The walkout by the Milwaukee Bucks this week for a playoff game to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake set off a chain reaction, without precedence in the history of professional American sports.
From Muhammad Ali to the Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics to Colin Kaepernick, sport has long drawn attention to the political and racial concerns of the time. The Bucks’ stand over the shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, just 40 miles from their home arena, perpetuated that activism and inspired similar responses across the league, the WNBA, and professional baseball, soccer, and hockey.
“Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today may not be on basketball,” Bucks players said in a joint statement Wednesday night before their scheduled game against the Orlando Magic.
Several NFL teams canceled their practices, and biracial tennis player Naomi Osaka announced she would not play her Western and Southern Open semi-final match on Thursday.
“In some ways, this is similar to the climate of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which this was Black nationalism, this immense activism, which actually attracted athletes in the Black freedom struggle and also resistance to the Vietnam War,” said New York University history professor Jeffrey Sammons, an expert on race and sports.
But 2020 is also different, he said.
“It has become clear that athletes have significantly more power than then, and I think what is happening in the larger society has given them more coverage than they had before,” Sammons said.
The national account of race was galvanized by the death on May 25 of George Floyd, 46, a Black father of five, under the knee of white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Mobile video of Floyd’s death prompted millions of Americans to take to the streets during the coronavirus pandemic to protest racism, police brutality and mass incarceration of Black people.
The resulting impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement promoted demands for police reform, led to the filing of criminal charges against officials accused of brutality and toppled Confederate monuments, amid many problems at the forefront of current activism.
However, professional athletes have a unique platform to spread that message more widely than even Black politicians and activists, because their popularity cuts across so many racial, generational and political lines.
“Now that we have the calibration done by social media followers, we know where LeBron James stands in terms of popularity and influence, so there is a greater recognition that they have this platform,” he said. Kenneth L. Shropshire, director of the Global Sports Institute at Arizona State University. “And they have accepted that they have this platform as well.”
James, the superstar of the Los Angeles Lakers, has 141 million followers via Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
The momentum for Wednesday’s walk-off may have been boosted by the pandemic, which led to most of the NBA’s superstars playing and living together in a “bubble” in Florida.
“Somebody said it was kind of a herd immunity,” said Shropshire, author of “In Black and White: Race and Sports in America.” “The idea that at this moment, because they’re all there together in this bubble, that there was just more unity in deciding to do this.”
The WNBA has been ahead of the NBA in recent years, Shropshire said, pointing out that its players’ association was the first to ask him to talk about what players could do as sports messages to promote racial rights to 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. t was Black, was shot dead in 2012 by a white man.
One of the league’s biggest stars, Maya Moore, spent the past two seasons away from the game devoting her time to fighting for the release of a Missouri man who spent 23 years in prison. for a crime he says he did not commit.
Because sports strikes have traditionally been caused by labor problems, there is little historical precedent for the unanimous action taken this week to address a cause of non-sport, Shropshire said. A rare exception, he said, was the 1965 American Football League All-Star Game, which was set to take place in New Orleans. When Black athletes were stranded at the airport because taxi drivers in the divorced city refused them tariffs, enough players threatened to boycott the game that the league moved it to Houston.
Download the NBC News app for news and alerts
Yet over the decades, individual athletes have paid a price for talking about issues of social justice. The cancellations of games Wednesday came four years after the day after Kaepernick first took a knee in the national anthem to protest a recent stream of police brutality against Black men.
Kaepernick’s silent act, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, led to loud backlash from conservatives who said they respected the national anthem, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took it as a campaign issue. Kaepernick was dropped at the end of the NFL season in what many critics claimed was a boycott.
“In this world of football, the essential American militaristic sport, it was this sense of how daring he was,” Sammons said.
Kaepernick was preceded by heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who objected to the Vietnam War and refused to fight in it. He was stripped of his title and lost five years of potential earnings after being convicted of evading concepts.
American track and field stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos have endured death threats and damage to their long careers by raising their black-sliding fists in a Black power salute at the medal standings during the 1968 Summer Olympics.
Craig Hodges, a teammate of Michael Jordan at the 1992 Chicago Bulls, was dropped from the NBA shortly after attending the post-title visit to the White House in a West African dashiki and delivering a letter to President George HW Bush, calling for the treatment of his administration of people’s colors.
Today, more players in all sports are ready to take on similar positions than there were during Hodges’ playing days.
“If Major League Baseball cancels out and there are very few Black American players in the league,” Sammons said, “that’s quite an explanation for how the larger climate is changing and how masses of peoples and not just athletes the team will keep on standing up for racial justice. “
