MISSOURI REVISITED.
In recent days, we’ve seen two black men in vastly different parts of our country die by police officers’ pistols. We’ve dealt with the shooting deaths of five police officers at a once-peaceful protest in Dallas.
Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and those officers have caught the nation’s attention. They’ve stirred debate about the state of policing and the value, or lack thereof, placed on black men’s lives.
Athletes, some of our society’s most powerful influences, have offered their thoughts and prayers on social media. They’ve blasted their thoughts to fans who hail from vastly different economic, social, geographical and racial spheres.
Sports can make people who otherwise might not care about racial injustice start to pay attention.
I’ve seen it happen.
Making a difference
I’m a sports reporting intern for the Chronicle and a rising senior at the University of Missouri-Columbia. This past fall, Concerned Student 1950, a student activist group that can trace some of its roots to the Ferguson, Mo., protests that followed the death of Michael Brown, issued a list of demands to the university’s administration.
The goal of the demands was to help fix the racial injustice and inequality perceived on campus. The group called for the removal of then-University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe, whom it viewed as exercising “gross negligence.”
On Nov. 2, one of the group’s leaders, Jonathan Butler, began a hunger strike he said wouldn’t end until Wolfe was no longer president. Minimal dialogue between the parties occurred. Little progress happened. There was minimal national media attention.
On Nov. 7, a Saturday, 30 black Missouri football players announced they would boycott football-related activities until Wolfe was no longer in office. By Monday, after the entire team announced it would stand in solidarity with those players and international media swarmed the university, Wolfe and then-Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigned. The hunger strike ended. The Tigers missed one practice.
“I just feel like, with particular issues, with us being athletes, it’s our duty to show the students that we’re more than just athletes, that we are students like everybody else,” said Missouri receiver J’Mon Moore, a graduate of Elkins High School and one of the leaders of the boycott. “We do have a word. We do have a say-so on the things going on outside of football.”
Missouri was 4-5 at the time of the boycott. The Tigers were set to play a non-conference opponent, Brigham Young University, in Kansas City.
Was it disappointing that the attention created by a football team possibly forfeiting a game — and not the possible death of a graduate student — is what ultimately put pressure on Wolfe to step down? Yes. Was it surprising? Nope. After Wolfe announced his resignation, Concerned Student 1950 celebrated on the quad it’d camped out on for a week. Players danced with members. They chanted. Circled around them was more than a quarter-mile worth of people locked arm in arm. Some of these supporters were around before the football players’ involvement. Many others weren’t.
It wasn’t until the football team boycotted that Concerned Student 1950 became the central topic of practically every conversation in Columbia.
Shared experience
Many of the biggest stars in American sports are black men, the demographic that has been at the center of many high-profile, officer-involved shootings.
It didn’t matter that, as athletes, the black Missouri football players experienced more privileged lives than non-athlete black students on the Missouri campus. And it doesn’t matter that some of sports’ biggest stars, people such as LeBron James, James Harden and Cam Newton, are now wealthy and, seemingly, free of some of the institutionalized forms of racism minorities encounter each day.
As a reporter covering the Missouri protest, I learned these athletes can empathize: Even if they don’t feel as oppressed as other black citizens by the time they’ve achieved fame and glory, they likely did at one point.
“If the worlds of the average black students and the black athletes in the football program were as distinct and separate — with the black athlete not being subject to what black students were talking about — the black athlete wouldn’t even understand when they approached them,” Dr. Harry Edwards, a pioneer of the sociology of sport, said soon after the Missouri boycott. “It was the common shared experience (that the athletes identified with), and anyone who doesn’t face that fact is fooling themselves.”
Speaking out
Friday, New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony used Instagram to make an impassioned plea. He asked for more athletes to take stands like the ones the Missouri football players did.
“I’m calling for all my fellow ATHLETES to step up and take charge,” Anthony wrote in the caption of a photo of Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor and other black athletes at a 1967 news conference pertaining to Ali’s decision to be a conscientious objector. “Go to your local officials, leaders, congressman, assemblymen/assemblywoman and demand change. There’s NO more sitting back and being afraid of tackling and addressing political issues anymore. Those days are long gone. We have to step up and take charge. We can’t worry about what endorsements we gonna lose or whose going to look at us crazy. I need your voices to be heard. We can demand change. We just have to be willing to. THE TIME IS NOW. IM all in. Take Charge. Take Action. DEMAND CHANGE.”
Sports are too big of a business today for lawmakers, administrators and bureaucrats to call athletes’ bluffs.
In 1969, a group of black Wyoming football players, now known as the Wyoming Black 14, lost their spots on the team after they asked to wear black armbands during a game against BYU. The armbands were a form of protest against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ then-policy preventing black men from being priests.
Forty-six years later, a losing college football team helped remove its university’s top administrator.