Safety’s End Racism T-shirt fit all of NFL

As Week 1 of the NFL season kicked off, thousands of players stood together in solidarity in their fight against racism and systemic oppression. Their message – presented on black T-shirts worn as they arrived at stadiums or took the field for pregame warmups – was clear and impossible to distort.

“An injustice against one of us is an injustice against all of us,” the front of the shirts read, printed over the shadowed statement, “One team,” above the logos of the National Football League and NFL Players Association. The backs of the T-shirts read “End Racism,” in big, block letters.

The shirts were the product of a collaboration from Texans safety Michael Thomas, his apparel company and the NFLPA. The NFL, and Nike, which owns exclusive on-field apparel rights, signed off on the project.

Thomas said the mission hit its mark: “It’s one thing if we all had great messages on a teamby-team basis. But, to look up, and on Sunday, to see all of the players from across the league wearing that shirt, it gave me – I don’t even know how to say it. It was surreal. It gave me a feeling that everyone is in this together. It’s a brotherhood in the NFL, but everybody was supporting the message. All of us want to end racism. All of us want true justice in this country.”

The idea was first hatched in late May. Troubled by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Thomas and his fellow players tried to come up with ways to use their resources and platforms to draw attention to the need to further the fight against racism and police brutality against people of color.

That’s when Thomas got a call from Dior Ginyard, who works in player engagement for the NFLPA. Thomas had previously been working with the NFLPA to obtain licensing for the apparel company he had started about a year ago in his hometown of Aldine, Texas. Ginyard asked Thomas about designing shirts for NFL players to wear as a sign of unity once the season kicked off. Thomas – a nine-year veteran who signed with the Texans this offseason and also serves as a member of the NFLPA’s executive committee – went to work. He consulted with his business associates and new teammate Kenny Stills, an outspoken player-activist who had kneeled during the national anthem alongside Thomas in 2016, when the two played on the Dolphins. Thomas and Stills went back and forth about the T-shirt messaging.

Originally, they considered shirts that would read, “Am I next?” But Thomas, Ginyard, and Vogue Wilborn, one of the NFLPA’s designers, wondered if the message was “too aggressive.”

“A white guy might not feel comfortable wearing that, because obviously, ‘Am I next?’ didn’t really apply,” Thomas said.

The team settled on the “End Racism” message.

“It was very clear,” Thomas said. “There was no reading between the lines and trying to figure out what message we were trying to put out. No. It reads very clear. ‘An injustice against one of us is an injustice against all of us. End racism.’ There was nothing people could try to take and use to their own narrative, and it kept us true to the movement and it spoke directly to what we were trying to do. It was very intentional.”

In advance of Sunday’s opener, 3,500 T-shirts were distributed to NFL players.

“I love the fact that all the players actually liked the shirts and wore them,” Thomas said. “It also was well received by fans. You know, the ones who are going to comment or anything, as you saw in Kansas City when they booed us just for locking arms, there’s going to be that crowd anyway. But for anybody else who’s following the movement and understanding what we were trying to do, they found it unifying.

“Obviously, wearing Tshirts isn’t enough,” added Thomas, who has joined other players in continuing to lobby lawmakers for police reform while also heavily investing time and resources in voters’ rights initiatives and education. “Wearing T-shirts, that’s not the objective. But it does allow us to be visible and it was clear that, yes, we have to go back to work, and yes, we have a job to do. But we understand what’s going on in our country – Black, white, Hispanic – we all understand that color doesn’t matter. We all see it and we’re all trying to fight for the whole thing.”