For a month now, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has chosen not to stand for the national anthem. He told the NFL Network's Steve Wyche he refused to "show pride in the flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."
Kaepernick's stance, or lack thereof, and strong reactions to it, immediately brought to mind other fraught moments involving patriotism across the decades, including several from the earliest days of integration in the ACC.
A smattering of other pro athletes followed Kaepernick's example, among them Megan Rapinoe, a two-time U.S. Olympian and a member of the Seattle Reign of the National Women's Soccer League. Rapinoe knelt while the anthem was played. "We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country," she told AmericanSoccerNow.com. "Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties."
There are many ways to profess love of country. But approaches that deviate from patriotic custom historically come with a price, as Kaepernick and other dissenters have discovered.
"That shows great courage," Steven Greene, an N.C. State professor of political science, says of the anthem protests. "Anybody can wear a T-shirt that says 'Black Lives Matter' _ you're not going to get too much grief for that. To not stand for the national anthem, you know you're going to get grief. You may not fully appreciate just how much. ... It's a bold stance because we know how much this country values patriotism and, honestly, how much it's tied up into sports."
President Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, acknowledged Kaepernick's acts were protected free speech. Others were equally adamant in exercising free speech to express disapproval. The management of the NWSL's Washington Spirit abruptly altered the pregame schedule to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" while the teams were off the field. A Spirit statement explained the move was made to sidestep Rapinoe's quiet protest, lest it subject fans "to the disrespect we feel such an act would represent."
The Spirit's stratagem echoed a comparable maneuver Charles Scott attributed to thoughtful conflict avoidance by Dean Smith, his basketball coach at North Carolina.
Scott arrived at Chapel Hill in 1966 during a period marked by tumultuous demands for civil rights, general dissatisfaction with society's status quo and deep divides over the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. War fever is an especially heady brew, unwelcoming of dissent, a truth evident when Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion and a convert to Islam, refused induction into the U.S. military on religious grounds.
Following Ali's death barely three months ago, that decision was saluted as a courageous act of conscience. But back in 1967 the boxer's choice brought angry denunciations as unpatriotic and wound up costing him millions of dollars.
The next year the playing of the national anthem occasioned a dramatic display by U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised gloved fists in a black power salute after winning medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. The mute demonstration eloquently conveyed their message, got Carlos and Smith sent home and was widely condemned.
Those same Olympics were boycotted by college basketball's most celebrated African-American players, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) and Elvin Hayes, to protest unequal treatment of blacks in the U.S. (The American Olympic squad was all-amateur until 1992.) Scott, among the initial wave of pioneering black athletes as Southern basketball programs were slowly integrated, chose to play for the gold-medal U.S. squad as a rising junior.
Scott's undergrad years at UNC were riven by tensions over the university's sorry treatment of cafeteria workers and other matters affecting African-Americans. Student leaders tried unsuccessfully to recruit the sympathetic Scott as a spokesperson. Smith encouraged the All-ACC guard to become engaged in campus affairs but didn't want the basketball program dragged into racial politics.
"He was afraid one time that I wouldn't stand up for the national anthem when the Black Student Movement was saying not to stand up for the national anthem," Scott told me in a May 1994 interview. "That's when it started that (we) would go in before the national anthem was played, and he would come out after the national anthem was over. He would never have to worry about his players sitting down during the national anthem, and he'd have to react to it." A sprint en masse to the locker room became a Carolina pregame staple and spread to other schools.
Now the anthem is played just prior to tipoff at ACC basketball games, and teams can't hide. ACC football players likewise don't emerge onto the field until "The Star Spangled Banner" has been played.
Whether anthem sitdowns will spread to college athletes is unknowable.
N.C. State's Greene believes the "turbulent times politically" are apt to spawn more pro sports figures engaged in acts of protest. Basketball's LeBron James recently led the way in that regard, although decorously and without challenging patriotic norms, before Kaepernick stepped forward. "We're in this era where sports seems to become ever more important in our society," Greene says, "so the soapbox as an athlete is bigger than ever." Social media amplify their reach, too.
Meanwhile, Kaepernick, beneficiary of a six-year deal set to pay an average of $19 million annually, bolstered his cause by pledging the first $1 million of his 2016 salary to support community charities in the Bay Area. 49ers owner Jeff York similarly committed $1 million to local nonprofits working toward "improving racial and economic inequality" and bettering communication between police and the communities they serve.
"Kaepernick's really started something here. First of all, he started a big, nasty argument," says Matthew Andrews, a professor in the history department at UNC. "I think he's trying to start a dialogue, and of course when someone tries to start a dialogue we don't actually talk about the issues, we talk about the protest itself."
Undercutting Kaepernick's rectitude, he illustrated his concerns regarding police brutality by wearing blue practice socks depicting cops as pigs. The 2013 Super Bowl quarterback's anthem protest already predisposed outrage. In contrast, no hint of discomfort accompanies perennial pregame dancing at UNC's Smith Center to "Jump Around" by House of Pain, which includes the lyrics: "I'm the cream of the crop, I rise to the top, I never eat a pig, cause a pig is a cop." But, then, public approval can be highly emotional and blindly selective, as demonstrated at Clemson six years after Harvey Gantt's 1963 court-assisted breaking of the school's color barrier.
African-American undergrads fought to end black-face skits, playing "Dixie" and displays of the Confederate battle flag, a banner perceived as symbolic of police brutality and resistance to integration. The student newspaper supported the black students and, amid supposedly disloyal Vietnam War protests, wryly chided Confederate partisans, "That 'glorious civil war' would be called treason today."
The analogy fell on deaf ears, at least initially.
Clemson cheerleaders routinely ran onto the field carrying a large Confederate flag before football games at Death Valley. In response to black students' concerns, an undergrad "Central Spirit Committee" insisted on substituting the American flag. Tigers fans, presumably proudly patriotic in other respects, greeted the switch made prior to an Oct. 25, 1969 contest against Alabama with boos and jeers.
