NFL honours King at its convenience
The Super Bowl has returned to Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown and, all week in Atlanta, the NFL will lean heavily on the slain civil rights leader’s legacy.
Tuesday morning, an NFL Network reporter recorded a standup outside Ebenezer Baptist Church, which served as King’s home base. Later in February, the league will partner with the Ross Initiative on Sports Equality for a three-day social justice workshop at Morehouse College, King’s alma mater. And all week the league will undertake community service projects seeking to position the NFL at the nexus of sport and social change.
Indeed, in 1991, NFL owners voted to move the Super Bowl, scheduled for January 1993 in Phoenix, rather than stage their biggest event in Arizona, where voters had just rejected a bill that would have made King’s birthday a holiday.
But the spectre of MLK also highlights the vast gap between the civil rights icon’s famous dream and NFL reality, where team owners rally behind right-wing political causes, where pro-Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick remains unemployed and where, as of Super Bowl week, the number of African-American head coaches had dwindled to two.
Nobody has argued that Kaepernick’s prolonged estrangement from the NFL owes to the Colour of His Skin — after all, more than 70 per cent of NFL players identify as Black. But watching teams audition less-accomplished pivots hints that something besides merit keeps athlete/activist Kaepernick out of the NFL’s pool of eligible quarterbacks. That scenario can’t coexist easily with King’s call to judge people by the Content of Their Character, yet it persists even as the NFL amplifies King’s message of social change.
Nor does the roll call of current NFL head coaches resemble the racially integrated America that King envisioned and risked his life fighting for.
Twelve years ago, Tony Dungy’s Indianapolis Colts defeated Lovie Smith’s Chicago Bears in the only Super Bowl to feature two African-American head coaches. But five of the seven African-American head coaches who began the 2018 season have been fired, while white men account for all six of the league’s recent coaching hires.
That demographic shift might reflect hiring networks more than outright discrimination, but it doesn’t mean Black candidates receive equal treatment. The NFL requires teams to interview at least one nonwhite applicant for each coaching opening, but this winter’s hirings show how toothless the Rooney Rule can become when matched against entrenched networks composed of white owners and white coaches.
But King himself wasn’t an athlete, he understood the role sports could play in the broader civil rights movement, and it’s doubtful that the unblackening of the NFL’s head coaching fraternity would square with his idea of progress.
But that disparity won’t stop the NFL and its teams from celebrating King any more than it deterred Dodge from using the civil rights legend’s words and image to sell pickup trucks in a Super Bowl commercial last year. It didn’t matter that the ad selectively quotes a speech where King later ripped the advertising industry for glorifying materialism. Half a century after King’s slaying, corporations and politicians choose the version of him they want to celebrate. When NFL.com aggregated tweets from players and teams for a Martin Luther King Day article, the posts all stressed race-neutral concepts such as justice, service and unity.
The league could have honoured King by offering a more generous settlement in the 2011 class action suit over the longterm damage caused by the repeated blows to the head. When retirees alleged that the NFL hid evidence from them that concussions could lead to brain damage later, and the league settled the suit for $765 million U.S., a judge in the case rejected the figure as too low and forced the NFL to boost it to $1 billion.
A league fully committed to King’s teachings wouldn’t need a court order to do right by retired union employees who suffered brain damage on the job, but corporate entities honouring King rarely highlight him as a champion of organized labour.
King died after he was shot through the neck while standing on a balcony in Memphis, where he had arrived the previous week to rally in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers. Most of them were Black, and all were engaged in a bitter fight over pay and working conditions.
Casting King as the star of a Super Bowl commercial hawking pickup trucks requires a broad interpretation and narrow application of his words. But envisioning King fighting for Black workers doesn’t need an active imagination.
It’s literally the last campaign he led.
And in a league that depends so heavily on Black talent, it’s a legacy worth celebrating.