by Curtis Bunn
All teams in the playoffs backed the Milwaukee 2020 boycott. It was an escalation of past acts of consciousness by athletes, including wearing “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts after Eric Garner’s death by police in New York in 2014.
The Bucks’ stand raised memories of the 1961 Boston Celtics protest of an exhibition game in Lexington, Kentucky. The Black players, led by Hall of Famer Bill Russell, sat out because they were refused service in a restaurant. Their white teammates did not support them and played in the game.
To bring attention in the hope for change in America in 1968, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists and bowed their heads on the Olympic podium in Mexico City during “The Star-Spangled Banner” after winning gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200 meters. Their Black Power salute is among the most iconic images in sports history.
“It was a cry for freedom and for human rights,” Smith said in 2008. “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”
There were countless acts of activism by athletes—including Muhammad Ali’s well-documented moral stand and refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. NBA champion Craig Hodges had his career blackballed after Rodney King was beaten by officers in Los Angeles. Hodges, a member of the Chicago Bulls, attempted to organize a protest of Game 1 of the 1991 NBA Finals on June 2. But he failed to get support from other players, including teammate Michael Jordan. When the Bulls visited the White House after winning the title, he handed President George H. W. Bush a letter expressing concerns about racism and U.S. military involvement. Hodges, one of the best shooters in the NBA, could not get a team to sign him to a contract after the 1991–92 season.
Donald Trump wanted Black athletes to keep quiet. He inflamed tensions when he called NFL players such as Kaepernick “sons of bitches” for kneeling and attacked NBA players for the boycott in general and superstar LeBron James in particular. In his zest to reopen the country that had been shut down by the coronavirus and his affection for anti-Black sentiments, Trump lashed out.
“I think people are a little tired of the NBA,” he said. “Frankly, they’ve become like a political organization, and that’s not a good thing…It’s terrible. I think what they’re doing to the NBA in particular is going to destroy basketball. I can’t—I don’t even watch it…You know when you watch sports, you want to sort of relax, but this is a whole different world…You don’t want to stay in politics. You want to relax.”
James was unfazed by Trump, saying, “I really don’t think the basketball community [is] sad about losing his viewership.”
The all-time great, who led the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA championship in October 2020, ascended to become a prominent social justice figure. He used his platform to advance the Black Lives Matter messaging, speaking out on political and social issues and helping form the program More Than a Vote, which advocated for African Americans exercising their right to participate in the electorate.
This adds to James’s legacy of service. He has contributed millions to his hometown of Akron, Ohio, and paid tuition for countless students to attend the University of Akron; he opened his own school, I Promise School, for third through eighth graders that has produced strong outcomes; he’s produced documentaries; he participated in public service announcements supporting Barack Obama when he ran for president and for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
For his efforts, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham in 2018 told James to “shut up and dribble” when he and fellow NBA star Kevin Durant discussed the challenges of being Black in America after James’s home in Los Angeles was defaced with a racial slur.
James did not shut up. He stepped up. Ingraham, meanwhile, represented a bloc of people who are threatened by Black leadership. “The best thing [Ingraham] did was help me create more awareness,” James said at the time. “We will definitely not shut up and dribble…I mean too much to society, too much to the youth, too much to so many kids who feel like they don’t have a way out.”
James’s activism was inspired by the Black Lives Matter founders, and while his worldwide popularity did not validate BLM, it helped expand its growth.
“There is a whole area called the ‘psychology of celebrity’ that speaks toward this,” Atlanta forensic psychologist Dr. Christopher Bass said. “In this area of work, which is a healthy behavior, those with extraordinary gifts (especially physical) speak louder, speak with much more confidence, and in many cases have a voice that others relate to because of their gifts/skill set.
“LeBron James has consistently positioned himself throughout his career as a leader,” Bass added. “He has shown leadership on the court as well as integrity in the community. In times like these where many people feel hopeless, his reputation as a leader becomes very attractive. The idea of a well-rounded LeBron James represents the very best of who we could possibly be. Therefore, the average citizen will gravitate towards him and his words when we have no words of our own.
“Ingraham represented the few who continue to hold on to the belief that leadership qualities cannot transfer outside of the given area. This is not the belief of the majority. We, as a community, recognize that athletes are not merely one-dimensional. The average citizen believes that leadership skills are transferable.”
It took Michael Jordan longer to get there—thirty years, to be precise. In 1990, when a Black North Carolina candidate for Senate, Harvey Gantt, ran against Republican and devout racist Jesse Helms, Jordan refused to endorse the Black Democrat. Instead, he cracked: “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” effectively labeling himself as a selfish star who had no connection or commitment to the community from which he came, or to helping elect someone who had the ideals of making life better for the Black people of his home state.
Surely, the depiction of a standoffish billionaire who cares little about his people ate at Jordan. In 2020, he gained some social credibility by committing $100 million over ten years to organizations “dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice, and greater access to education,” he said. Following Jordan, the Brooklyn Nets committed $50 million, and the Boston Celtics another $25 million, to bolster social and economic initiatives in their communities.
All the money thrown at the problem could not be described as a bad thing. But players and fans alike wondered if the gestures were sincere. There were rampant reports that some owners were unhappy that “Black Lives Matter” was painted on the court. And NBA commissioner Adam Silver made a point of saying that the phrase would not be on league courts the following season and that players’ names on the backs of jerseys would return over social justice messages. But the prevailing feeling was that the players’ position and appetite for activism had exponentially increased, and they were prepared to take a stand—or sit—when necessary.
It was the same with the WNBA, where Black players were in the majority. Notably, a strong stand was taken by the Atlanta Dream, which was co-owned by Kelly Loeffler, the Republican who lost a critical Senate seat in a contentious runoff against Reverend Raphael Warnock, who became the first Black senator of Georgia.
Loeffler criticized BLM, and her players pounced, defying her edict not to wear Black Lives Matter messages on their uniforms and calling for her to sell her portion of the team. In February 2020, Loeffler caved and sold the team to an investment group that included former Dream player Renee Montgomery, who had been vocal in her disapproval of Loeffler. The sale hammered home a point across the athletic landscape: athletes—men and women, Black, white, and brown—found a voice through Black Lives Matter.
Conscious Decisions
As part of their “Overlooked” series, the New York Times printed, for the first time, the obituary of Nancy Green, better known as Aunt Jemima, who was born into slavery in 1834 and died in 1923.
Green lived near Lexington, Kentucky, and worked in Chicago as a housekeeper and nanny. She was recruited in 1890 as the pancake company’s original face. Green was killed in a car accident in 1923, but her image lasted
on the box for ninety-seven years after her death—until Quaker Oats in 2020 decided the brand was built on racial imagery.
The Times wrote Green’s obituary, which included this from her great-great-great nephew: “She would want the real story to be told of her and the ladies that came after her.”
In September 2020, in a “major and extremely rare” occurrence, Dictionary.com updated more than 15,000 entries on its website. One of the changes was using an uppercase B when referring to Black people. According to a statement from the website, “capitalizing Black confers the due dignity to the shared identity, culture, and history of Black people. It also aligns with the practice of using initial capital letters for many other ethnic groups and national identities, e.g., Hispanic.”
This symbolic gesture created a stir in some circles but not much of one in others. But it was born of the times.
Also symbolic was the painting of “Black Lives Matter” on America’s streets. The first was in Washington, D.C., in black and gold bold letters, on the street, renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, that leads to the White House. That was intentional.
At least seventy cities followed suit as “Black Lives Matter” became the most used phrase in the world. Signs popped up in store windows, front yards, and on bumper stickers. Substantive or not, there was a substantial shift in public consciousness on the issues that mattered to Black people.
Additionally, there were countless financial commitments from companies, professional sports leagues, philanthropists, individuals, and government agencies to address the racist policies that had existed forever, but in this movement became targets of change.
Science company giant Thermo Fisher Scientific developed the Just Project—named after Dr. Ernest Everett Just, an African American biologist and educator of the early 1900s who ascended to prominence with his revolutionary work in the physiology of development in reproduction. The project provided free COVID-19 testing and equipment and staff to the students of America’s 101 historically Black colleges and universities. It was a $15 million commitment that was lauded for efforts to minimize the impact of the pandemic on HBCU campuses.
JP Morgan Chase committed to hiring 4,000 HBCU graduates by 2024 and ramped up its Advancing Black Pathways Career Readiness program, an online program for recent graduates of historically Black colleges and young professionals of color.
Countless companies, from Amazon to American Express to Home Depot to…you name it, have pledged their support and financial backing to address the country’s social justice issues, fairness in the workplace, and the public health crisis.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned and urged the board to fill his seat with a black candidate. MSNBC named its first Black woman, Rashida Jones, as president, the first to head a major television news network.
Additionally, thirty-seven companies formed a consortium called OneTen, which includes among others Nike, Target, Verizon, Comcast, American Express, and Bank of America. They joined forces and committed to help 1 million Blacks who did not have four-year college degrees to secure and sustain jobs in the effort to close the gross diversity issue and growing wealth gap. OneTen was created to be a “comprehensive system” that merges skill-building organizations with local education to invest in their success in the job market. Black people were twice as likely to live below the poverty line, which explains the telling numbers: African Americans made up just 8 percent of white-collar professionals and 3.2 percent of executives or senior-level officials and managers, according to a report by the Center for Talent Innovation.
IBM committed $100 million in the form of guest lectures, curriculum, digital badges, software, and faculty training to two dozen HBCUs as part of its Skills Academy Academic Initiative in Global University Programs. And the computer behemoth chose Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, among others, to participate in a separate program called the IBM+HBCU Quantum Initiative. The initiative gives students and faculty access to quantum computers, which are so advanced they solve problems differently than the average desktop, laptop, smartphone, or IBM researcher.
Morehouse and Spelman College were awarded $40 million as part of a donation from philanthropists Patty Quillin and her husband, Reed Hastings, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix. The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) will also receive $40 million, pushing the total award to $120 million.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott lavished dozens of HBCUs with their highest-ever donations. She bestowed $50 million to Prairie View A&M University, $45 million to North Carolina A&T State University, and on and on.
Some call it “throwing money at the problem.” At the same time, money speaks loudly. And having money makes it possible to do things, close gaps, cross bridges. It also amplified an undeniable fact: Black lives began to matter, at least on the surface.
Getting policies in place to curb long-standing systemic racism and reforming police procedures would be the ultimate measures to show progress. But the BLM movement sparked corporations across the country to hire diversity and inclusion officers to address the gross imbalance in the workplace.
Consciousness was raised to the point where images or statues erected across the country of owners of enslaved people, known racists, and Confederate leaders were pulled down by BLM groups or others offended by their presence. In some cases, city officials took the initiative to remove the statues themselves.
It was an uprising, so to speak. In Portland, statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were toppled. Around the world, protesters upset long-standing statues or symbols of oppression.
In almost every case, they were representations of white dominance. The movement for Black lives empowered and elevated the need for those symbols to go. And with consciousness raised around the globe, many of them fell.
At the same time, the thirst for knowledge about Black history elevated. In Charleston, South Carolina, Joe McGill was among a team of experts with the National Trust for Historic Preservation hired to oversee the restoration of several buildings at the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens property.
They weren’t just buildings. They were once the homes of enslaved people.
McGill was excited to work on the project when it formed ten years ago for two reasons: One, he is a descendant of slaves and, two, he knew that far too often slave dwellings had been ignored and decimated over time. Not only did McGill restore them, he asked for and received permission to sleep in the cabins.
“It was important for me to spend the night in those cabins,” he said. “I got to see more of what these plantations were not doing. They were not telling the stories of the people from whom I derive my DNA. It was upsetting. It angered me.
“But instead of using that anger for evil, I knew I could use it for good.”
And so McGill launched the Slave Dwelling Project, which started out as his idea for a sleepover on the plantation, but elevated into an “immersive experience.” McGill leads thoughtful, informative discussions on the legacy of slavery with those who visit the plantations.
Through the coronavirus pandemic, McGill conducted the presentations, including at the Evergreen Plantation in Louisiana, via social media platforms or the Zoom virtual conference app.
McGill’s efforts stood in stark contrast to a movement that gained some momentum to eliminate or minimize the teaching of the true history of slavery in schools. Not that American history accurately covered the authentic elements of slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, or the civil rights movement. But to have many, including Trump, call for an elimination of teaching even the insulting, sanitized version of slavery was an unacceptable form of suppression.
Some people would rather the plantations not exist, the atrocities that took place there so piercing and long-standing to Black people. Many times the true stories are not told because some of the sites had not been preserved, McGill said. But he considered the sites a teaching opportunity.
In the decade si
nce McGill began his crusade, so to speak, others have expanded his work. In Washington, Georgia, historian Kimberly Clements researches the lives and families of seventeen people who were enslaved on the Robert Toombs House Historic Site. She is building an exhibit space on the property that will feature artifacts believed to be those of the enslaved family. She is also creating a file for each enslaved person, hoping one day to have a dedicated room where the public can do research on other enslaved people from the area.
“The turbulence we have witnessed [in 2020] has created a greater consciousness about these issues,” said Dr. Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston. Powers pointed out that it is important for the tour directors and docents to share more information about the lives of the people who were enslaved over focusing on the abuse and oppression that were their plight. Share about how the Africans resisted slavery and indentured servitude, he said.
“People don’t want to learn they were mere victims,” he continued.
The advocates for teaching Black history in a robust way agree. Lauren S. Brown, a teacher and contributor to the MiddleWeb website, which focuses on education, wrote: “We must remember that African American history is not all about slavery, but that slavery had a profound impact and reach that continues today.
“We must remember that when we do teach about historical slavery. We must teach students about the enormous impact of slavery on the story of America from its very beginnings. And when we wrap up our units on the Civil War and Reconstruction, we can’t ignore Black history until Rosa Parks. None of us—no matter our race or the race of our students—can afford such a distorted view of history.
