Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Dr. Harry Edwards on Human Rights, Sport and Society

Episode Date: July 17, 2017

This conversation is loaded. The center of the conversation is Dr. Harry Edwards journey to impact human rights through the experiences of the African American athlete.Often times when people are asked, what they want most in life, the response,, without hesitation, is "to be happy -- or to have peace." I know for sure that I don't want, just happiness. I don't want just one of the core emotions. I want to be connected to them all, not muted from the ones that are uncomfortable.In this conversation Dr. Edwards did just that -- he felt and shared sadness, frustration, fear -- he taught me more about how he lives his life in this fashion, than he did with his words -- and his words are precise and thoughtful.After completing his Bachelor's degree, he was "on the draft board" for an NFL team and rather chose to go to Cornell University where he completed a M.A. and a Ph. D. in sociology. He later became a professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley from 1970-2000.He is a human rights activist. He was an influential member of the Black Panthers. He was the catalyst for the famous fist raise at the 1968 Olympic Games medal ceremony for the 200-meter track event.He was followed by the FBI as he fought for what he believed in.He's been consulting with the San Francisco 49ers since the mid 1980'sWe talk about what he sees as the most pressing issues for sport & society going forward.This includes the increasing majority of African Americans in the NFL, the impact women’s health care has on the future of college sports and beyond, the issue of marijuana legalization and its relationship to athletes, and why you can either choose to make Colin Kaepernick a martyr or a model._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This conversation is with Dr. Harry Edwards, and it's intense. The center of this conversation is Dr. Edwards' journey to impact human rights through the experiences of the African-American athlete. And oftentimes when people are asked what they want most in life, the response without hesitation is to be happy or to have peace. And while those certainly are important, like at the center of it, they're really important, not at the cost though of being muted to all of the other emotions that come into the human experience. And Dr. Edwards said something really important in this conversation is that he felt and shared his sadness and frustration and fear. And for sure, for me at least, he taught more about how he lives

his life from this form of communication by the demonstration of sharing than he did with his words. But his words, they were precise and thoughtful and certainly impactful. If you're familiar with American sport and certainly the NFL, you're familiar with Dr. Edwards' work. Dr. Edwards is a human rights activist. He was an influential member of the Black Panthers, and he was the catalyst for what you might recognize in his work for the famous fist raise at the 1968 Olympic Games, the medal ceremony that took place where two of the athletes raised their fists and one of them from Australia didn't. And if you're not familiar with that experience, go check it out. For sure, check that out.

And even check out the third athlete, the Australian athlete, Peter Norman, and his experiences when he went back to Australia, how he was basically a pariah for the stand that he took. It's tragic. It's for certain tragic. On the other side, though, the attention that Dr. Edwards and the athletes that raised their fists were able to demonstrate was phenomenal. and it was definitely observed by many. So from his work, he was followed by the FBI because of what he believed in. And he's been consulting with the San Francisco

49ers since the mid-1980s. And this includes Dr. Edwards' take on the increasing majority of African-American athletes in the NFL and the impact that has and the impact of women's health care that it has on the future of college sports and beyond, the issues of marijuana and drugs and the legalization of marijuana and its relationship to athletes, and also why you can choose to either make Colin Kaepernick a martyr or a model. And with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Dr. Harry Edwards. Harry, how are you? Doing better than I deserve for old dude.

Okay. So when you say that, you've had an incredible life journey. Like you've made impact globally from an Olympic standpoint. You've influenced the NFL in many ways. So this is going to be fun to have a conversation to understand your worldview and what you're passionate about and where that comes from. And I'd love to roll up our sleeves and get into that place, like the origins of where this comes from for you.

And before we get going, could you do folks a favor and start by maybe naming the chapters of your life? I don't know how many chapters are in your book so far, but like early childhood, what's the title of that chapter for you? I think I have to go back and look at the factors that influenced what I was becoming even before I was aware of moving in any particular direction. I was born in St. Louis, Missouri and raised in East St. Louis, Illinois, right across the river in what was essentially what they used to call the South End Bottoms, which was an all

black enclave. I was impacted, even though I didn't know it at the time, by the history of East St. Louis. One of the worst white race riots in American history in 1917 were basically issues, labor issues, blossomed into a white riot where over 350 black people were killed, many of them burned alive in their homes. And I can remember people that I used to think were old folks in their 50s and 60s who were younger then, teenagers and so forth in 1917 were, actually would be talking about it. And I remember they would get angry, get away from here, you ain't got no business around listening to old folks talk. You know, they would always tell us that.

But you pick up that something was wrong, something was really bothering them because the tone and the atmosphere and the climate of the conversation would change. And I can remember when I was eight, nine years old, old folks saying, well, yeah, you know, they found the Howard girls over there and they killed them right there on that corner. And they had so-and-so on 10th and Broadway where they pulled them off of the trolley and lynched him and his wife and his son. I mean, they would say those things. You all get out of here. You ain't got no business listening to old folks talk. So that, even though I was not aware of it at the time,

I knew that something was going on with East St. Louis, that there was something wrong. Nobody talked about it in the open, but you'd pick up bits and pieces. And then by the time I was 13 years old, there was the Emmett Till lynching. And I remember being in Woodshop at Hughes Quinn Junior High School. And they had a copy of, some of the kids had a copy of Jet Magazine and they would say, hey man, you got to go and, Sonny, you got to check this out, man. Look at this. And when I first looked at it, it was shocking because I'd never seen anything quite like that before. Emmett Till's mom had insisted that his funeral involve an open casket because she wanted the world to see what had happened to her son, what they had done to her son. And I remember going home to my father and taking a copy of Jed magazine with me, taking that copy with me, because I wanted him to explain this to me. Well, how could this happen?

What was going to happen to the people who did it? How old were you? I was 12 going on 13. I was in junior high school, about the same age as Emmett Till. He was 14. And so it resonated in particular with me and with my classmates at Hughes Quinn Junior High School at that time. And, you know, I thought my father was the biggest, strongest man in the world. I thought he was the baddest dude in the world. He's about 6'3", about 235 pounds, 32-inch waist. I mean, he carried a gun with him everywhere he went. He had done time in Joliet State Prison 10 years. He was a boxer. He was a sprinter. He could dance. I thought he was the baddest dude in the world. And when I gave him that magazine, when I gave him that Jet magazine with that

picture of Emmett Till and asked, why did they do this? So what's going to happen to the people that did it? And he stared down for a long time, which to me was strange because he had always said, always look people in the eye. One of the big things that kept black people down and oppressed was that they could never look white folks in the eye. You always had to lower your head and lower your eyes and never look them in the eye as a sign of the respect that you had for their place relative to your own. So he had always told me, look people in the eye. I don't care what, that was a big deal with him. Only this time he looked down. He didn't look me in the eye. And I knew then that something was wrong. And when he looked up, he said, nothing's going to happen to the people who did it.

This boy shouldn't have never been down there. He said, that's why I never went back to the South, because I didn't want to deal with this. But I saw something else in his face that I had never seen, which was fear. For him, for me, this was something that he had no power to deal, as big and bad as he was. And that's when it dawned on me that there are some things in this society that are going on that not even my daddy, as big and bad as he was, could save me from. That was a pivotal point in my life. Then, of course, as I went on to college.

Wait, wait, wait. I want to. OK, so what did you do in that moment when your hero said, I feel helpless? I felt the greatest sense of estrangement from somebody that I thought I knew. Because I'd never seen that side of him before. What does estrangement mean? Estrangement means that I didn't know him. I'd never seen that side of him before. What does estrangement mean? Estrangement means that I didn't know him.

I had never seen this side of him before. And at the same time, a sense of you're on your own. This is one that you're just going to have to deal with. There's nothing that my daddy could do to save me from this or for that matter, to save himself. That's what happened in that moment. And I could see it in his face. So you had that moment at 12 to 13, you saw your dad, your hero go through an experience, and then you internalize it saying, okay, this is important for me. And I got to figure some

stuff out on my own. He's got to do the same thing and he's scared. Okay. So then I would imagine that came from fear, like a fear-based thing, like, well, what's going to happen to me? But you had a thought about justice before that. What is going to happen to the people that did this? And how did he die? The open casket? Yeah. He was lynched. Emmett Till had gone down to Mississippi to visit relatives and was staying with an uncle in a place called Money, Mississippi. And they had gone to a mom and pop store. And the woman in that store, a white woman, had made the statement that a young black man had made a fresh remark to her. And as a consequence of that, her husband and a group of other knuckle-dragging Cretan racists went into his uncle's home, drug him out, and lynched him.

And they found him in the Tallahatchie River with a cotton mill fan around his neck about four or five days later. And it was obvious that he had been tortured, beaten, and finally shot in the head. And that was the image in that Jet magazine that literally terrified a generation of young people. I do not know anyone of my generation who was not moved to anger, to loathing, to fear at some level by that occurrence. And my father would turn out to be absolutely right. Nothing happened to the people who were responsible for it. And in point of fact, they bragged about having done it after they were acquitted by an all-white jury in Mississippi. That was a pivotal point in my life. And it was that sense of and concern about injustice that really led me to California. I picked up the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1958, and there was an article in there about a coach at USC

where he had named a black kid as a quarterback, as offensive coordinator. And he had named a Jewish kid who was on the offensive line as co-captain. He had named a black kid as captain and named a Jewish kid as co-captain on the football team. The black kid's name was Willie Wood, played quarterback for USC. The Jewish kid's name was Ron Mix. The result was he got all kind of death threats and everything else. His response was to the coach. The coach got death threats. His response was to name them co USC if I could, to play football, because I was part of that first generation that went to integrated high schools in East St. Louis in 1956, and the high schools in 1957, the year that I went to high school. They integrated the high schools last where all the Dayton and so forth begins to go on. But when we got there to East St. Louis Senior High School, the newly integrated high school, they had no idea what to do with us. They had, for all practical purposes, an all-white staff. There were a couple of black teachers on the staff. I never

had one. All of my teachers the whole time that I was at East St. Louis Senior High School were white. They had no idea what to do with us. So you had an idea that you wanted to go to play college ball, though. That was a vision or a dream or something that you had. How did you have that implanted? And I'm asking you that because I grew up in a very different experience in how I grew up. And I grew up on the beaches surfing, and I didn't have a vision of going to college. But if you were to look at me, you would think that, oh, well, yeah, you're supposed to go to college. I'm the first person to go to college in my family. So how did that happen? There was in East St. Louis,

which was totally segregated, the doctors, the lawyers, everybody lived right next door to the people who worked at the post office, who worked on the railroad, who were unemployed, who were peace laborers, as they used to call them. My old man was a peace laborer. He got his pay from Monsanto Chemical Company in a brown envelope, and it was cash, and it was $65 a week. I mean, he literally went into bad health trying to prove that an ex-convict could support a wife and eight kids on $65 a week and not go back to jail. But also right up the street from us lived attorneys and doctors and dentists and so forth. I literally grew up a mile from Miles Davis, and his father was a dentist. So there was an attorney by the name of Frank Summers who said, you have a chance,

told me you have a chance to be something great. He had at first employed me to come down and cut his lawn and wash his windows. What did he see in you? I don't know. I really don't know. If you had to, if going back now, what would you imagine he saw in you? And you said he was an attorney? Yeah. He was the first black deputy attorney general of the state of Indiana. And he managed to make a living. He was a great guy, but he also took me under his wing. And when

I decided not to go to Iowa or to Indiana or to some school in the Midwest and so forth, you know, I told him I want to go out to California. He said, OK, I told him, I want to go out to California. He said, okay, I'll give you $500 to go out. And when you get out there, here's a contact person. So he gave me a contact person that he knew in California that would help me to hook up with who I had to know at USC. And all of this came about. And when I got to USC, they say, well, Harry, you haven't taken a college admissions test. And I didn't know anything about a college admissions test. They gave us no counseling in terms of that at Eastside, at East St. Louis Senior High School. I left Eastside utterly unscathed by education. They never laid a glove on me in

the classroom. They didn't know what to do with us in the classroom. But the Brown versus Board of Education Topeka, Kansas edict said the schools have to be desegregated. Were they angry that you were there? No, they weren't angry. A lot of them were confused and uncomfortable. They didn't have a vision. They didn't have a map. They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a comfort zone with regard to us. And so we played football in the fall. We played basketball in the winter and we played track and field in the spring. And that was it. And as long as we were winning championships and so forth,

that was the comfort zone that they relegated us to. And so when I got out to SC, I had no counseling about what I didn't even I never heard of the college admissions test. This feels like a form of racism that I've never heard before, which is and correct me if I'm off on this, but it's I've never articulated this. But it's like they, there wasn't a way to know how to help you. And maybe that's the most racist, institutional racism there is. It's the most insidious because it is so unintended. Yeah. Unintended. It is so unintended. The most positive thing that a teacher at Eastside ever said to me, he looked at me one day and he said, you know what? He used to call me Belafonte, Harry Belafonte. He said, Belafonte, you know what? He said, you can do whatever you want to do, but you've got to make up your mind to do it. That was it. That was the only thing he ever said to me.

My hair just stood up though. Yeah. And he looked right into you. He looked right into my eyes, came up to my desk one day when I was clowning. And he said... So he caught you. Yeah. Right. At a really good moment too. Yeah. And I said, oh, okay.

Did you believe him? I believed him because up until that time, he was like all the other teachers. If we wanted to clown, as long as we weren't a problem, that was okay. If we wanted to come in and put our head down on the desk and go to sleep. That was okay. If we wanted to come in and stay for 15 minutes and get up and get a pass to go to the bathroom and don't come back, that was okay because they could deal with all of that. They just didn't know what to do with us academically because they had no contact at all with the culture and so forth that we came from. And whatever we learned there during the day at Eastside, we forgot on the bus on the way back home at the end of the day. And so

by the time we came back, not only did we not have the homework done, we had no notion about what the homework was supposed to look like, because they just dealt with the kids that they could deal with in the classroom and that was not that was not us but the lawyer frank summers who gave me 500 to go to california um maybe more importantly told you you could be something special right more than the 500 but it was the extension of that. That was an investment. That was the, yeah. Yeah, he said, you can get this done. And it was strange at 16 years old, because I really didn't graduate from Eastside. After my eligibility was up, they just moved us on, you know, because they want us to have that complete autonomy. You said they didn't know how to deal with this.

No, they really didn't. And that was one of the downsides of Brown versus Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas. You can move people physically into the school, but the cultural knowledge and understanding to deal with them from a teacher-student education perspective was simply not there. Were you angry? Or I'm imagining it'd be really easy to be angry at a whole class of people. I was not so much angry as I was perturbed. Because you hear the racist jokes, you hear the N-bombs being dropped, and after a period of time, you just get to the place where you choose not to hear it. You choose not to be sensitive to it because if you're sensitive to it, then you are in this constant state of rage and you can't get anything else done. I know people who literally dropped out of school because of it.

And so you choose not to be upset by it. And the thing that I had going for me was something that I cherished, which was I could take a hot shower at Eastside at the stadium after football practice. And I did not have a hot shower every day. I mean, I wasn't going to do anything to blow that up. And so I just let a lot of stuff pass. So this, okay, so there's something full circle happening for me is that knowing that you are part of the Black Panther organization, there's the 10 point, the 10 point, I think they call it, right? Yeah. There's 10 point something. 10 point program.

10 point program. And one of them is like, we, I don't know if the word was demand, but we whatever, a hot shower and decent homes or decent shelter. All of that resonated with me. Yeah. All of that resonated with me. Yeah. All of that resonated with me. I knew exactly what they were talking about in the Black Panther Party programs because so much of what they were demanding as a right was something that I had been systematically deprived of on the South side of East St. Louis. So when I did get to California and they told me I had to take the college admissions test, I had no idea what they were talking about.

What my folks knew about college was Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin go to college, or Loretta Young, mama goes to college. That's what they knew about college. My dad got his education, which came to about the eighth grade, most of it in Joliet State Prison, where he was sent when he was 17 years old. My mother had about a third grade literacy level, so they didn't know anything about college. Frank Summers, the lawyer, did know something about college. But when I told him I wanted to go to California, he said, OK, I'll help you. I'll help you get there. And I literally caught the train to California, came out. And the first thing they told me at USC

was after they did some research and so forth on my athletic career, say, yeah, but you've got to take the college admissions test. I couldn't even read the thing. I couldn't even read it. I mean, I knew when the guy looked at his watch and said, okay, open the booklets. And I opened the page. And then I just thumbed through the back and saw where they had math and algebra and all that kind of stuff. I just got them walked out. And so I went back to the shoebox and I had a basketball and track scholarship to San Jose State. And so I could stay in California where I had come out and people walk around in shirt sleeves, pulling oranges off of trees in February. And so I went

to San Jose State and that's how I ended up at San Jose State on a basketball and track scholarship. What year did you graduate there? From San Jose State? Yeah. 1964. But during that period of time, there were other things that happened that carried me all the way back to the East St. Louis riots, to the Emmett Till lynching. That was during the period of the sit-ins in 1960, my first year there. And there were a lot of black students who had been kicked out of black schools for being involved in the sit-ins at South Carolina A&T, at Shaw University and so forth at Howard. And San Jose State had picked them up and said, we'll transfer all of your units so you can get your degree from San Jose State.

This was the liberal California thing. These were the students who were involved in the sit-ins and who were kicked out of their schools because as one of the students told me who had enrolled at San Jose State, the president of their university came to them and said, we can't explain to the legislators that provide us our money how we tolerate you going in and disrupting Southern life and law with these sit-ins. So you're suspended indefinitely. Man, this is bringing you full circle to the 49ers and Colin Kaepernick. Well, it's bringing me the things that have motivated my concern with these injustices.

And then in 1963, March on Washington was another empowering thing. But in 1963, Meg Evers was also murdered, shot in the back. And I remember the pictures of him lying in his driveway. Three weeks after the March on Washington, four little girls were blown up in a church in Birmingham. And I remember those pictures. I was working with the students to, in 1968, around demonstrations over segregation at places like the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. I had met with Dr. King to support the Olympic Project for Human Rights on January 17, 1968. We were supposed to get together again at the end of April. Matter of fact, we had already talked about a date, April 28th. He was assassinated on April the 4th. So I graduated in 1964 from San Jose State. And you were part of a

culture, a unique moment in time where you had all these people. And there was lots of racial tension taking place. You had a bright, shining star, Dr. King, that was, no, was he public yet? No, he became big time in 1965 when he got the Nobel Prize, but he had been in the public since 1956 under Montgomery Bus Barcott. But the Nobel Prize in 65 really blew him up huge. In 1964, when I graduated, I had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Cornell University. I was on the draft board of the Minnesota Vikings. I was on the draft board of the American Football League San Diego Chargers. I still have the letters and things that they sent me saying, we want you to enter the draft. And you had a letter from Cornell. And I had a letter from

Cornell. I had a letter from Harvard. I had it. the only thing that, Cornell got there first with the money. And I was a Woodrow Wilson fellow. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus standard. Every product is formulated with top experts and every batch is third-party tested.

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What did you do in college to get those letters? From? From Harvard and Cornell. Was this a four point something GPA? No, I had a 385 in sociology and had been nominated for Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to do Ph.D. work and won it. And so Cornell University and others, they go to those lists and say, hey, if this guy's got a Woodrow Wilson, this is a horse that we can put some money on. This was in 1963. But as I said, I was also on the draft board of the Minnesota Vikings who had contacted me. I had thrown 191 feet in the discus, which meant I qualified for the Olympic trials. But in point of fact,

the money that was offered by the Vikings and the Chargers was less than my Woodrow Wilson Fellowship was paying. I was also on the draft board of the L.A. Lakers. But as the scout told me, we would only want you in the paint because you don't have a left hand. We'd only want you in the paint. We're talking Jungle Jim Luskertalk. But he said, we'd only want you in the paint. We're talking jungle Jim Luska talking. I don't know anything about him. But he said, we'd only want you in the paint because you don't have a left hand. And that means basically a salary of $10,000 and an off-season job. I said, you know what? I have a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that pays $36,000.

Only $22,000 goes to Cornell University. The other $14,000 goes to me as a living stipend, which is more than the San Diego Chargers offered, more than the Minnesota, and it most certainly is more than the Lakers offered. And I'm not interested in going to the Olympic Games and tying up my life for a year with no way to live. And at that time, they didn't have these stipends where you go and you get money and support and so forth to prepare for the Games. Well, it's not that different now. Most Olympians that get to, by the time they get to the games are broke. Yeah, they're broke. Yeah. Well,

it was worse then. There was no future coming out of the games if you were black. I mean, you were lucky if you got a parks and recreation job. So that was the situation in 1964. But on the political side, when I left San Jose State to go to Cornell, I wanted to get a jump on my academics. So I immediately began doing the research for what I wanted to do for my master's thesis, because that's what holds people up. You can do the classwork, but the thesis holds people up. And so what I did was to go down to New York and begin attending Malcolm X's group. He had broken with the Nation of Islam by that time. I was well aware

of the race issues and so forth. And I want to do a master's thesis on the Black Muslim family, because after Malcolm broke, based on my reading and understanding and research, going all the way back to Marcus Garvey and those Black nationalist movements, Pan-Africanism and so forth, I had determined that to the extent that Malcolm was going to be successful in what he was going to try to do, it had to be founded on solid community family foundation. So I wanted to write my thesis on the Black Muslim family, which is what I did. And while I was there, I got a chance to meet with Malcolm on one occasion, talk to some of his lieutenants. But on February the 21st, 1965, I met with him in the midsummer, late summer, fall, somewhere around in there. Because I got to Cornell around the 1st of August.

And somewhere in there, I went down to New York City and hooked up with his congregation, with his group, the Organization for Afro-American Unity. And six months later, he was assassinated. And as I stated, in 1968, I was meeting with Dr. King, who had come out and endorsed the Olympic Project for Human Rights. I met with him on January 17th. On April 4th, he was assassinated. We were supposed to meet again on April 28th to talk about how the movement was going. April 4th, he was assassinated. I remember being on San Jose State's campus in the summer of 1968, putting together placards for a visit from Bobby Kennedy. He was in LA.

He was supposed to come up and speak in the Oakland, San Francisco area. And he had already called up and said he wanted a diverse group out there. We were putting together placards and banners and everything because he was the anti-war candidate. He was our candidate. And a lot of people on the left, including people in the Black Panther Party like myself and most students on these liberal campuses in particular in California, were against the war. So he was our candidate. He was supposed to come up on that next day. This was June the 6th, 1968. He was killed in L.A. that night. He never made it up to the rally that we had prepared for. But then as I go back and look at all of this, from the East St. Louis riots to Emmett Till to 1963 and Medgar Evers, the bombing of the church, the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968, all of these things I had some kind of real connection to. It dawned on me, you know, my 21st birthday was November 22nd, 1963. And I remember coming out of my apartment with my voting registration card in my hand, because at that time you had to be 21. And I was going to go have my first legal beer.

And I walked on the campus and everybody was huddled around and some people were crying and some people were listening to these little miniature radios. And I said, well, what's going on? Because that whole morning I'd been consumed. Hey, I'm 21. I can do what I want to do now. And they say, hey, somebody just shot President Kennedy and he's dead. I say, you got to be kidding me. That was my 21st birthday.

So all of these things impacted me, marked me, both in terms of the politics of America, and particularly in terms of the racial politics of America. All of that impacted who and what I became, along with the Olympic Project for Human Rights, not the Olympic Project for Civil Rights, because I always felt that we had a human rights issue in this country when it came to the issue of race. And you agitated the very famous image of two Olympians putting up their hand. Smith and Carlos were original members of the group that put together the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which I essentially projected, orchestrated. I was a student of sport and society. I mean, I wrote my PhD dissertation on the sociology of sport, which, by the way,

my committee at Cornell didn't believe in. They said there's no such thing as the sociology of sport. I said, that's why I want to write my dissertation on it. But that's physical education. That has nothing to do with society. I say, you're going to tell me that a dyad, a two-person relationship, and a triad, three-person relationship, about which there have been countless monographs, dissertations, and books written, is sociologically relevant, but 100 million people watching the Super Bowl is not. And they said, well, okay, you can go ahead and write it. But there was virtually no support. It's the longest dissertation in Cornell University history, 1,100 pages.

And it's missing from the dissertation archives at Cornell. Come on. No, principally because J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, who put me on their ADEX list. Now, Hoover was a madman coming after the Panthers at that point, right? Hoover had determined that the Black Panther Party was the most dangerous threat to America society in the nation. And he had put a group of people on this ADEX list, which he himself handled personally. Hoover was the head of the FBI for 46 years. There was this group of people he considered Dr. King, he considered Angela Davis, myself, Stokely Carmichael, H. Ralph Brown, and God knows NAACP and God knows who else as internal threats to the United States. He was basically a racist.

And so at the end of it, he put me on this ADEX list and had his agents discreetly go and buy a copy of The Revolt of the Black Athlete, discreetly go and surveil Edwards's dissertation at Cornell. The dissertation is missing. I know that there was a copy of The Revolt of the Black Athlete in my file, a file which by the end of it all was over 3,000 pages long. The longest dissertation in this history is missing. Somebody went there to do research on it and said it's not there. Well, of course it's not there. It was in the- It was a dangerous document. Dangerous document. So ultimately, of course, they didn't have to take the dissertation. They could have just bought the Sociology of Sport because the dissertation was published

as the Sociology of Sport, which was the first integrated textbook in the history of what became a new subdiscipline in sociology. Yeah, right. There's journals now, sociologists for journals and whatever. Yeah, of course. But up until 1970, when I completed my dissertation, people said, there's no such thing. So you've got an ability to have a vision, right? To see forward in some kind of way, but it sounds like, or it feels like the way that you see forward is that you feel things passionately

internally. So before you go out and think about what's coming down the pipe for you or for others, that you feel things internally first. Well, I've always defined myself as a scholar activist, because I think that activism without scholarship ultimately is conducive to nothing so much as chaos and confusion. So I've always done research. So there are a number of areas where articles have literally been written about things that I predicted were coming down the path, from the violence at the Munich Olympics, to the fact that the Soviet Union would boycott the 1984 Games, to the inevitability of performance-enhancing drugs becoming a problem as the money got bigger and bigger in sports,

to the impact of recreational drugs as far as the integrity of the athlete experience was concerned in the 1980s and so forth. In fact, I made the statement straight out in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1981 that within five years, the NBA and the NFL in particular will be drafting hardcore drug users, some of them with life-threatening circumstances. That was in May of 1981. In June of 1986, the Celtics drafted Len Bias and he died of a drug overdose. Three months later, the NFL Rookie Defensive Player of the Year, Don Rogers, died of a drug overdose, cocaine. And so it became very, very clear, but it was clear to me in 1981 that this was the direction and trajectory of development. So it's not just a gut feeling. It's a consequence of my commitment to scholarship and analysis of the dynamics of developments at the interface of sport and society. These things are not only knowable, they are predictable. They are literally predictable. And we can go through some of the things that are coming down the road now. Yes, that's what I was going to go to. So with your body of knowledge, your body of

work, your understanding of what you've seen and experienced, what are you seeing coming next? Well, first of all, the NFL is going to become virtually all black because that's who's playing the game. This is going to be a result of the concussion situation. When you look and see what is happening, where Pop Warner football is down by around 17 percent, where USA football is down by also between 17 and 20 percent, and you look at who's dropping out, despite what you see on the kick pass and punt halftime show and so forth, where it's virtually all white kids. When it comes down to tackle football, you're looking at African-Americans who are essentially playing. It's already when you look at who is on the field, not who's on the roster. You can put

Ronald McDonald on the roster, but who is actually on the field? You're looking at a majority black athletes. Look at the Clemson-Alabama National Championship game. Who's on the field? It looked like Ghana playing Nigeria. That's where the NFL is going. And you're saying that's because of a brain risk issue. That's because of the injury risk issue. That's because of the injury

risk. And there's only so much hitting you can take out of football and still keep it football. And in point of fact, if you eliminated the long snappers and centers, the kickers and punters, and the quarterbacks right now, it would be well over 80% who's on rosters. And so that's the direction that football is going in. And with that comes a whole series of management issues and challenges and so forth because of developments at the intersection of sport, race, and society. What happened with Kaepernick is not an outlier. It is a indicator of the trajectory that things are moving in. And unless the league gets on top of this and gets out in front of it and understands that they cannot say that there are 64 starters

and backups and 32 clipboard holders who are better quarterbacks than Kaepernick in an all-Black league. You can't say that. That's irrational. You cannot have people who have committed rape, people who have had gunplay issues, people who have beat on women, people who have been involved in domestic violence, people who have been involved in dog fighting, who've been murdering mutts, who've been involved in gunplay and so forth, and drugs and have them in the league. But a guy who takes a knee and says, we are better than 147 men, women, and children killed in the streets of this country every year by police officers, somehow he can't play in a league. You can't do that in an all black league. And if you do, then you're asking for management problems that ultimately are going to become a threat to the very integrity of the sport. Because at that point, people will turn around and say, you know what, I don't need to watch this.

I can go watch soccer. I'm going back to baseball. I'm going to pay attention to to something else. I don't need to watch this going on every week. So you've got to get out in front of it and manage those things you can neither eliminate nor avoid. The other thing that's coming down the pipe has to do with women, which is the greatest human rights issue that this country confronts today. When you look at the assaults on Roe v. Wade, when you look at the assaults on Planned Parenthood, people forget that while Title IX moved the number of scholarships given to women at colleges and universities from 26 colleges giving those scholarships to over 540 colleges and universities giving scholarships today. That happened with Title IX in 1972.

But what made it possible was Roe v. Wade and the increased money that went to Planned Parenthood and other women's medical service facilities in 1973, because then schools could be assured that if we give this woman a scholarship in September, she's going to be around in March to play in the March Madness Final Four. She's going to be around in May and June to run in the NCAA track and field championships. She's going to be around in May to play in the volleyball championships and so forth. And with situations developing, such as in Texas, where they went from 144 women's clinics down to 14, and only four of those have hospital admission privileges, which meant as a student that I knew at the University of Texas had to drive 500 miles to get the services she needed because, and she had to pay for them out of her pocket because they were in another state and the insurance didn't cover it. at the collegiate level, but also at levels such as the WNBA, where a lot of the women are married and heterosexual. But in a rape culture society as we have here, even those women who are not

heterosexual are at threat and need to have ready access to safe and legitimate medical services when they need them. But don't think that it's just the women that are involved. We have a problem now on college campuses where male athletes have children on campus. And in order to keep their star athletes available, many of these schools are running what are essentially daycare centers, where the woman drops the baby off in the day when she goes to class, and the man picks the baby up after practice that same day. So this is going to increase because it won't just be the athletes who are impacted. It will be women, period, who are impacted. And all of a sudden, you're going to have an increase in this paternity situation on campuses that many schools are already wrestling with just in an effort to

keep their star athletes, the core and anchors of their multi-million dollar stadiums and basketball pavilions and athletic programs on campus, active and available. So this thing that's happening with regard to a tax on Planned Parenthood and so forth are going to reverberate right through the athletic structure. And because athletics really simply reflects society, this also means that you're going to begin to have changes in the numbers of women in the corporate workforce, in the institutions such as college professors and teaching and so forth and so on. at San Jose State, there was one female teacher on the faculty in sociology. When I came to Berkeley, there was one or two female teachers on the faculty in 1970. By 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the numbers of women exploded. Why? Because family planning became available. They were not then hostage to their bodies if they were married. And the idea of the school teacher being unmarried, which was a longstanding tradition in American society, not because of the

purity of teaching, but because if she started teaching in September, they wanted her to be there for the class in June when the graduation took place. They wanted her to be there to finish the class. So school teachers, quote, were supposed not to be married. And if they got married, they were summarily dismissed for a long time in American society. So all of this is coming down the pike. Another thing that we're going to have to deal with that's also coming down the pike is the marijuana issue. You have a situation where marijuana has been legalized in nine states, including California and Washington and Denver, all of which, by the way, have professional football teams,

professional basketball teams, college basketball teams, big time division one teams. But an athlete can walk off campus and buy a bag of grass like he buys a Snickers bar. But at the same time, the leagues and the conferences and the departments have rules against smoking grass. The number one problem that athletic teams across this country, almost everywhere I speak, professional and collegiate, is what are we going to do about the marijuana problem? But more than that, it's not just the availability of marijuana and what that does in terms of a guy's sharpness and focus and being able to do what he needs to do on the field, on the court. But when they legitimized marijuana, they took the crime out of its possession and having access to it. But they didn't take the dope pushes out of its possession and having access to it. But they didn't take the dope pushers out of the picture.

And so what the dope pushers have done is to move on to another marketable product. And in this case, the most marketable and accessible are opioids. And so the people who used to be pushing grass on athletes are now pushing opioids on athletes, and that's some deadly stuff. And so the league, which is still trying to figure out, are we going to make marijuana legal? And so haven't even begun to think about what are we going to do about the impact of the legalization of grass in terms of the availability and so forth of opioids, which are now being pushed by the same pushers who used to push grass before it was legal in those places where it has

been made legal, not to speak of 29 states where medical marijuana is legal and accessible. Pushers have gone to opioids. That's a challenge that the league is going to have to deal with because what they're going to have in a very short period of time is the same problem that they had with cocaine that took out Len Bias in basketball, that took out Don Rogers in football, and that hooked a whole bunch of athletes. They're going to have the same problem with opioids. So those are just three things that are already well this side of the sports political horizon. I've got a number in my head of the percentage of athletes that use marijuana. Hey. So I don't want to pin you down, but would you say more or less than 50? Let me put it this way. Let me say it like this. There is not a team. Professional or collegiate in this country. That does not have a marijuana problem.

And marijuana is a social habit. You don't smoke by yourself. You smoke with your friends. You smoke at your parties. You smoke when the ladies come over. You smoke before you go to the club. You smoke out in the car after you come from the club. And so the issue of... Maybe before you go to work. The issue, oh, believe me, there are people in the NBA, in the NFL, the first thing they pick up in the morning, last thing they put down at night is a joint. They leave practice to go home at lunchtime and have a joint. There's no question about that. The issue becomes how does the league manage that where it is becoming increasingly legalized and accessible

through medical marijuana, but everything that's legal is not legitimate. And since you're talking about a social thing, it doesn't matter what the percentage is at any given moment. What you know is that it is going to be social. And if you have a pot smoker in your locker room, somebody's going to be smoking with it. And as soon as you get one or two potheads, you're going to have three or four. And that's going to be a growing group because they want to have access as privately as possible to a supply source. And they get that from each other. If you were to wave a wand, would you wave that wand to reduce or to eliminate marijuana for athletes?

The only magic wand that's possible is a magic wand that generates from within the dynamics of the sports involvement process itself. It begins with identity. Who are we? Who are we? Are we athletes committed to a goal? The goals that brought us all together? are we a bunch of potheads and people who just happen to be wearing the same uniform. Then the second thing is the culture. How do we approach our craft? That's what the culture is about. How do we approach our craft? Do we approach our craft haphazardly, depending on how we're feeling, how high we are, or do we go out with a focused goal and a commitment to each other. The third thing is attitude. The attitude that you take as an organization, as a team, as a locker room to any challenge, whether it's the guys in the other uniforms, just a bunch of faceless numbers in the way of what you're trying to do, or whether it's somebody smoking marijuana in your midst, whether it's

somebody beating on a lady in your midst, whether it's somebody with a gun problem in your midst. What is your attitude toward the challenges that you are confronted with? And then the fourth thing is accountability. Everybody is held accountable for their role and their part in what it takes for us to be a success in what brought us all together. So that travels. Identity, culture, attitude, and accountability, those four things travel. They travel home. They travel on the road when you go to play another team. They travel when there's nobody there but you working out and nobody's watching. Those four things travel. And if those four things are not part of your approach to dealing with the marijuana problem, it doesn't make any difference what you do because nobody is going to be there 24-7 to

watch everybody in terms of what they're supposed to be doing. That has to be something that's a part of the team that you are involved with. And you have to weed out those people who have not bought into that. They may be great football players, but they should have to be great football players someplace else if they have not bought into that. I don't know of a way that you can manage a pothead proclivity in your locker room that does not begin with those four things. They must be at the very core of your effort to deal with pot, to deal with domestic violence, to deal with guns, to deal with DUI. There has to be that sense of this is who we are. That's not who we are. There has to be that culture. This is the way we approach our craft. This is what we do. There has to be that attitude about any challenge

that gets in the way, gets between you and the goals that you've set as an organization. And then there has to be that factor of accountability, top to bottom. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature.

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I'm usually here every day during the season. During this time of the year, I'm here two or three times a day because I'm on the road so much lecturing and taking care of other kinds of business and concerns with other clients that I have, colleges, universities, other football teams even. And what is your main focus with the Niners? Player personnel, player personnel development. If it's an issue involving player personnel, at some point it's on my desk. In talking to ownership, when the Kaepernick thing began to evolve, they said, hey, this is your horse. You've got to manage this. And what I assured them is, hey, let me manage it. I will manage it in a way that everybody comes out better. And I think that Kaepernick came out of it better. You know, as I stated, he has the most sought after jersey in the NFL, but he was voted the Len Ashmon Award by his teammates. We were 14-2, but we were not 14-2 because of the Kaepernick situation. We were 14-2 because

we weren't very good. 2-14. It's 2-14. Yeah, we were 2-14 because we weren't very good. Two and 14. It's two and 14. Yeah. We were two and 14 because we weren't very good. And how, how was he better when he, you know, not that a job defines anybody, but how does he come out better when he doesn't have a job this year going into the season? He could be better as a human. One, he was unequivocally right. That's the first thing. Secondly, if he doesn't have a job, that's not on him. That's on the league. Don't tell me anything about the integrity of the shield when you have rapists, when you have people who've been involved in gunplay, alcohol, DUI, some everything else. You think there's some collusion. Yeah.

No, I don't think there's any collusion. I think that it may well be just cultural consensus, but it really doesn't matter at the end of everything else. You think there's some collusion? Yeah. No, I don't think there's any collusion. I think that it may well be just cultural consensus, but it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. Without words. Without words. Got it. Yeah. It might be just cultural consensus. Every new owner who came in prior to Art Shell wasn't called in a meeting by all the other owners and said, hey, don't hire a black head coach. It was just cultural consensus. And so whether it's cultural consensus or collusion doesn't matter. The reality is that all of these other people

are in the league, owners, players, staff, folks, guilty of sexual harassment, rape, dog fight, everything have gone into the league, been convicted. Some of them come back and play it again. That's fine. I'm huge on second chances. The saints are dead and the angels abide in heaven. Nobody down here on the ground but us human beings. And we do the best we can. And sometimes we blow it. Sometimes we mess it up. So we all, I think, deserve a second chance. I'm not against that. But don't tell me that somebody who hits a woman and knocks her cold could have killed her because he's a trained

athlete and she's a woman behind something she said to him. And he's drafted in the second round and brought into the league. But Kaepernick, who took a knee, dignified, nonviolent, and says, in effect, 147 black men, women, and children effectively, summarily executed in the streets of this country, is not acceptable. And I'm not accepting things that I cannot change. I'm seeking to change things that I cannot accept. That's what Kaepernick was saying. And to show you the scale of this thing, between 1882 and Dr. King's assassination in 1968, an average of 40 black people were lynched in this country

every year. Since 1968 to 2015, when Cap took a knee, an average of 147 black people were summarily executed in the streets of this country, men, women, and children by police officers. That doesn't even get us into the 5,000 homicides in the Black communities across this country that are a result of perpetual disenfranchisement, malignant neglect, cultural and institutional collapse that also accrues in terms of accountability to the society as a whole. Kapp is saying we're better than that, but he can't work in the league? Are you kidding me? Yeah. Well, how do you respond to that typical response, which is you shouldn't do it during the national anthem? Well, first of all, most of the people who make that statement couldn't

even sing the words to the national anthem. And if they went to the second and third stanzas of the national anthem, where they talk about murdering slaves who had the audacity to fight for their freedom, then maybe they wouldn't be so high on the national anthem to begin with. But I'm more than willing to accept the legitimacy of the national anthem. I was invited to give a series of lectures and workshops at West Point. And while I was there, there was a young man and a young woman who showed me around the facilities and campus and the whole nine yards at West Point. And during the time that I was there, there was a funeral. It was the funeral of a young man who had been in Afghanistan. But he was also the cadet that showed the young man who was showing me around West Point.

He was his mentor when he came in as a freshman. young guy who had been killed in Afghanistan, whose funeral was at West Point, at the facility at West Point, was his mentor when he came in as a freshman. And I remember standing there doing the playing of the national anthem. And it brought tears to my eyes. These are young people who know that when they leave West Point, they're not going to a big corporate job. They're not coming into the NFL. They're not going someplace where they're going to be in the movies or make albums or records or show up sitting on the couch at some late night talk show. They're going to Afghanistan. They're going to Iraq. They're going to something. And they accept that burden. This is a volunteer army where these young people stand up when a nation calls. They don't get into debates about the politics. How are we going to pay for it?

Who's right? Who's wrong, they simply say, send me, send me. and feel tremendously the significance and import of the National Anthem, notwithstanding the second stanza and the third stanza and some of this other stuff that comes up. But I also understand the backside of that. These young people are sacrificing their lives, their limbs, they're doing this so that we in this country will continue to have the right to protest far right. And that is what Kaepernick was doing. And if the words of the national anthem,

freedom and justice for all. It's just words. It's not so much that we're persecuting Kaepernick if he can't come back into the NFL. This is an affront to those young people that I was standing with at West Point. It's an affront to that young man who was buried while I was there giving a lecture on diversity and recruitment and its importance both in sports and in the military. So to look at what Kaepernick is doing and saying, yeah, but I agree with what he's saying. I understand what he's saying.

But why, but not doing the national anthem. Many of those same people would feel the same way, just as negatively toward him, if he was taking a knee in Times Square during the playing of chopsticks. Because basically what they're saying is, I don't want to hear anything about the circumstances and conditions and so forth of African-American people,

of women, of poor folks as far as that's concerned. I want to come out and see a football game and after the game, sit down, shut up and get on with your life. You're making a lot of money. Kaepernick believed more in this country than that. He believed more in the American people than that. He believed that as a nation and a society, we are better than that. And I understand that feeling, that sentiment, that drive because from the time that I began to hear these things about what happened in East St. Louis in 1917, from the time that I saw that picture of Emmett Till, from the time that I

met with Malcolm X, only to see him shot down, met with Dr. King, only to see him shot down, 1963, and I realized that in this country, the price of trying to move things ahead of public office could be your life. Right on up until this past month, I would much have rathered that that man that went to that Republican-Democrat softball game, rather than going out there and shooting that congressman, I would have much rathered that he had just walked down to the sideline and took a knee and said, you know what, we've got to move stuff ahead in the Congress. We'd all been better off. So what CAP has done is to contribute to that conversation that has been ongoing, that the Kerner Commission called for in the wake of Dr. King's assassination

in 1968, which is an open, honest conversation about race and racism and inequity and injustice and who and what we are as a nation. That's what Cap's transgression has been. And if there's no room for him in the NFL, then don't tell me anything about the integrity of the shield. I don't want to hear that anymore. I don't want to hear it from Roger. I don't want to hear it from the owners. I don't want to hear it from the people that they have sitting on the desk I don't want to hear it from anybody until they can tell me They can explain to me Why someone who takes a knee and says during the playing of the national anthem? Just as surely as this is the land of the free and the home of the brave with freedom and justice for all

We're better than this so for me going all the way back to my upbringing in the East St. Louis with all the ghosts and residuals of 1917, right up through this situation involving the National Football League and Kaepernick. It's all of one fabric. It's all of one fabric. It's all of one life.

And it's not a thing of anger. It's a thing of how do we get this done? The guy that was the agent in charge of the San Francisco office of the FBI in 1968, when he came to the FBI, He worked out of that office. The San Francisco office was the point office that J. Edgar Hoover had assigned to run me all over the country. He and I, for the last 15 years, have had a standing appointment for lunch two or three times a month. Me and Dick Hale get together and we talk about everything. We spend a lot of time talking about our children and our grandchildren and what I found over those years is that he wants the same

thing for his children and two granddaughters that I want for my children and two grandsons. And that's what we talk about. We disagree to some extent on how to get there. We disagree in some other areas. So it's not an issue of antipathy and anger and ongoing animosity and so forth. This is an American predicament. Kaepernick was indicative of an American predicament. So people that are feeling your passion, and you've gone to almost every emotion,

from frustration to deep empathy and sadness. You shared times of fear that you've had in your life. And so you've had almost every emotion alive in this conversation. And not just talking about them like there's some distant thing, but feeling it and animated by that spirit. If there's folks that say, I want to live like that, not necessarily for the same causes that you're passionate about, but I want to live in the same passionate way that Harry does, that Dr. Edwards does. I want to follow these big dreams that I'm not, a kid from your neighborhood was not supposed to go and get his doctorate degree from Cornell and write the longest dissertation.

For 32 years at Berkeley. Four Super Bowl rings with the 49ers. With one mentor, two mentors, and your dad, three. Three that we've talked about where one showed you what it's like to be scared and not know what to do. The other one looked at you in the eyes and said, you can do something special. And the other one said, hey, listen, here's $500. Right? Here's $500, right? So how would you teach somebody right now about living life with passion and purpose and fortitude to stick with the difficult times, to stick with it? What can someone do that's just starting their career, that feels a little dull, that is lost in some ways, that is overwhelmed by emotions? You know, my good friend, late Maya Angelou used to say that courage is the king of all values because without it, you can do nothing else and you can't have any other values. And I think that people somewhere, somehow, on some basis, have to find the courage to want not just change, but to want to help generate and create that change. And the notion of fear is so pervasive.

I was at a lecture, NC2A lecture. One of the people on the dais with me was Bill Russell. He came to the Seahawks to talk to us. Yeah, and I stood up and gave this 35-minute speech, hit all of the notes, all of the points, all of the crescendos, and at the end, people stood up and gave me a standing ovation. Bill Russell spoke after I did. He stood up and he said, my message is short. I think it's important. He said, don't be afraid. He talked for about two minutes and he sat down. And people were looking at each other, and you'd hear a clap in the back and a clap over here and a clap over there. And the moment of silence, the moderator got up and finally started asking questions to the panel. On the way home on the plane from the NC2A convention, I thought about that, and it dawned on me.

His message was so much more important, so much more to the point than what I had said that got a standing ovation that it completely went over people's heads. We in American society are organized by fear. Be afraid of white men with badges and blue uniforms. Be afraid of black kids with hoodies. Be afraid of women who are asking for medical services. Be afraid of the evangelicals. Be afraid of the Muslims. Be afraid of secular humanists. Be afraid of liberal Democrats. Be afraid of conservative Republicans. Be afraid of the rich and all of their money and power. Be afraid of the poor and their demand for entitlements. Be afraid of the old and their demand for entitlements. Be afraid of women. Be afraid. Be whatever you want to be, but be afraid. And then I'll tell you what the solution is to your fear. The cemetery is the greatest container of solutions, ideas, creativity, innovation, because the people who had those ideas, those innovative notions, took them to the grave with them because they were afraid to step out there. What Bill Russell was saying was at every level,

don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to step out. Don't be afraid to move beyond your comfort zone. Don't organize your life around your fears. Don't allow anybody else to drag you around by your nose according to your fears. Don't be afraid. And he sat down. That was the most significant statement that was made during the course of that whole four-hour lecture and panel session that we had. And it took him about five minutes to make that statement. And people sat out there, you got a few hands clapping here and clapping there, and it dawned on me that if we could just get to the point that we are not afraid. So you ask me, what can people do who want to make a difference, who simply want to live and make their contribution? The first thing that I would tell them is what Bill Russell told that crowd.

Do not be afraid. Personally, politically, socially, culturally. Don't be afraid to walk up to that person who's wearing the hijab and say, you know, I don't know a lot of Muslims. But you look like a person that I would love to know. Tell me about yourself. This is who I am. Don't be afraid. That would be my love to know. Tell me about yourself. This is who I am. Don't be afraid. That would be my advice to him.

And I learned that from one of the greatest intellects that I've ever come across, one Mr. William Felton Russell. We should drop the mic now. But I have one more question about mastery. Like, how do you articulate or define this concept of mastery? I think that you have to believe that you can be everything that you can be. And mastery is not something that you have. It's something that you do every single day.

It's something that you feel spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, in every dimension of your life. Because the first thing that you have to master before you can master anything is your life and yourself. And if you can't master that, then you can forget about mastering painting or mastering the corporate structure or mastering this task of that task. You must first master yourself. There's an old saying that who becomes fulfilled and totally manifest has to do with chance. This old saying by the poet Saint Vincent Benet, two ships on the same sea blown by the same wind take off in different directions because of an X factor in one that is not in the other. An X factor means something unknown. Chance always plays a role. We're here by chance. I was smarter than everybody else. I picked the right parents. Turned out to be 6'8 and 260 pounds with

a 39 and a half vertical and all other kinds of attributes, 168 IQ and all the rest of the stuff that goes along with that. Yeah. But that's a chance. 168 and a 39 vertical, those usually hang out together. Yeah. And I found this out after I got to San Jose State and after all of the testing and stuff that they put me through as a condition of the scholarship and getting into school. But a lot of it is consciousness of who and what you are. People are so busy so many times trying to be what others and the imagery expects them to be, projects them to be. And if you are not that, then you're nothing. Rather than really trying, having the courage to be who and what they are. My first advice to people who are interested in mastery, personal, professional thing, is first of all, don't be afraid. Do not be afraid and have the courage, that thing that Maya said is the king of all values, to cultivate and be who and what you are. I love how you said it and everything you just said, I'm in complete agreement with.

The figuring out, if you will, of who someone is, who I am, is a life journey. And it's one of the ancient practices in mindfulness is like, just ask yourself the question in a mindful way, whether you're sitting on a cushion or you're writing with a pen or whatever you're doing, who am I? Yeah. And the beautiful part about it is you're always in a state of becoming. I mean, at 75 years old, I'm still becoming. I'm still, every now and then, my grandsons will show me a side of myself that I didn't know was there. You know, every now and then I'll have a conversation with Dick Hale about his two granddaughters and something will come out that I didn't know was there. And that's always exciting for me, but you've got to have the courage to face it, to deal with it.

Yeah. So the way I think I link these concepts that we're talking about together is that we are becoming, and there's a razor's edge that's required to fully be. And then when we have the courage to be on that razor's edge, to be still, to be in the present moment, to be here with emotions, to be here with another person's journey and their story, when we have the courage to be on the razor's edge, then we become. And it takes courage in the face of all of this stuff that was going on, not just to say, wow, I understand why Kaepernick's doing that. But, hey, I support him doing it. We're going to be better as a consequence of it. We're going to be a better society. We're going to be a better people.

We're going to be a better organization. We're going to be a better league. got to step up behind that as owners, as GMs, as the commissioner, as other players and say, not only can we live with this, we're going to be better as a consequence of it. And the other part is, of course, that Kaepernick has moved from protests to programs in an effort to pursue progress. You can make him a martyr or you can make him a model. And it would be ridiculous to make him a martyr because you don't have to go back very far to see that all that has done is blow him up bigger than ever. They made Muhammad Ali a martyr. And before you know it, he was the most recognizable face on the face of this earth. And to the day he died, was the number one athlete personality, not just in this country,

in the world. I was in a room where you had Jim Brown and Bill Russell, whole bunch of, I mean, these are great athletes. Ali was sitting over in the corner. Every last one of them made their way over to shake his hand. Ali, how you doing, champ? What's going on? That's what happens when you make somebody, or you can make him a model. Hey, you want to make a statement? Cap has moved from protests to programs. This is a man that has spent almost two million dollars of his own money on youth and community programs. He sent 60,000 pounds of medical supplies,

food, clothing, and so forth to Somalia, one of the biggest human rights crises in the world today. He stood outside of the parole office in New York City, handing out suits of clothes and vouchers where people could go and buy clothes so that despite the fact that they just walked out of the probation and parole office, they can go put a suit on and go and look for a job. This is what Kaepernick has done. And they're going to turn around and say, but there's no place for him in the league. That's not only not smart, it's self-defeating. So it's not just an issue of being able to say yeah

behind the scenes yeah I don't want to say this too loud but I understand where he's coming from it's a it's it's being having the courage to stand up and say you're right I support you tell me what I can do to help in that cause okay where can people follow you where can can they find you? Where can they be part of what you're agitating and creating and shaping? Talk about your books, talk about social media, talk about the right places to find you. The Revolt of the Black Athlete has been reissued by the University of Illinois Press, of course, because as one reviewer said, it reads like it was written with a crystal ball.

It was written 50 years ago. I was a 24-year-old student at Cornell University who believed that I could literally impact positive changes, bring about positive changes in American society. I cared enough about black people in this country to try to advance both by changing their perceptions and understandings of the games they play. And it was from that perspective that I wrote The Revolt of the Black Athlete. So it's been reissued. I would also go online and look at the eulogy that I did for Bill Walsh. About two years before he died, we were in this very building, and he called me up to the office and he said... This is the legendary coach. Yeah, the head coach, Hall of Fame coach of the San Francisco 49ers. He called me up to his office in this very building and said, Harry, I want you to do my eulogy at my memorial service. I had no idea

what he was talking about. I had no idea how sick he was. And so my comment was, Bill, I'll do your eulogy if you'll do mine. He said, okay, you got a deal. And then about 18 months after that, he called me in and said, we were standing out on the field and he said you better go to work on that on it on that eulogy I said well what he he said no he said I'm very sick you know said I got leukemia and I'm about ready to to to move on he said this has been going on now for five or six years and I just it's time to move on. And so I wrote the eulogy and I asked him as I stayed in the eulogy, I said, do you want to see it to make sure that everything is said that you want said? He said, no. He said, I don't have to see it. Surprise me.

So they can go online and just hit Dr. Harry Edwards, Bill Walsh eulogy and that'll come up. Also, they can look a letter to Bill Walsh, which was up for an Emmy this year. They most certainly can look at O.J. Made in America, which got an Oscar this year. That's something that the whole first segment was almost all me. And then, of course, throughout helping to frame up that whole perception of O.J. Simpson and how he fit in with the thrust and so forth. Seven-part series. They most certainly can pull that up. It was a pretty good year to have an Oscar-winning program and also an Emmy nomination in the same year. And I'm not even in the business.

Come on. And then I've done a lot of voiceover stuff that they can also go online. So if you go online and just hit Dr. Harry Edwards, a ton of stuff will come up. You can look in there and pick and choose and say, well, you know, I think I want to do this. I think I might want to move in that direction. Cool. Or find you at Berkeley. Are you still teaching?

No, I'm not. I retired from Berkeley in 2000. I'd been there for 32 years on the faculty of sociology. I felt that the students had suffered enough. But at the time I was over that 32 years, I taught over 50 percent of all the students who took sociology at Berkeley. They had a saying on campus which used to tickle me. They say, if you go to Berkeley and haven't taken a class from Edwards, you really haven't been to Berkeley. Yeah, that's good. Every now and then I see, I get letters from my students still, you know, oh, Dr. Edwards, I, you know, I was over at Stanford Hospital and some old guy came up to me on a walker. He had glasses that looked like the bottom of Coke bottles.

They were so thick. And he walked up to me and he said, you know, I took a class from you in 1969 at UC Berkeley, and I'll never forget it. And I just want you to know how much of an impact I'm looking at this guy. I said, you gotta be kidding me. But then it dawned on me. I mean, I was like 20, 24, 25 years old when I started teaching. So you teach for 32, 33 years. And after a period of time, it's just time to go. But that's what I really miss. I fell in love with every class I ever taught. And I would have classes of six or 700 kids, you know, and we would have. I mean, it was it was the those were some of the greatest experiences of my life. Well, I'll tell you what, I usually am not this quiet during these conversations because I like to get in there, but you just, you just have a way about sharing facts and purpose underneath of an intent that all matter in a life effort.

So, you know, phenomenal. And I hope to see you on the sidelines this year. Oh, if they don't fire me, I'll be there. That's right. I hope to see you on the sidelines this year oh uh if they don't fire me i'll be that's right i hope to see on the sidelines yeah i know that drill and then you know you just a last parting note is that you make it really easy seahawks and niners you know nice little rivalry but you make it really easy to honor our for me to for me to honor you as a competitor when you know when we're on the football part of it, just because your spirit and how you see the bigness of the experience and football is just a way to learn more about who we are and a reflection of society. And, you know, it's just, it's fun to know you.

And I'll finish with this one last thing. I have so much respect for, for the Seahawks. Pete Carroll, of course, is one of our guys. He was here with us during the Superbowl year. He's just a tremendous spirit. I think he gets it. But I go back to something that Bill Walsh told me my very first year with the 49ers, and this is my 31st year with the 49ers, something he told me standing on the sideline doing a preseason camp. We walked out onto the field, and all of a sudden he turned to me and said, Harry, look at this. He said, you've got John Frank at tight end. There's Bubba Parrish, a black kid, next to him. There's Justice Apollo next to him at guard. There's Randy Cross at center. There's Guy

McIntyre, a black kid, at guard. Then you've got Keith Farnharts at the other tackle, and you've got Jerry Rice out here at wide receiver. You've got a kid from Appalachia at quarterback. You've got two kids from Nebraska, a black kid by the name of Roger Craig and another kid here by the name of Tom Rathman from Nebraska. Look at all that diversity. He said, all due respect to Super Bowl championships, all due respect to Super Bowl rings and conference championships and all other perks and everything that come with this job. This is why God gave us this great game with all of its risk, all of its violence, all of the chances that you take, all of the work that goes into it to demonstrate

what we can accomplish and achieve together. That's what the significance of the NFL is. This was Bill Walsh. That's one of the things I learned from him. And with that, I'll probably say it too much. Harry, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us.

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