspired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who inspired LeBron James. Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali…well, they inspired everyone.

This is how leadership works. This is how history works. Individual excellence and individual bravery must take their place in the collective striving for fairness. And in time, the reverberations of the contributions of these athletes, of their courage to fight for what is right, are felt at the highest levels of politics: Look at President Bill Clinton’s friendship with Magic Johnson, Obama’s admiration of Muhammad Ali, and South African president Nelson Mandela’s high regard for Arthur Ashe. There will always be people who revile those with the courage to take a knee. But history vindicates the honest pursuit of justice and the sacrifice of taking a stand. Only in this way will the long march for equality continue.

1

SETTING THE STAGE FOR ACTIVISM

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis

THE WINNERS’ PODIUM at the Olympics is one of the world’s most powerful platforms. It symbolizes victory, patriotism, and peak personal performance. It captures moments, enhanced by precious metals and national anthems, that are profoundly emotional and globally viewed. And, under certain circumstances, it yields iconic images that rise above the world of sports and reverberate in history.

One such moment occurred after Jesse Owens won the long jump final in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the second of four gold medals he would win there. These were the Games that Adolf Hitler assumed would showcase what he believed was Germany’s racial superiority. The day before, however, after Owens won the 100-meter dash with a record-setting performance, Hitler famously left the stadium without shaking his hand—an assumed snub that made the front pages of all major American newspapers. Owens’s performance, the headlines trumpeted, had exposed Hitler’s delusional claims; overnight, the track star became an American hero.

After winning the gold medal and setting a world record in the long jump at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Jesse Owens salutes the American flag while surrounded by athletes and officials making the Nazi salute.

Photographs of Owens’s achievements were wired throughout the world, including one of him on the podium after his long jump victory, respectfully saluting while German officials and silver medalist Luz Long sieg heiled an absent Führer—Hitler had left the stadium yet again. The photo added visual potency to the news of his success: the victor’s laurels encircling his head, the winner’s bouquet in the crook of his left arm, USA emblazoned across his sweatshirt. It was, and remains, an image of individual heroism rising above the mindlessness of fascist subservience.

But history is all about context, and the decades that followed would add nuance to this famous image, as well as enhance our understanding of how to interpret Owens’s success, not only in terms of sports, but also within the ongoing historical conversation about race in America. Thirty-two years later, at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos—African American sprinters who were extending the tradition of Olympic success that Owens initiated—would offer the world an altogether different podium salute.

A very different salute: at the medals ceremony for the 200-meter run at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos raise their gloved fists in protest against racism and social injustice in the US and throughout the world. Peter Norman (left), who took the silver medal, would be poorly treated upon his return to his native Australia after supporting Smith and Carlos.

The Black Power fists that Smith and Carlos raised following their gold- and bronze-medal performances in the 200-meter sprint—while the American national anthem played—had been calmly and carefully considered by these athletes. These gestures were anything but subservient. They were intelligently defiant. The black gloves expressed African American strength and unity. The men also wore black socks and no shoes to symbolize African American poverty, beads to honor the memory of lynching victims, and buttons of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which was working to combat racial segregation in the United States, South Africa, and elsewhere.

Sadly and predictably, the public response to this bold protest was the opposite of what it had been for Owens. International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage demanded that both runners be suspended and moved from the Olympic Village. The American press was scathing. Brent Musburger, at the time a