American Scandal - Muhammad Ali vs. The Draft | Black Athletes and Activism | 4

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Muhammad Ali risked his career and even his freedom to take a stand against the Vietnam War. He followed in the footsteps of men like baseball great Jackie Robinson and singer Paul Robeson, who started out playing football. These Black athletes are all part of a heritage of working for social justice, according to journalist Howard Bryant. Today, Bryant joins Lindsay to talk about his book The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterListen to American Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-scandal/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, this is Lindsey Graham, host of American Scandal. Our back catalog has moved behind a paywall. Recent episodes remain free, but older ones will require a Wondery Plus subscription. With Wondery Plus, you get access to the full American Scandal archive, ad-free, plus early access to new seasons and more. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. podcasts. Muhammad Ali was not the first black athlete to risk his career, reputation, and even his freedom to advance a cause he believed in. He stood on the shoulders of men like Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line as the first African American to

play Major League Baseball, and Paul Robeson, who was most famous as a singer and actor, but also played pro football. Before Ali, they used their fame to fight against the pervasive racism around them, and like Ali, they paid a price. Being a social activist and a famous sports figure is a risk, especially for black athletes. While some people celebrate sports figures who take political stands, others criticize them as ungrateful or unpatriotic. In recent years, we've seen these divisions play out over athletes who have taken a knee during the national anthem supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Journalist Howard Bryant explores the history of this intersection between sports and black activism in his 2018 book, The Heritage, Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN and head of unscripted development for MetalArk Media. Our conversation is next. You just realized your business needed to hire someone like yesterday. With Indeed, there's no need to stress. You can find amazing candidates fast using Sponsored Jobs. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page

for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And just how fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $100 sponsored job credit

to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash wonder ECA. Just go to indeed.com slash wonder ECA right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash wonder ECA. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Hey, it's a Martinez. I work on a new show and yeah,

the news can feel like a lot on any given day, but you just can't ignore las noticias when important world changing events are happening. So that is where the Up First podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories. Listen to the Up First podcast from NPR. Howard Bryant, welcome to American Scandal. It's good to be here. Thank you.

Our series focuses on Muhammad Ali, but as we mentioned in the introduction, he's part of a much bigger heritage, as you call it in your book. And this heritage started with earlier black athletes like Paul Robeson, who most people probably know as a singer and associate with the song Old Man River. But he was also a football player.

Tell us about his athletic career. Well, Paul Robeson was one of the great athletes of the first part of the 20th century in the same vein as Jim Thorpe, some of the great, great athletes to begin the century. He was a player in high school, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He was a great football player, letterman, basketball, baseball track at Rutgers. He was part of the legendary Walter Camp, one of the godfathers of American football, his All-America teams in 1917 and 1918. And he was a member of the new professional football league in 1920 that would soon be called the National Football League. Obviously all

of the things that Robeson did as an athlete began to become obscured when he showed even more talent on the Broadway stage and on the concert stage as a singer, actor, and then in Hollywood as well. Robeson played two years in the NFL and then chose to go on Broadway, but he was an athlete first. And it's just sort of fascinating when you think about somebody that had that much ability, sort of a true Renaissance man. And a man of intense charisma, you'd have to be. How did Paul Robeson use his celebrity for social justice?

And I guess how did he get in trouble for doing so? The arc of Paul Robeson's career is very similar to the arc of a lot of black athletes in that he wasn't an activist at first. He was very much a believer in what we would call the American dream, very much a believer in being that representative of what possibilities could be if African Americans were given the chance to be part of the mainstream society. He was not a dissident as a player. Or even in the first several years on Broadway, he was a standard for progress. In fact, much of mainstream America, much like Jackie Robinson, would use him as proof that whatever racial dynamics existed in America, that opportunity still existed. It wasn't until the 1930s when he went to be on the stage

in London where his politics began to coalesce around social justice, around socialist policies. And that was where he began to get into trouble and then began to take a different look at America and began to realize that his position required of him a responsibility to uplift the races, he would say. And so by the mid to late 1930s, beginning of the 1940s, Robeson then began to recognize that his Hollywood roles, that the industry was not willing to put him in or any African American role in anything more than subservient positions, he began to recognize that he was much more of a social justice figure in terms of fighting

against income inequality. All the things that we talk about now, in fact, Robeson even in the 1930s and early 40s would talk about the one percenters against the 99 percenters. So even that language dates back to him 100 years ago. He was clearly, politically, would refer to himself as a progressive New Dealer. And that would obviously put him in opposition to the anti-New Dealers. And then of course, as we get to the Cold War, people began to paint him in communist circles. Yeah. Let's talk about that era, because this is where he was probably most vociferously targeted.

How did he get associated with communism in America? Well, I think it was his associations. It's hard to imagine today that there was ever in the United States a true opposition to capitalism. I think that today, especially in 2025, I think there's been a complete surrender that this is our economic system and there's no questioning that economic system. That was not the case in the 1920s and the 1930s. It's fascinating that there was during Robeson's time far more questioning of our economic systems.

And so the time of the New Deal, the Great Depression, you take these economic forces and you combine them also with the Soviet Revolution in 1917. And so there is a feeling in the United States and around the world that workers' rights were underrepresented and that Robeson found himself, as he would always say, on the side of the common man. That of course put him in opposition with the forces in the United States who were very

much anti-socialist, anti-communist, very much anti-New Deal. And this period, it became very polarized in an almost cartoonish way. You are either pro-American or you are against America. And Paul Robeson was forced to meet this opposition head on when he was called up to speak before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. At one point in his testimony, he is forced to defend his patriotism after mentioning that while in Russia, he felt no color prejudice like he felt in Mississippi. I was wondering if you could share the exchange that followed.

It was Gordon Shearer, the committee chairman who asked Robeson, why do you not stay in Russia? And he said, because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I'm going to stay here and have a part of it just like you and no fascist minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?

So the passion there, his love of country is clear. How did he perhaps reconcile his activism with his patriotism? There was no way to separate Robeson from the Cold War. I know we talk about the period of McCarthyism for Joseph McCarthy and for the Red Scare, but nobody paid a higher price for his activism, for his convictions than Paul Robeson.

You go back and think about what the Cold War was during those years, and you had the demand of loyalty oaths under the Truman administration. You had demands that the attorney general had lists of subversive organizations. And one of the things that Robeson saw far earlier than a lot of the black establishment that he clashed with was that in a lot of ways, the capitalistic system in terms of raw dollars, in terms of who owned and who had opportunity to earn, was not going to work for black people. The gaps were simply too great.

Well, you talk about the costs of activism. In Paul Robeson's case, what was the result to his career? Well, Paul Robeson lost everything. He lost by refusing to sign the anti-communist affidavit that he was asked to sign, just prove to us that you're not a communist. His response would always be that his politics were no one else's business. And in 1950, the United States passport division revoked his passport, took away his opportunity to go abroad and earn a living, even though he was earning more than $100,000 a year traveling the world as a concert singer,

as an actor, as a stage performer. And all of that was taken away and he was not allowed to perform in the United States simply because he was associated with communism. And so he would be picketed whenever any sort of concert outlet would book him. He was radioactive inside the United States, was essentially under house arrest, was not allowed to travel abroad where people loved and respected him around the globe. These convictions cost him everything. For eight years he was not allowed to travel outside of the United States. So Robeson might be characterized, I suppose,

as an early standard bearer for what you call the heritage. Yeah, I think that one of the things that, when I think about this, when I think about what that term means and what it has always meant to me and why the book was titled that, was this idea of a legacy of African American entertainers, athletes especially, who were using their positions to advocate for social justice, really not even social justice so much as for the rights of black people. And when you think about integration, you think about how

the struggle for black rights, how it grew over the course of the 20th century, integration did not take place through the doctors and the lawyers and politicians. It took place through athletes and it took place through entertainment. White America did not need Joe DiMaggio or Babe Ruth to speak for it, but black America looked to Jackie Robinson and Joe Lewis and later Muhammad Ali and Bill Russell. And so yes, Paul Robeson was certainly one of those major, major voices to speak on behalf of African Americans.

I'm glad you brought up baseball. That seems to be an early source of black activism. Why do you think that is? I think that the reason why baseball was so prominent in terms of the social movements was twofold. Number one, baseball was very quickly the first professional sport to really take hold in the United States.

There were other professional sports. I mean, there was a time when cycling was more popular than baseball. There was a time when college football was more popular than baseball. But when you think about the modern 20th century, it's baseball. And as the national pastime, as it was called, as the appointment viewing that was the World

Series early on, it was the sport that really did carry the imagination of the country. And it's a mirror image to that. You also had the Negro leagues, you had the black leagues as well, which were one of the major black businesses in the United States. And so baseball took on a place of importance that you wouldn't see in the other sports. And I think that in addition, the way baseball looked physically was very jarring, it was very glaring because it was all white, it was clearly all white. And this is even when you have Jack Johnson as the heavyweight champion of the world,

baseball is still all white. Even when you have the 1936 Olympics with Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson's brother, Mack Robinson, you have these great black athletes performing on behalf of the United States. You still look at the national pastime. In the national pastime, baseball has no black players. So baseball was symbolic. Baseball was the sport where you looked at it and you said,

okay, well, if America belongs to everyone, why does this sport not have any black players? And so you have tons of opposition as strategies are being mounted to take on Jim Crow and to take on segregation. Baseball was a main target. Well, sticking with baseball, let's talk about Jackie Robinson and his activism. He, at one point, testified against Paul Robeson

in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he was no less vociferous in his opinions. No, Jackie was very much like Robeson in that he was the type of person who believed in the American dream very much early on, that I'm an American and I'm going to fight for it. As his wife, Rachel Robinson, would always say when she would talk about him, she would

say, well, that was Jack, my country, right or wrong. In 1947, obviously, when Jackie Robinson comes in and integrates Major League Baseball, who better to represent progress in the United States or the potential of America than Jackie Robinson. And Robinson didn't really want to testify against Robeson, but he also did not feel like he had much of a say in the matter considering that his boss with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, asked him to do so. And so you had these two titans pitted against each other on Capitol Hill on July 18th, 1949. But even though they may have been artificial foils, Jackie Robinson was absolutely, well, almost militant in his activism.

Certainly he would cause controversy today because, for instance, he refused to stand for the national anthem. Well, by the end of his life, yes, but not when he was an active player. Jackie's disillusionment with the United States grew over time. All of the things that he fought for and all of the things that he sacrificed, the changes just weren't coming. So yes, by the end of the 60s, he would say very clearly, not only did he not stand for the national anthem or did he not salute the flag, but he also gave an interview to the

New York Times where he said, if I see a car with an American flag, bumper sticker on it, I'm assuming the guy behind the wheel is not my friend. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery's Business Movers. In our latest series, media mogul Ted Turner launches a 24-hour channel dedicated solely to breaking news. But CNN doesn't just shake up the television industry. It transforms journalism, politics, and culture in America forever. Listen to Business Movers, making the news on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered how a circus performer could become the most powerful woman in the Byzantine Empire? Even the Royals is a podcast from Wondery

that pulls back the curtain on royal families, from ancient empires to modern monarchs, to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. Before she ruled an empire, Theodora was a teen sensation in circus shows, featuring dancing bears, burlesque performers, and blood-soaked chariot races. But when her star came crashing down,

she clawed her way from rock bottom to the very top, using everything from comedy to espionage to get there. Empress Theodora didn't just survive. She revolutionized women's rights across the Byzantine Empire, like changing laws to let women divorce men, own property, and bring abusive men to justice. For all her work in pioneering, she's remembered as the most powerful Byzantine Empress in history.

Follow Even the Royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Even the Royals early and ad free by joining Wondery Plus. Howard Bryant, I'm wondering as a kid, which black athlete stood out to you as taking a stand for social causes? Who inspired you? One above everyone, it's Muhammad Ali.

There's no question about that. He was the standard. He was our hero. He was the person that we all gravitated toward. It's a good example as well, of the power of boxing at that time, and of course to the power of him as well. But certainly when, as a young kid growing up in the 70s and then of course then as a teenager in the 80s, it was Muhammad Ali and everybody else, but also as a Bostonian, there

was Bill Russell. And those two were friends. Those two together were the standards for what we felt an athlete's responsibility was to black people. And I think that what's really interesting about that, when you go back and look at those years, is it was so long ago, and yet when you add up those two, you add up Robinson and Robison and Joe Lewis, and you add them to the Bill Russells and the Muhammad Ali's, even though their heydays were over a half century ago, that responsibility still lingers in today's athletes.

Those players that came before, their impact was so large that if you didn't follow them, people looked at you and wondered, why aren't you embracing this the way you're supposed to? Adam Lickman You consulted on and appeared in the PBS documentary series Muhammad Ali. Ali is, of course, remembered today as the greatest boxer of all time, but also a hero to many. He took on the establishment with a ferocity and style that is probably unmatched. But in his fight for civil rights, which was probably

thrust upon him like many of these men, where do you think Ali looked for his inspiration? Where did he find the determination to do what he did? Well, I think it came from Malcolm X and it came from the Nation of Islam. It came from growing up in Louisville and realizing what is around you. He was a very aware man, and very aware as a young man. It doesn't take much to look at your situation if you're paying even remote attention and feeling the need to change it when you're black living in Kentucky

and when you're born in 1942. You've got segregation codified in the law. I mean, you still had de facto segregation in the North as well, but down there, it's literally against the law to sit where you wanted to sit or to sit in a restaurant or to be served or to drink out of a water fountain. So when I think about the Ali's of the world, it feels more natural. It's not that he was doing something so remarkable. The only reason it was remarkable was because other people weren't doing it, even though the injustice was very clear.

Our series covers largely Ali's fight in the courts after his refusal to serve in the military and go to Vietnam. And we cover the harm it did to him and his family and his career. But he made a comeback, and it was in 1974 in Zaire that he fought the rumble in the jungle against George Foreman. I guess I'd like you to characterize this fight. What did it mean for Ali at the time? It meant everything. The Rumble in the Jungle is the most important fight, not only to Muhammad Ali's career in my mind, but also in the idea of Muhammad Ali as a person, as the person he would become, as the symbol that would outlive him as the greatest, as the figure for social justice, as a humanitarian, as someone that America would eventually catch up to, even though he was once one of the most unpopular people in this country.

And the reason why is when you think about what took place during those years, and when you think about what took place later with Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 and was blackballed from his career. You think about all of these athletes. You think about Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who gave the Blackfist salute at the 1968 Olympics. You think about Kurt Flood, who challenged baseball's reserve clause that players were bound to one team for life, and he took that case to the Supreme Court and lost. And then eventually players got their freedom,

and now you have ballplayers signing $800 million contracts. You think about all of these athletes, and you think about the prices that they paid. This country broke them, every single one of them. This country broke them. They lost something that they never got back. They were never quite the same. And this country did its very best to break Muhammad Ali.

It took three and a half years of his career. He comes back, he loses in his championship fight to Joe Frazier, and he's not champion. And then he goes out and he loses to Kenny Norton. Norton breaks his jaw. And you look at Ali, and you look at the Ali of 1964 when he was beautiful and he weighed 214, 215 pounds and danced around like he was a middleweight,

his heavyweight with that kind of movement and agility and youth. And it's all been taken away. Zaire is where he gets it back. He's the one they couldn't break. If he loses that fight, he's broken like everyone else. He's not the champion. And maybe he doesn't get another shot

to win the championship or maybe he never wins it. But the fact that he won that fight as a massive underdog and did it in Zaire and did it in Africa, it's the kind of perfect storm that creates a legacy, that creates an entirely different history. and I think about that quite often about how badly everyone needed that fight and not just him but also all the people who fought for social justice and who felt like the idea of justice was getting away this is also taking place, Vietnam is not over yet. So the idea of fighting against systems and beating systems and actually having something tangible that you can hold in your hand and say we won, they weren't just moral victories. All of this is on Ali and is on his shoulders during that fight against Foreman in 74.

And that's why we still talk about that fight even though it was more than 50 years ago. If we were to revisit that fight, watch it again now, would it be clear that this was not just for a championship, but for redemption? I mean, can you see it in the ring? You can see it in the broadcast, and you watch that fight and hop on YouTube and watch it. Sure, you can see it because of the way they're talking. Ali is a huge underdog.

The fight is taking place in Zaire, so instead of looking at a boxing match the way you usually do where you look in the crowd and there are virtually all white faces except for the black celebrities that are in the crowd, this is historic. And so when you see all of those different things and you listen to what they're saying on the broadcast as well about how much of an underdog he is. I mean, obviously people aren't putting this in that sort of immediate context because it wasn't quite clear at the time. But by the time he wins that fight, it is clear.

Even when you're watching the fight and it's clear that the tide has turned and that Foreman has sort of punched himself out and Ali is not going to get demolished in the first round like everybody thought. Now you're starting to see a world figure on stage in his country. And the fact that you had two black men fighting in Africa, but the crowd and the people and the story and the narrative is only centered on one. And that person is Muhammad Ali. After all that had been done to him, it became very, very clear that this wasn't just another fight. This was something historic. What heritage do you think Muhammad Ali has bequeathed to the athletes who came after him?

I don't know that. I believed at one point that there was a clear line of responsibility. And there was one enemy to that line that I'm not sure was defeated. In fact, I'm sure it wasn't defeated, and that was money. Money and the capitalism that Paul Robeson fought against, that a lot of people fight against, that this idea that the athlete was this force for good. And so to see Ali, and then to see nobody really follow him. By the time we get into the mid to late 70s and the 80s and the 90s, it becomes entertainment.

Then there's the Dr. J's and the Michael Jordans and the rest of those players, and this idea of activism disappears. Of course, it disappears in a lot of ways from the country as well because you get into a more conservative time in the 1980s and the 1990s. And so you don't really see a return of this sort of place of the athlete being vocal until you start getting into the 2010s when Trayvon Martin is killed. Then you start to see this new generation of players. But it had been 40 years almost between the athletes being activists and being vocal in

the 1960s to when they began to speak up again. They had lost their place in that heritage. They had broken with what was taking place from Jackie Robinson up to Ali. It's not necessarily a straight line, and it wouldn't be a straight line. It disappeared for quite some time, and which is why I think it made so much news when suddenly athletes were speaking up again. And so I don't think that when you look at these athletes, it's an automatic given that they're going to take on any sort of responsibility anymore than any other citizen.

I also think it's important to think about something else when we think about these time periods. And that is that the athletes are not leaders. The athletes are followers. And with the exception of Jackie Robinson, who was not necessarily politically active when he first was signed by the Dodgers, his presence gave him that responsibility because he was there. There was no way around it.

He was the first black player in an all-white game. You couldn't miss him. But when you see the other players, and it includes Ali and Bill Russell and the rest of them, they're part of the civil rights movement. They are also reacting. They're reacting to Emmett Till. They're reacting to Selma. They're reacting to Montgomery. They're reacting to Birmingham. And they're using their platforms and they're using their positions to amplify what is already taking place in the street. I think the athlete gets sometimes far too much dispensation. Now Ali, on the other hand, is different

simply because he was willing to challenge the Vietnam War. That was a very distinct departure. In 1920, American women won the right to vote, but it took over 70 years and three generations of activists to get there. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans. Our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, we trace the decades-long struggle for women's voting rights and tell

the stories of the visionary and often controversial suffragists who led the fight, including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and Ida B. Wells. Follow American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. I'd like to dig into this a little more, that these black activists are reactionary.

It makes a lot of sense because the 60s and 70s were a tumultuous period in American history. You've already mentioned that there was a fallow period of activism in the 80s through almost the 2000s. What happened in this period that there were no Muhammad Ali's or Tommy Smith's or John Carlos's? Well, what would you do if you looked out and you saw a graveyard? Would you want to join it or would you want to avoid it? I think that in the middle of the 70s, which is why the fight in Zaire is so important, there's tangible evidence that you're going to lose everything. If you voice your opinions, and I think that just as much as there's fear on the part of the athletes, there's also fatigue

on the part of the country. By the time you get to the 70s, I mean, how long can you protest? People had been in the streets since the 1950s in terms of the civil rights movement. And so I think that coming out of the 1960s, and I think the King assassination had a lot to do with it as well, I think people were just broken. And I think that you moved into a new era where athletes were beginning to enjoy some of the same perks that the white athletes were getting. You had O.J. Simpson, who was now making a hundred, $200,000 a year.

Hank Aaron was making $240,000 a year. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar signed a contract that was worth a million dollars. Then you have Free Agency, Reggie Jackson signs a multi-million dollar contract with the New York Yankees. And so now the money is replacing the activism. If you notice that it does parallel itself as the activism in the street was reduced,

so was the activism from the athletes. So were the ballplayers. And once it revived itself in the street, then the ballplayers followed. Well, let's talk about the period in which it revived itself in the street. You've already mentioned the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin as an inflection point,

and certainly people took to the streets then and thereafter. You wrote in your book that LeBron James and other black athletes came out from behind the tinted glass of their escalates. What kind of atmosphere do you think they were stepping into? Pete They were stepping into an environment that was nearly as hostile to activism as the hostility of the 1950s. And that's because of 9-11. Try to go back and think about those first 10 years after 9-11, and then you've got the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. There's not a lot of room for the sort of activism of the 1960s. You look out and you watch a ball game

and there's an American flag across the 50 yard line, across the whole football field now. Before the game, you've got the flags and the flyovers and you've got military appreciation night in every ballpark around the country. And so for the players to then suddenly decide that they were going to take a stand against police brutality.

And let's not forget, you've got Trayvon who was shot but not by a police officer, but there was violence involved here from a citizen who acted as though he were law enforcement and George Zimmerman. And then you've got Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson in 2014. And you've suddenly, you know, you've got Sandra Bland in 2015, and you've got this social media viral movement where people are just sending video after video after video of some black person having a confrontation with the police. This is running specifically in opposition to the jingoism post 9-11.

So now you have the sports leagues draping themselves in the American flag and you've got the players openly challenging law enforcement. So not only do you have the revival of the black athlete speaking up against injustice the way that Ali and Bill Russell in that old heritage did, but you also have a labor battle. You've got the workers making a stand against management. It's an incredibly volatile mix. Colin Kaepernick began his protest in August of 2016, which was only a few months after Muhammad Ali died. Is that a coincidence or is there a connection?

Maybe a little bit of both, but I think that certainly when Ali passed in the spring, early summer of 2016, there was not just a reappraisal, but we were thinking about him more. He was fresh in our minds because even though he'd had Parkinson's and everything else, he just didn't think about Muhammad Ali dying. It was just so shocking even though it wasn't shocking at all. But I think that for Kaepernick then to do what he did later on in August, it was an interesting through line. I don't know if the two were actually connected or not, but there was something, I don't know if poetic is the right word for it, but there was something interesting about that timeline.

It's interesting that you use the phrase shocking about something that was shocking and not shocking at all because that seems to be the case with Kaepernick's protest. At first, not too many people noticed. But I guess remind us, when did the firestorm start? The firestorm started when he was actually noticed. He was sitting, I think it was before a preseason game in August of 2016. And once it became clear that he was protesting, and then he came out and said it. And I believe he said something along the lines of, I'm not going to stand for a flag

where you can commit murder and get free vacations. He's talking about police because of the number of shootings. He had been activated by the Philando Castile shooting in Minneapolis. And I think that when he did that, it really did activate the latent feelings that people had had about athletes and athletes speaking up, and about where we were. It wasn't just the fact that he was challenging law enforcement. Kaepernick was also challenging the direction of this country in a post-911 America. It's no small thing. In reflecting on this, having written your book, what were the latent feelings of athlete activism that Kaepernick was facing? How did things unfold for him? After the season, after the 2016 season where he protested and took a knee for the rest of the season,

he never played another down of football again. That was the end of his career. And everybody saw that. And when I say everybody, I don't mean just the people on their couches eating nachos, watching the game. I mean the other players. This is what's gonna happen to me if I speak. And I think that it was really a flashpoint moment because of all of the discussion about athlete activism and player

empowerment and how the players were now in control of things. And I took an opposite view of that. My feeling on that was how much power do you have if you lose everything by opening your mouth? Power is being able to speak, not losing everything when you do. And so to me, what was going to be very interesting to watch was going to be two things during that time period. Was it a moment or was it a movement? And how would the players respond going forward?

Because of the massive salaries that they were earning. What happens when the protester becomes the power? What happens to your heritage? What happens to the protester becomes the power? What happens to your heritage? What happens to your lineage when you are now so far removed from those environments that created the Muhammad Ali's and the Bill Russell's and the Jim Brown's of the world? For this activism, Sports Illustrated gave Kaepernick the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award. I'm interested in your take on that. Is this something that Kaepernick deserved?

Yes, of course he deserved it because he did something that Muhammad Ali did. He's actually one of the most deserving because if you go back and think about Ali and what he was, why was Ali the threat that he was? Because he advocated for black people specifically. Muhammad Ali was challenging the United States government and Colin Kaepernick was challenging American law enforcement, which is a national pastime unto itself, when you look at our popular culture.

The years 2010, 2011 to 2022, and you add in the George Floyd protests as well, which really was the last moment of this era of athlete empowerment or athletes taking a political stand, getting involved. What took place next? I would say chilled me to the bone when it came to wondering if this heritage was dead. The players disappeared.

There hasn't been a real moment since. It wasn't sustained. And then the players were using their money to distance themselves from the mainstream because they had the money to disappear and go to their private islands or go to their private gyms and everything else and they were no longer part of it. LeBron James is a billionaire. Serena Williams is a venture capitalist.

Alex Rodriguez has a percentage of the Minnesota basketball team. The athlete is now, because their wealth is so enormous, they have less in common now with the very people that they were supposedly aligned with. They're not like us anymore. The thing that made this period so interesting and gave the player so much social import was that they went to public school. Their kids went to the public school system. They were part of the everyday protest because the money wasn't as big back then. They were making four or five times what the average American was making. But now they make 200 times what the average American earns, 300 times. And I wonder what's going to happen or what is happening to this next stage in

this journey. Well, Howard Bryant, thank you so much for talking with me today on American Scandal. It's my pleasure, thank you. That was my conversation with journalist Howard Bryant. He's a senior writer for ESPN and head of unscripted development for Meadowlark Media. His book is The Heritage, Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism.

From Wondery, this is episode 4 of our series on Muhammad Ali. In the next season, in the 1950s, quiz shows were big business for the relatively new medium of television. But to keep viewers tuning in and ensure the most popular contestants kept winning, some programs began rigging the results, and soon one disgruntled former contestant would blow the whistle. Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey at Wondery.com slash survey. American Scandal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship.

This episode was produced by PolyStryker. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Sound design by Gabriel Gould. Music by Thrum. Produced by John Reed. Managing producer Joe Florentino. Senior producers are Andy Beckerman and Andy Herman. Development by Stephanie Jens.

Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louie, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondering.