Memphis 1968 has lessons for today’s university athletes
LABOUR INJUSTICES STILL RIFE
They wanted recognition of their right to unionize, which they’d done. They wanted their labour commensurately compensated rather than leaving them at the poverty line, or below.
They wanted what compensation they did receive protected against the whims of bosses who often took it away at the slightest perceived transgression. They wanted health-care benefits, pensions and vacations.
So most of the 1,300 black men who buttressed the Memphis sanitation department went on strike in February 1968. A month later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined them. In April there, King was shot and killed.
The newest college football championship coach, Dabo Swinney, didn’t sound aware of King’s last stand when at the start of the season he invoked King’s name to criticize San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s method of protesting police brutality against black men — kneeling during the national anthem. Swinney, the Clemson coach, recalled King, whose birthday this nation recognizes Monday, changing the world through “love ... peace ... education ... Jesus.”
What roils college sports today, where mostly well-paid white management lives off the sweat and blood of poorly remunerated predominantly black male labour, echoes the concerns of those striking Memphis sanitation workers King embraced early in 1968.
Take, for example, a study from Drexel University that estimated how much college football and basketball players are worth to their institutions and how poorly what remuneration they do get provides them to live. The Drexel study estimated that college athletic scholarships left well over 80 per cent of recipients living below the federal poverty line despite having an average fair market value to their schools between $120,000 and $265,000.
But the lack of equitability in college sports is beyond a mere paycheque. Like the workers tasked with keeping Memphis clean, the brief livelihoods on college campuses by athletes often are not protected against managers — i. e. coaches — who control their scholarships, influence which classes they can take and can refuse their wish to transfer to another school if they decide the one they’re at is no longer in their best interest. The past few years, some colleges and conferences, like Maryland and its Big Ten association, began guaran- teeing athletic scholarships for all athletes as long as they stay in good academic standing.
That was one of the main reasons college football players at my alma mater, Northwestern, tried to get recognized as a union a few years ago. Though the National Labor Relations Board ultimately denied them, that same board last summer reversed an old ruling on its part from a Brown University case. It had used that decision to reject Northwestern’s unionization attempt. But now it recognizes that graduate students who do research and teach — contributing to the higher education corporation — should be treated as university employees, which removes the argument of education as remittance for the reason why college athletes can’t be viewed as the same.
And among the primary demands of the Northwestern unionization effort, as borrowed from the National College Players Association that has been advocating for college athletes for years, are better health- care benefits, just like the Memphis trash collectors who King rallied around. After all, CTE, the brain disease costing so many professional football players the ability to live post-sports lives in good mental and emotional health, doesn’t start with the first NFL practice. College athletes suffer it, too. They suffer broken bones. And worn- down bodies. They don’t deserve to have to pay out of pocket for the sports-related injuries that linger throughout their lives.
Sports were little more than a footnote in King’s life. He met with Muhammad Ali in March 1967 in Ali’s hometown of Louisville during Ali’s forced exile from the boxing ring because of his strident opposition to the Vietnam War, and, not coincidentally, gave his seminal public speech denouncing the U.S.’s incursion in Southeast Asia shortly thereafter.
In December 1967, King joined a meeting in New York organized by black sociologist Harry Edwards and several black aspiring Olympians who demanded Ali’s boxing licence be restored, U. S. Olympic boss Avery Brundage be sacked because of his dictatorial style and bigoted pronouncements, and the U.S. Olympic team hire more black coaches.
King didn’ t support those struggles because they were in sport anymore than he turned up for the Memphis sanitation workers because they were public employees. He engaged with them because of his oft-repeated belief that injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere. Not recognizing college athletes as other labour is just that.