Taking A Knee: Athlete Activism

In our final episode, Matt Andrews explores how athletes have protested in the modern era, from Craig Hodges' direct plea to President Bush to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem. Those protests, just like similar ones before it, were criticized by some Americans who told those athletes to "shut up and dribble." 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,

(00:26):
and we're back on the Untold History of Sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Sad to tell you, folks,
this is our last episode, so soak it in. I'm
gonna miss bringing you history every week, and I hope
you'll miss hearing my sultry tones in your headphones. We
got a special thing going you and I. But part

(00:47):
of the journey, of course, is the end. Today, on
our final episode, will be discussing players in the modern
era of sports and their obligations to their social conscious.
Whether or not a social conscious has a place in
sports is seemingly always up for debate, but let's hear
what Matt thinks about it. Last time, we traced the

(01:09):
links between sports and patriotism and militarism, and I ended
with the story of Pat Tillman, a man celebrated for
his athleticism and his military service, and the strong, silent
American who answered the call of duty both on and
off the field. Today, we explore a group of athletes
that some Americans considered The opposite of Pat Tillman today

(01:32):
is the story of athletes who use sporting arenas for
political protest to critique the United States. Now, some people
consider protests to be the height of patriotism. Others consider
it to be the exact opposite. It's un American, especially
when during the playing of the national anthem. As a nation,

(01:52):
we seem pretty divided over this. But the most prominent
and controversial of these protesting athletes was the San Francisco
forty Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who started taking an as
they called it, in NFL stadiums as a way to
protest racism and police violence. This lecture pivots around Kaepernick.

(02:14):
I want to tell you what he did and why
he did it. Maybe you agree with it, maybe you don't.
But I want to give you both the backstory and
talk about what has happened after Kaepernick. So let's start
with that larger backstory. I'm gonna go back a little bit.
You know last time when we were discussing rebellious American athletes.
I suppose it was when we explored Muhammad Ali and

(02:36):
Tommy Smith and John Carlos in the nineteen sixties, using
their platform as athletes to illuminate their grievances about race.
And then of course we discussed Billy Gene King and
the way she used her tennis stardom to critique sexism
in sports and the wider American society. Now, I'm painting
in very broad strokes here, but broadly speaking, that spirit

(02:58):
of athlete activism it went away in the late seventies
and nineteen eighties as athletes were starting to make more money,
they were learning to be silent and protect their brand.
This was an idea we talked about with Michael Jordan's
But in the early nineteen nineties there was an interesting
moment involving one of Michael Jordan's teammates on the Chicago Bulls,

(03:19):
and it's a moment that I'm going to use because
it reminds us that the activist spirit was not entirely dead,
but it also illuminates the cost of that activism. Craig
Hodges was a shooting guard on the Chicago Bulls in
the eighties and the early nineteen nineties. He was an
outstanding three point shooter and he was a key member

(03:41):
of those early Michael Jordan led Bulls teams that won
three consecutive NBA titles in the early nineteen nineties. Craig
Hodges was from Chicago. He had grown up amid poverty
in Chicago. He had witnessed violence by police officers against
black Americans in Chicago and in He wanted to speak

(04:01):
out against this poverty and this violence by using basketball.
NBA Finals matched Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls and Magic Johnson's
Los Angeles Lakers, and Game one was in Chicago, and
the day before the game, Hodges met with both Michael
Jordan and Magic Johnson and he suggested that they all

(04:24):
boycott the game. This game was being played just a
few months after Rodney King had been beaten by four
policemen in Los Angeles. In March, a video captured four
white police officers beating a black motorist, Rodney King. King
ended up in the hospital with a fractured orbital bone,
of broken ankle, numerous lacerations. This was a new phenomenon

(04:48):
in American history. That is a video showing what black
Americans had been saying for decades, we are the victims
of police brutality. Well, the NBA Finals were three months
after this Game one was being played in a state Illinois,
in which of the black population live below the poverty line,

(05:10):
no one is taking these issues seriously. Craig Hodges told
Magic and Michael, so let's illuminate these problems and start
a dialogue by boycotting game one. Now, according to Craig Hodges,
Michael Jordan's told him that he was crazy. Magic Johnson
was a little more receptive but told Hodges it's too extreme.

(05:33):
Nothing happened in the game. In series was played, the
Bulls won, but Craig Hodges regretted his inaction. He felt
as if his generation was more concerned with economic gain
than creating a unified movement and speaking out against injustice,
so the next year he decided to act. The next year,

(05:57):
after the Chicago Bulls won the NBA title again, the
team visited George H. W. Bush at the White House
and Craig Hodges stood out that day wearing an og bada,
a West African garb that became semi popular in the
United States during the Black Power era. Wearing an agbada

(06:18):
or adeshiki was a statement of Pan African identity and pride.
So Craig Hodges was there at the White House and
he shot a few jumpers with the President. The newspapers
tell me that wearing that agbada, he was nine for nine.
And then as he and his teammates left the White House,
he gave President Bush a handwritten letter. And here's how

(06:39):
that letter began. The purpose of this note is to
speak on behalf of the poor people, Native Americans, homeless,
and most specifically the African Americans who are not able
to come to this great edifice and meet the leader
of the nation where they live. This letter is not
begging for anything, but three hundred years of free slave

(07:01):
labor has left the African American community destroyed. It is
time for a comprehensive plan for change. Hopefully this letter
will help become a boost in the unification of inner
city youth and these issues will be brought to the
forefront of the domestic agenda. So Craig Hodges was using

(07:21):
this visit as a celebrated basketball player to urge the
President toward action to do something to save what he
called later in this letter an endangered species, young black
men in the inner city. I actually just reading it now,
don't think it's a particularly controversial or antagonistic letter. But

(07:43):
the Chicago Bulls were embarrassed by Craig Hodges. They were
embarrassed by what he wore that day and by him
giving the president that letter. His contract was up and
the Bulls did not resign him. And even though Craig
Hodges was the best three point shooter in the n
b A, no team signed him. Craig Hodges never laid

(08:05):
in the NBA again. There were severe consequences for his actions. Well,
this was more or less how it went for the
next couple of decades. I'm not saying no athlete ever
spoke up about any issue. Some did. The basketball player
mcmur ab du Ralf, the collegiate basketball player Tony Smith,

(08:27):
He and she they used the national anthem to make
statements of opposition against the American war in Iraq. But
a tipping point clearly came in two thousand and twelve.
In February of two thousand and twelve, a seventeen year
old named Trayvon Martin was walking back to a home

(08:48):
he was visiting in a neighborhood in Sanford, Florida, and
a resident of this neighborhood, George Zimmerman, he saw Trayvon
Martin walking and He immediately called the police and reported
that a black man in a hoodie was walking through
his neighborhood. George Zimmerman told the police dispatcher that he
assumed Trayvon Martin was a criminal. Zimmerman got out of

(09:10):
his car and confronted Trayvon Martin, and exactly what happened
next is in dispute, but what we know for certain
is that George Zimmerman had a gun, Trayvon Martin did not,
and George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. In response,
the NBA star Lebron James and other members of the

(09:32):
Miami Heat they took to Instagram and they posed in
their hoodies, heads bowed in remembrance of Trayvon Martin. This
was a statement that being black and wearing a hoodie
should not be considered a crime. It should not mark
you as a criminal and get you killed. Then came Ferguson.

(09:52):
Michael Brown was an unarmed black man who was shot
and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri,
in August. Witnesses said that Brown had put up his
hands in the air in an act of surren under
and yelled, don't shoot right before he was shot and killed.
One week later, members of the St. Louis Rams they

(10:13):
came out of the tunnel during pregame introductions and gave
the hands up don't shoot sign, you know, hands over
the head. This was becoming a gesture of protest against
what critics were calling police brutality and a devaluing of
black lives. It was actually out of these protests of
the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson that the Black

(10:34):
Lives Matter movement began to pick up steam and gained
international attention. That same year, police officers in New York
City approached Eric Garner. They were questioning him about selling
single cigarettes on the street. Eric Garner was unarmed, but
police officers put him in a chokehold, and in videos

(10:56):
that surfaced a few months later, Garner could be heard
pleading with the officers, saying I can't breathe as he
lost consciousness. He was pronounced dead one hour later. In response,
professional athletes like NBA stars Derek Rose and Lebron James
and Kyrie Irving. They wore t shirts with Garner's last words,

(11:19):
I can't breathe printed on them, The message being all
of this violence is suffocating. Now, the fact that Lebron
James was involved in these moments, I think it's interesting.
Lebron James was the consensus best player in the NBA
in that decade, and I can't speak to the precise

(11:40):
reasons for Lebron's activism, but I suspect it must partially
be a reaction to what happened to him in the
summer of that summer. Lebron James was the two time
reigning m v P of the league, but he was
also a free agent and there was feverish debate about
where he would go, and most people assume he was

(12:02):
going to stay with the Cleveland Cavaliers, his home town
team and a team that had drafted him straight out
of high school. But in a televised ESPN special known
as The Decision, Lebron announced that he was quote taking
his talents to South Beach. He was leaving the Cavaliers
as was his contractual right, and he was going to

(12:23):
the Miami Heat. And this decision provoked outrage and and
condemnation in Cleveland. Fans burned Lebron's jersey. This is more
or less when that curious tradition started, the owner of
the Cleveland Cavaliers, Dan Gilbert. He called Lebron's decision quote

(12:44):
a shameful display of selfishness and betrayal. He called it,
quote a shocking act of disloyalty. Now, let's be clear,
Dan Gilbert cut players all the time. Dan Gilbert did
not renew player contracts every year, as was his contractual right,
that's the business of the n b A. But when

(13:07):
Lebron did it to him, he was shockingly disloyal. There
was a national argument about this. Jesse Jackson weighed in
and said Dan Gilbert had a slaveholder's mentality. And we
could talk all day about the optics of Lebron's decision,
we could talk about the claims and the and the

(13:28):
rhetoric of Jesse Jackson, but clearly the backlash to this
decision affected Lebron James. You know, here he was a
young black man exercising his freedom, you know, taking control
of his life and doing what he thought was best
for him, and he was pilloried for doing so. People
were outraged, and the harsh reaction to him exercising his

(13:52):
free agency, I assume it made him more willing to
speak up and be heard, so he donned the hoodie.
When Trayvon Martin was killed, he wore the I Can't
Breathe shirt in remembrance of Eric Garner. And then the
stories and the videos they just kept coming. I mean,
this was partly the result of the sudden proliferation of

(14:14):
cell phones, which are portable recording devices which we all
have in our pockets. There was twelve year old Tamir
Rice shot and killed in Cleveland, Freddie Gray died in
police custody in Baltimore, Keith Lamont Scott shot dead in Charlotte.
Every month seemingly a new incident, many of them captured

(14:34):
on video. And I am not here today to adjudicate
all of these moments, but they all ended with a
black man or or a kid who was dead, and
usually a white police officer who was at the other
end of the gun and not charged with a crime.
After the break, Colin Kaepernick takes a knee. This is

(15:13):
when another athlete, the San Francisco forty Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick,
got involved. And there was more to this story than
most people seem to know. Beginning with the forty Niners
preseason games in st Colin Kaepernick would remain seated on
the bench during the national anthem, and his actions received

(15:34):
very little attention at first him just sitting there, but
they did receive the attention of Nate Boyer. Boyer was
a former Green Beret. He had served in both Iraq
and Afghanistan, and then he briefly played in the NFL.
He was a long snapper for the Seattle Seahawks, and
Nate Boyer wrote Colin Kaepernick a letter and he defended

(15:57):
Kaepernick's right to sit during the anthem. He he acknowledged
the persistent problem of race in the United States, but
he also explained to Kaepernick why his sitting offended him
as a veteran, and the two began a dialogue with
each other, and Kaepernick explained to Boyer that his intention
was not to offend veterans, but that he felt unable

(16:20):
to stand and celebrate the words of the anthem when
he felt black Americans were not free, and Nate Boyer
said he understood, and so he suggested to Kaepernick that
he kneeled during the anthem. He said, kneeling is more
appropriate in most religions. Kneeling is an act of humility.
Kneeling is a way of humbling oneself before forces that

(16:44):
are bigger than you are. And Kaepernick found this idea intriguing.
This was one of the ideas he wanted to convey
that this was not about him. He was interacting with
forces and issues much more important than football. So he kneeled,
but kneeling was more obvious. Kneeling put him more out

(17:06):
in the open, and so people noticed, I mean, boy,
did they notice. Reporters surrounded his locker and then they
asked Kaepernick what does it mean? And Kaepernick was very clear.
Here's what he said. I am not going to stand
up to show pride in a flag for a country
that oppresses black people and people of color. To me,

(17:28):
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. That's what he said. So this
was a critique of racism and police brutality, but murder
as he saw it, and it was a statement that
as a high profile professional athlete, he had an obligation

(17:51):
to use his fame to educate, to illuminate a problem.
Agree with what he did, disagree whatever. That's why he
did it, and national opinion was exactly that. It was split.
Some praised and thank Kaepernick for his convictions, for risking
his career to illuminate a problem, like Ali had done

(18:13):
with the Vietnam War in nineteen sixty seven. Others saw
his gesture like many had seen what Smith and Carlos
had done in ninety eight. They saw it as immature, offensive, ungrateful, unpatriotic.
His jersey was burned even by forty Niners fans. Taking

(18:34):
a knee became shorthand for making a public statement that
you were aligning yourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement.
It is a statement that you believe that racial injustice
and violence remains at an epidemic level. And a lot
of athletes started doing maybe I should say a lot,
but some athletes started doing it. And it's the players

(18:56):
in the w n b A, the Women's National Basketball Association,
who were taking a knee in the largest numbers. Why
NBA players w NBA players, they had wore those shirts
with social justice messages on them. But unlike NBA players,
the players in the w NBA, they began locking arms

(19:18):
and taking a knee to align themselves with Kaepernick's message
to challenge Americans to listen to the words of the
national anthem and ask if Americans were living up to
those ideals. You know, one w NBA player, Maya Moore,
a superstar, she stepped away from basketball entirely to devote

(19:39):
her life to the issue of misconduct by prosecutors. She
raised awareness and raised funds for Jonathan Irons, a black
man who had served twenty two years in prison for
a crime he likely did not commit. Key evidence that
likely would have exonerated him had been withheld in his trial.
Maya Moore walked away from professional basketball to fight for

(20:02):
his release, and her efforts got Irons released from prison,
and the two are actually now married. But whether it
was wearing t shirts with social justice messages, or taking
a knee during the national anthem, or using Twitter to
critique Donald Trump and his policies, you know, some Americans

(20:23):
were getting very tired of athletes using sports to get
their message across. In the Fox News host Laura Ingram,
she told Lebron James to quote, shut up and dribble.
This was a sentiment that was forged out of the
culture wars of our contemporary era, but it was also

(20:43):
a sentiment that we saw way back with Muhammad Ali.
Athletes are to be seen and not heard. Athletes are
prized for their bodies and not their mouths. So just
shut up and dribble. And then came the summer of
which was the summer of COVID and and so many
other things. In May of any the NBA and the

(21:06):
w n B a all professional sports. They were on
hiatus due to COVID when the video of a white
police officer killing George Floyd's surfaced, and this came right
after news of the killing of Brianna Taylor. Brianna Taylor
was a medical worker who was shot and killed by
Louisville police officers in March of during a botched raid

(21:28):
on her apartment. NBA and w NBA players are members
of the community, and they were not playing basketball at
this time because of the pandemic. So many of them
were part of the marches and the and the protests
against these killings. They were among the voices insisting that
black lives matter and justice needed to be served in

(21:50):
these cases. But then the NBA and the w NBA
called their players back to work. They were called to
Orlando to Disney World to play basketball in the so
called bubble, where they would be isolated. Kyrie Irving was
an All Star guard and the vice president of the
NBA Players Union, and he made the argument that playing

(22:12):
in the bubble would be a distraction and a disservice
to the mass movements in the streets following the death
of George Floyd. He and some others made the argument
that playing basketball would shift the focus from illuminating racism
and police violence um to who did what in last
night's game. This argument did not carry the day. Players

(22:35):
like Lebron James and the union president Chris Paul. They
argued that they could do more to raise awareness about
racial inequity if they were actually played basketball. They could
use their fame as players to illuminate these issues, and
the NBA and the w NBA higher ups, the league office,
and the team owners, they aligned themselves with the players here.

(22:58):
They added the words black lives Matter to the court.
They allowed players to choose from a pre arranged selection
of racial justice slogans they could put these on their uniforms.
They defended the players and coaches when they took a
knee during the national anthem. This was a pretty radical
moment in American sport history. Maybe it's meaningful. Um, maybe

(23:22):
this is less meaningful than being in your community. I
think it's an interesting and fair question. No, I for one,
certainly wanted my basketball back. But the optics of it
all happening in the fantasy land known as Disney World,
it did seem a little bit like these men and
women were packed away in a snow globe while the
rest of the world raged around them. Well, the snow

(23:46):
globe cracked and almost broke open entirely in August, when
yet another video surfaced, video of police in Kenosha, Wisconsin,
shooting an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake in the back.
Speaking about being in the bubble, George Hill of the
Milwaukee Bucks set in frustration. We shouldn't have even come

(24:09):
to this damn place, to be honest, and that frustration
led to the Milwaukee Bucks postponing a playoff game going
on strike for racial justice, and it led to a
cascade of strikes across the sports landscape. At the w
NBA stopped, Major League Baseball stopped the NHL playoffs in

(24:31):
Major League Soccer took a pause. So many things happened
so quickly. But I think fifty years from now, just
as we look back over fifty years ago to the
moment when Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their fists,
I think we will look back to this moment in
August of and say this was a moment when many

(24:53):
things changed. Not everything, but many things. And here's why
I think we will say this. The NBA and w
NBA players refused to go back to work until their
team owners pledged to open their arenas for voters in
the upcoming presidential election. So this was concrete action and

(25:16):
more than this, And this may be the most symbolic
and significant story of all. And I do not mean
this in a partisan or personally political sense. I just
mean that this moment literally changed the course of this nation.
It changed American history. In a story that I think
combines all of the themes we've been talking about today,

(25:40):
the w NBA players went after one of their team owners.
Kelly Leffler, was a Republican senator from Georgia, and she
was also one of the owners of the w NBA's
Atlanta Dream and she openly criticized her league's decision to
embrace and use the phrase black lives matter. She called

(26:03):
the black Lives Matter movement an anti police, anti church,
anti family, and anti American, and instead of the phrase
black lives matter, she said the w NBA should put
the American flag on its court and uniforms, and her
players rebelled against her. They started campaigning for one of

(26:25):
her potential opponents, Rafael Warnock, a black minister from Atlanta.
He was the minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same
church that Martin Luther King Jr. Had been a minister.
Poles said that Warnock was in fourth place in that
Senate race, and then the w NBA players, through their
support behind him. They ended up stumping for him, and

(26:49):
Warnock ended up defeating Kelly Leffler in that Senate race.
And this was the race that flipped the Senate from
Republican controlled to Democrat controlled. And again, I do not
say this in a partisan sense. I say it as
a historian of a American sport. I do not think
there has ever been a more obvious link between athlete

(27:11):
activism and concrete, measurable political change in the history of
the United States. That is the moment. So I want
to beld off all of this and wrap up our course.
When Colin Kaepernick started taking a knee in NFL stadiums

(27:32):
in team, there was a lot of outrage and many
arguments offered against it, and I think we could have
a dialogue about this. But there was one argument out
there that I'd like to address. It came from the
former NFL quarterback and CBS football analyst Boomera Siasin, who
said the following about Colin Kaepernick. Quote, I cannot say

(27:56):
it in the strongest, most direct way that it's an
embarrassment and it's about as disrespectful as any athlete has
ever been. And I don't care what the causes. The
NFL football field is not a place for someone to
further their political ambitions. End quote. In other words, no

(28:16):
matter the issue, no matter how right you may be
or wrong, the football field, the sporting arena is not
the place for politics. Now, I'm tempted to say, okay, boomer,
but as a historian of American sports, this is an
argument that I'd like to actually respond to. When Boomer A.

(28:38):
Siasin says that the football field the sports arena is
not a place for politics, he's just wrong. As we
have discussed in this course. Sporting spaces have been political
from the start. They were spaces where the upper class
broadcast their supposed superiority to the laboring classes. Sporting arenas

(29:00):
were spaces to articulate ideas about whiteness and blackness and
race of hierarchies, and places to counter those ideas. They
are spaces where we as a nation have debated feminism
and gender equality. They are the spaces where the American
ideals in the democratic system were trumpeted against Soviet Communism.

(29:22):
Football players and other athletes have been used to sell
wars like the war in Iraq to the American people
for decades. As an NFL veteran, boomer As Siasin was
part of those very political displays. After September eleven. They
were a rallying space for impending militarism. Never mind whether
you were for or against the war, your sports were

(29:42):
part of the government's foreign policy project. So look, you
can agree or disagree with Colin Kaepernick's message, You can
agree or disagree with his using the anthem for his protest.
But if Boomera A. Siasin thinks that sporting arenas are
not spaces for politics, he just is not paying attention.

(30:05):
So I'd like to thank you for your attention and
being willing to consider all of these issues with me.
I am hopeful that you found our discussions interesting, um
and enjoyable, and I am hopeful that you think about
sports at least a little bit differently than when we begin.

(30:29):
That's it. It's over for Professor Matt Andrews. I'm Mike Coscarelli.
Maybe you'll hear from us again sometime soon. School of

(30:51):
Humans