appears in today’s New York Times. It was written by Georgetown University profession Michael Eric Dyson and is titled Famous Athletes Have Always Led the Way, and is illustrated with the famous photo from the 1968 Olympics of Tommy Smith and John Carlos with raised gloved fists on the medal podium, which is relevant to the column. Dyson starts with the criticism of others towards Kaepernick for his kneeling:
He’s disrespecting the flag. He’s slighting veterans. He’s showing contempt for the national anthem. He’s not a true patriot.
and places it in the larger context of
These and other charges rain down on those who dare challenge the nation to do better by blacks.
then reminding us of the words expressed by Brent Musburger towards Smith and Carlos after their protest, when he called them
“black-skinned storm troopers.”
Dyson takes a different view:
There’s another criticism reserved for the black celebrity: That their wealth and fame mean they have little to complain about, and when they speak up, they’re being ungrateful for the privileges they enjoy. But that’s just the point. At their best, the black blessed have always spoken up for the black beleaguered.
He tells us
You don’t get to be a sports fan — to enjoy the spectacle of black excellence — and look away from what these athletes demand.
and reminds us of the issue which led Kaepernick to his action, the killing of unarmed Black men by police — and remember, as of yet no policeman has been convicted of a crime in ANY of the recent incidents.
What gives this column its power is what follows this introductory material. Consider the next three paragraphs, which blew me away when I read them:
“You’ll never know how easy you and Jackie and Doby and Campy made it for me to do my job by what you did on the baseball field,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said to the baseball superstar Don Newcombe — speaking of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella — a few weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
Newcombe was humbled, he told a reporter. “Imagine, here is Martin getting beaten with billy clubs, bitten by dogs and thrown in jail, and he says we made his job easier.”
Americans who are angry with Kaepernick often forget how black entertainers and athletes have used their fame to break down barriers of discrimination. Ray Charles helped to desegregate concert halls; Jackie Robinson integrated an entire sports league. Entertainers and athletes also helped to combat fear of black culture.
Here I stop and reflect. Most of my 20+ years of teaching have been in majority black schools Only 4 years were not. In several cases I have been among a handful of Caucasians in the building, counting all — students, faculty, staff. Going well beyond that, much of the music to which I listened growing up was from African Americans, whether it was being introduced to calypso by Harry Belafonte (another Black performer to whom the last of the three paragraphs above applies), the many artists from the doo-wop tradition, jazz performers like Dizzy and Miles and Ornette Coleman and Ellington and Hampton and others, and most of all Ray Charles including his crossing over with two albums of modern sounds of Country and Western When I first recognized segregation and discrimination on a trip to Miami Beach in 1956, it made me someone committed to Civil Rights in all of its manifestations and necessities.
And yes — athletes often led the way. In the movie 42 starring Chadwick Bozeman as Jackie Robinson and Harrison Ford as Walter O’Malley, the latter tells the former of little white boys copying Jackie’s pigeon-toed stance as an illustration of the affect upon the larger white culture that Robinson was having.
Dyson tells us that
The billy club and the baseball bat were competing weapons in the war for the mind of white America
but that it became increasingly impossible for both to occupy the same space, and that
The preservation of a society that prevented more black people from thriving ran headlong into an appreciation for the athletic gifts — and, by extension, the humanity — of black people.
and that the athletes offered an easy lesson:
Give black folk a chance, treat us fairly, make one set of rules for us all to abide by, and we will do well.
one set of rules for us all to abide by
Sadly, that has never been true, and even before the election of Trump there were increasing signs that we were moving away from such a basic principle of decency and fairness.
Athletes like those that King admired, like Smith and Carlos, like Kaepernick and others today including superstars like Lebron James,
saw the contradiction between American ideals of fairness and justice and their arbitrary application to people of color. A black person had to be a superstar athlete and beloved icon to enjoy only some of the perks that many white people could take for granted at birth.
And yet one could be a superstar and still face the hatred that seemed only directed towards Black players: here I think of Richie Allen having his dogs killed while he was playing for the Phillies.
There is much more in this rich column. Dyson writes about how Kaepernick and his fellow kneelers are inspiring young people — I saw it less than ten days ago when during the singing of the Star Spangled banner at our homecoming pep-rally several dozen students themselves knelt. He writes about white men of power who are now speaking out — Stan Van Gundy, Gregg Popovich, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank.
That leads to Dyson’s closing paragraph, upon which I urge all to reflect:
These men, united by a sports world that is fueled in many ways by black excellence, are patriots, true lovers of democracy, who want to see substantive social change. That cannot happen without agitation and resistance, without protest and uncomfortable moments of reckoning. Kaepernick’s legacy resides far beyond the gridiron he deserves to play on; it lives in the spiral of social awareness and public conscience that his protest has unleashed.
I agree.
What about you?