The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Between the Lines Ep. 1: The Long History of Football and Race

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Welcome to the first episode of The Athletic's latest narrative podcast series - Between the Lines. The five episode series hosted by The Athletic's Tashan Reed looks at the Black experience in the NFL through a series of interviews with a diverse group of current and former NFL players, coaches, executives and league officials.Episode 1 of Between the Lines reviews the major moments in the 100 year history of race and activism in football while placing an emphasis on the inherent conflict between doing so and adhering to the culture of football. Voices in this episode include Doug Williams, Bomani Jones, Jim Trotter, Marcus Thompson II, Devin McCourty, and two of the originators of the Rooney Rule - Cyrus Mehri and Dr. Janice Madden. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Tashon Reed. I'm a black man from Ferguson, Missouri. My dad, Kenneth, grew up in the Pruitt Igo Projects in downtown St. Louis in the 50s and 60s. Water lines in several of the Pruid Igo apartment buildings broke, and the subsequent flow of water turned into ice. And now raw sewage bubbles out of the ground like a malevolent spring. He lived through what would become known as the Civil Rights Movement. Freedom, freedom, freedom.

Water, freedom. My mom Brenda was raised in Osceola, Arkansas, in the 60s and 70s. In the South, racial tension hadn't waned one bit. Today, I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood. My parents told me about their experiences and taught me the ugly history of what black people in America went through. Then, in 2008, it felt like maybe. Just maybe, America as a whole, was taking some positive. steps forward. If there is anyone out there.

When Barack Obama was elected as America's first black president. We still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible. Perhaps the days my parents described living through were a thing of the past. Who still questions the power of our democracy. Tonight is your answer. I know now that that pipe dream wasn't real. I had already started to figure that out as I got older, but it was really driven home in August of 2014.

There was growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African-American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, in the street within an apartment complex in Ferguson. I did not hear once he yelled, freeze, stop or hope. It was just horrible to watch. Brown's body laid in the street for hours. And as words spread that Brown had attempted to surrender before Wilson ended his life, more people gathered around the scene.

Eventually, their curiosity turned into anger, and their anger turned into protest. It's going to be a problem. There are any available Ferguson units who can respond to the Canfield and Copper Creek? Crowd control here. It was the spark of an uprising that would boil over in the months to come, and it became a a landmark moment in the origin of the Black Lives Matter. I knew all about the deep-rooted antagonism between police and the black community, but seeing it in person like this was different.

As someone who looked like Brown, who was from the same neighborhood, and who was the same age, everything about the situation. His tragic death, the response from the community, and the polarizing national discourse that followed resonated with me. I was only a few weeks away from starting my freshman year at Mizzou in pursuing a career in journalism. And I quickly made the decision that wherever my career took me, I would make sure to highlight the issues that plagued my community in my coverage.

That's why I'm doing this podcast. This is Between the Lines, a series dissecting how the NFL, America's biggest game, has dealt with America's biggest issue, race. The NFL does have a race problem, but more than that, the owners have a race problem. You're going to hear from more than a dozen, former and current diverse players, coaches, and executives

about their experiences in the NFL, how players grapple was speaking out in the next man-up culture of football. I couldn't sit around and not do anything about what was going on in our country, at least addressed it from a perspective that I could make half-stop. some impact then. To diverse coaches and executives who have broken through race-based glass ceilings, to others who never got their shop. You realize that no matter what you do, sometimes it's not enough.

I'm not going to let someone else determine my happiness. We'll explore how the league and a group of mostly white billionaire owners have historically failed to support diversity and how they appear set to only continue to fall short. At the end of the day, these 32 billionaires, they're the ones who have to say, yes, we're doing it. The NFL is one of the most visible, profitable, and influential businesses in America. If the league doesn't reflect diversity and inclusion, and it hasn't for quite some time, it permeates throughout the rest of the country. That won't change unless we continue to talk about it.

We start by diving into the history of the game and where football stands within the movement towards a more equal society. Welcome to Between the Lines, Episode 1, the long history of football and race. Along the timeline of professional football, equality in the game has taken an uneven route. In its inaugural season in 1920, the league had two black players, Bobby Marshall and Fritz Pollard. A year later, Pollard would become the league's first blackhead coach. but in 1933, the league's owners made the decision to ban black players from playing.

The man leading the charge was George Preston Marshall, the owner of the pro team in D.C. Marshall, according to pro football historian Thomas Smith, stated that if teams were integrated, the white players from the south would go to extremes to purposefully injured black players. It took an external threat to force the NFL to reintegrate in 1946. The Cleveland Rams were moving to Los Angeles. In the city would only allow the Rams to play in the L.A. Coliseum if the team signed a black player. The franchise would eventually bring on UCLA-star running back, Kenny Washington. While the league was reintegrated, it remained far from diverse.

By 1959, NFL rosters were still just 12% black. Continually throughout the NFL's history, it took existential threats to motivate the league's owners to act. act on issues of race. The American Football League that challenges the National Football League, monopoly over professional football. That's Frank Garrity, a professor of history and African American studies at Columbia University. Professor Garrity wrote a book titled The Sports Revolution

that details how the state of Texas has impacted civil rights through sports, including the collection of Texas millionaires who started the AFL in 1960. Which was started by the son of the O'Baron-Hun family, And KS Put Adams, another oil family. And they are the ones who are the driving force behind the creation of this league. So the Texas entrepreneurs are unique, I think, right? Insofar as even if they came from segregationist families, and Lamar Hunt was one of them, they understood quickly that if their teams were going to compete and if they wanted to be successful financially, that they needed black players.

The thirst to compete with the NFL took AFL teams to scout places NFL never went to. the HBCUs. It's not by accident that Lamar Hans, you know, what becomes the Kansas City Chiefs franchise, one of the more progressive franchise in terms of labor, signing black players, signing Lloyd Wells, a Houston-based black journalist, becomes a scout who allows the chiefs to get all sorts of talent, identify all sorts of talent from HBCUs. The case of Buck Buchanan is a good example of the disparity between the NFL and the AFL when it came to players from HBCUs.

Buchanan was an all-world athlete. Six-foot-eight, weighing around 300 pounds, Buchanan was once clocked running a 4.9 second 40-yard dash. That was an unmatched combination of size and speed for the era. Coming out of grambling in 1963, the star defensive linemen was selected in both the AFL and the NFL draft. But while he was taken first overall by the chiefs in the AFL, Buchanan had to wait until the 19th round,

to hear his name called in the NFL. Buchanan chose to go with the Chiefs. His impact was so large that John Madden himself said Buchanan revolutionized the game. And still, the number of black players in the NFL would remain marginal until the merger with the AFL in 1970. And even then, it was rare to see black players get opportunities at certain positions, particularly quarterback.

I grew up in an area in South Louisiana that was, about 20 minutes north to Baden Roots, predominantly black, and, you know, had to deal with certain things every week. Doug Williams is a landmark figure in the game of football. In the mid-70s, he became a star quarterback at Grambling under legendary head coach Eddie Robinson. Well, fortunately enough, you know, I had Coach Robinson, who coached me in college, that always told us, you know, this is America.

Whatever can happen in America, it can happen here. And if you can block and tackle at Grambling, you can do it anywhere. I always had him in my corner. He never told me because I was black what I couldn't do. You know, he told me what I can do at Gremlin. In 1977 as a senior, Williams was prolific at gambling. He led all of college football in both passing yards and touchdown passes. Still, only one NFL team scouted Williams in person ahead of the draft.

Joe Gibbs, then the offensive coordinator with the Tampa Bay Bucks, spent two days with Williams at Grambling. That time was enough to convince the Bucks to take Williams with the 17th overall pick in the draft and make him the first black quarterback to be taken in the first round in NFL history. Immediately, though, Williams says he experienced the way the NFL handled black players differently

from white players. You know, getting drafted in the first round by Tampa Bay, I learned real early because I didn't report to training camp. So a week late because of the contract negotiation, you know, the pay that they had offered me wasn't near about what they offered other guys that were drafted in the first round. Williams was offered a below market contract for even a backup quarterback, a base salary of just $50,000.

It came to a point where, you know, I played football at Grambling Free and high school free. And I told my age, and I say, hey, look, let's just go and play. least I'm going to be making more than I was making before I got here. Then, after his first game in the NFL, Williams was asked what he viewed as a routine question by a reporter. After the game, I was asked the question was what was going through my mind and what was I thinking about and looking at when they was playing the national anthem. You know, honest, I was point blank.

You know, I didn't think it was that bad. And I told the guy, I said, oh, when I'm on the sideline, you know, I'm counting to see how many black coaches on the other side line. Remember, I went to Gremlin. They were coached that Gremlin was black. Williams saw it as an innocuous statement, but Buckshead coach John McKay called Williams into his office the next day for an impromptu meeting.

Coach McKay said, come on, Duggy. I'll just come to my office. So I went through his office, and the editor of the Tama Bay Tribune was there. Tom McHughan. I went in the end, Coach McKay sat down, and I sat down, and Tom looked at me. He said, he said, Doug.

So yeah. He said, you can't make that kind of statement. What did I say? What kind of statement you talk about? You know, you said that you stood on the sideline and you was trying to figure out how many black coaches was on the other side. We only had one on our side.

So, you know, and most time we play, you either see one or none. Very sudden you've seen two or three. I learned pretty quickly that I was in Tampa. You couldn't go too many miles south in Tampa. You know, and that you'd been to golf, you know. So I realized that, you know, what I was up against at that particular time when I got scorn for just saying what I thought

was just a routine answer to the course. Not only was Williams muzzled off the field, but his capability on the field was questioned. Many thought he wasn't smart enough. Others were concerned that he couldn't leave men. When I looked at it, I felt like if I had the helmet on, I just concentrated what was between the lines. And that's how I got over a whole lot of that stuff. You know, you read stuff. the paper, but you don't let it get to you because you know what you can do. And I think that was the thing that kept me going. Being a competitor all my life, I didn't worry about what they say. I just worried about what I can do. The Bucks lowballed Williams again during negotiations for his

second contract, which caused him to leave the NFL for the USFL. After that league folded, Tampa traded his rights to Washington, where he reunited with Gibbs, who'd left the Bucks to become Washington's head coach. A few years later in 1980, Williams shattered through all the stereotypes about black quarterbacks, leading Washington to a Super Bowl win in a blowout against the Denver Broncos and throwing four touchdown passes in the process. And again, Doug Williams, he is having a dream day for our quarterback. He's had a dream year and a dream moment here in San Diego.

He was the first starting black quarterback in NFL history to lead his team to a Super Bowl win. For Williams, it took a conversation with his old college coach Eddie Robinson to understand the significance of the performance. And he said, Kat, he said, you know, it wasn't about the four TD passes you through. It was about the fact that you got up off the turf. And, you know, that's the thing that he always preached to us

was getting up off the turf. He said, you got up off the turf and did it. And he said, watching that game today to him, you know, remember our coaches started the head coach in 1941. So when he said that it was like Joe Lewis knocking out Matt Snelling, He said, that's how he looked at that game. You know, and that's it. I didn't know. I didn't really know exactly what he was talking about.

I heard my dad to talk about it. But he told me that, you know, I might not realize the impact today. And that was January 31st, 1988. He said, but the older you get, the more you're going to realize the impact that that game was and what it meant to not only him, but to a lot of folks in America. One year later, the Los Angeles Raiders hired Art Shell, making him the first blackhead coach in modern NFL history. We have to get back to the toughness.

When we walk on the dog on field, you know, we want people to give us respect. Williams and Shell's accomplishments were positive steps, but the pervasive culture that defined the NFL was still one that silenced diverse voices. Most players felt they had no choice but to capitulate to that precedent. And without modern tools like social media, players were relying on outlets such as newspapers to speak their minds. They were often hesitant to do so because most of the staffers

at those publications didn't look like them. You realize right away that it's sort of a lonely existence and then you look at the teams and the leagues that you cover and you see so few of you off of the field.

Jim Trotter, now a national NFL reporter for the NFL Network, was a rarity as a black sports reporter in the late 80s. When I graduated college, I went to a small paper in Muskegon, Michigan.

and I was the only black in the sports department. I left there and I went to Tacoma, Washington, where I was one of two blacks in the sports department. And then I left there and went to San Diego, where they had never had a black in the sports department before. Trotter got his first experience covering the NFL on the San Diego Chargers beat in the 1990s. He was a newcomer,

but he noted players immediately had a different level of comfort with him. I walk in the locker room and there's two players in there on the far side of the room. And the second player was Junior Sayyau. And so he turns and he looks and he sees me. And mind you, we've never met. And he calls me over. And he says, also, you're the new guy.

And I'm like, yeah, you know, say my name. He's like, I'm Junior Seyau. He introduces himself, you know, as if I didn't know him. And we have a short conversation at the end of that conversation. He says to me, if you need anything, take my number and call me. Trotter initially thought that Sayah was joking. Why on earth would the team's star player give his personal number to a reporter who he had never met? What I learned later, you know, having been around him and developed a relationship with him,

he saw a non-white covering the team. And to him, that meant something. And obviously, Junior was American Samoa in terms of his ancestry. For whatever reason is that I think he felt that there were some shared experiences. and therefore the coverage in a time of controversy or whatever would be more fair. Trotter saw a similar relationship develop among other players of color, but he describes the nature of those relationships as a double-edged sword. Just because we are of the same race doesn't mean that you mess up, I'm not going to report it.

I have a job to do. They understood that when there was something of controversy, I made a point of not ambushing them with it in terms of they were going to read it in the paper. the next day. I was always going to come to them first and give them an opportunity to address it. Except for ownership, the different levels of the NFL pyramid. Media, players, coaches, executives, and the league office started to shift a bit in the 90s. It was a slow process, but players started to get more bold. I built this and this is my house. I don't care if I'm with the Valgo's or not. This is my house and this will always be my house. And let's continue. In 94,

Dion Sanders, Prime Time himself, went on a free agency tour. After he visited the Dolphins, he said they were out of the running for his services because they didn't have a single black coach meet with him. Throughout the entire league, there were still only a handful of blackhead coaches and coordinators throughout the 90s and early 2000s. It wasn't until 2002 that a moment sparked some kind of change, and it came from someone whose only connection to the league was fandom. I started my day like I did every day. I first read the sports section. Yes, you sports fans know what I mean when you got it. You can't start the day without reading the sports section. That's Cyrus Mary, a civil rights lawyer and a passionate sports fan. Mary was reading his morning

newspaper on the day after Tony Dungey, the man who turned the Tampa Bay Bucks from a laughing stock into a contender was fired. And I was already nipped about Dennis Green being fired by the Minnesota Vikings after taking to the team to the playoffs eight out of 10 years. And Coach Dungey turned around what was at that time the worst franchise in football, Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Both of them were getting the playoffs all the time. Both of them were getting the championship games and both of them being let go. Mary says he had an epiphany right there at his kitchen table.

The firings of Green and Dungey ignited a desire in him to use the skill set he built in his professional life as a lawyer to bring change to football. I could do some of the things I've used in the past. I used to be a clinical organizer for Ralph Nader's group, public citizen. We used to release a lot of reports. I had that in the back of my mind. And I also knew from doing discrimination work

that you could use statistics to do comparative analysis. First, Mary teamed up with one of the most famous lawyers in the world, Johnny Cochran. You know, whether we like it or not, racism has played a part in our lives in this country. Yeah, I love this country. It's the greatest country in the world. But it doesn't help to pretend that we don't have some problems.

Then Cochran and Mary needed to find someone to actually do the statistical analysis to prove their thesis. I got a call from Cochran and Mary saying, you remember that discussion you had about looking at success. Could you do that for NFL coaches? Dr. Janice Madden is a labor economist who had little interest in football. But she knew Cochran and Mary from working with them in the past on a football. another case involving gender discrimination in the workplace. Dr. Madden says her analysis when it came to black coaches in the NFL produced a result that shocked her. I was really surprised that with so very few black coaches, there were such a strong pattern of the African American coaches doing better.

It was really dramatic. The only way this could be is that there's a barrier to entry because there's no reason why African Americans would be better coaches than white coaches. You only get that result, if you're requiring them to be better, acquiring African Americans to be better to do the job. Mary says the numbers that ultimately made up the report clearly defined a situation. Black coaches went to the playoffs two out of three times, and white coaches won out of three times. Well, that's a monumental difference in favor of the black coaches, to one games more often, and yet we're like last hired first five. And so we put out a report called Black coaches in the National Football League, superior performance, inferior opportunities.

By the time I get to the NFL, it was a major deal. This is Ray Anderson. His initial connection to the NFL was working as one of the league's few prominent black agents. But by 2002, he'd become a vice president at the NFL. He was working in the league office when Cochran, Mary, and Madden released a report that they put together. And it was solidly.

on the desk, then Commissioner Paul Taglibu and 2B Commissioner Roger Goodell, along with Jeff Pass, the general counsel of the NFL. And it was very clear that that report needed to be acted upon. And now, when presented with the data, the NFL leaned on the argument that there weren't enough qualified blackhead coaching candidates. But for Dr. Madden, that argument didn't hold weight. The NFL at the time was making the argument, well, wait, you know, we have this concern, but there just aren't enough African Americans in the pipeline. And I said pipeline be damned. I mean, this is saying that whatever you've got out there, you seem to have a higher barrier

for African Americans, whatever your pipeline is. As Dr. Madden saw it, the owners opted to lean almost entirely on their own instincts, instead of looking at the data when it came to who they hired as head coaches. We do know from a vast array of studies of labor markets that when people go to their gut. In other words, it's subjective. It's just the feeling they have. That minorities of all sorts are people that haven't traditionally had the jobs, given their demographic characteristics, are less likely to farewell. Far too often, those instincts led them to hire candidates who looked like them. It's been referred to in some of the psychological literature is implicit bias,

that it's not necessarily that anybody's saying we don't want African-American coaches. It's that there's a level of comfort or thinking about who's going to do this, that African Americans face a barrier in being able to cross. What I learned in that process is that people have good intentions, but sometimes they just don't know. Anderson was one of the primary people inside the NFL working to address the inequalities starkly laid out in the report. He realized that a lack of information was just as big of an issue as any intentional effort to avoid hiring blackhead coaches.

We as a group were able to have candid conversations. And one of the things that I really pressed as part of my experience, having been an agent, these cannot be token interviews. These cannot be checked-the-box experiences. So we've got to construct a rule that really is intentional and deliberate about making sure that when these opportunities are presented, they've got to be legitimate. opportunities. Anderson, along with others, ultimately drove enough internal support to lead the NFL to establish the Rooney rule. Named after late Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney,

the Rooney rule required teams to interview at least one diverse candidate for head coaching vacancies. At the end of the day, it was all going to be driven by what the owners wanted to do. It wasn't going to be the presidents and the general managers and the head of the union or anybody in the League office, including the commissioner, it was ultimately going to be what were the owners going to commit to in terms of really advancing these opportunities, i.e. hiring folks that looked different than them. In the 2003 season, when the rule was put in place, the league only had three blackhead coaches. Going into the 2006 season, that number had grown to seven. There was optimism that the NFL had turned a corner. We know now, though,

that that growth wouldn't be sustained. To start the 2022 season, there were only four Blackhead coaches. So I was quite surprised, because I hadn't been paying attention on the last 10 years, to see that things have reverted back to where they were 20 years ago. I mean, we usually learn from the past. The NFL hasn't shown its stun-nap. Particularly among the head coaching ranks, the league has failed to make any sustained progress on diversity.

and while those who suffer as a result have had moments where they pushed back, the NFL was ultimately able to silence them. But all that started to change before a preseason game in 2016 in Santa Clara between the 49ers and the Packers. Some fans are burning jerseys. Kaepernick's jerseys. Burning, burning gone. After 49er Colin Kaepernick was spotted sitting during the national anthem. Some are calling the sit-out disrespectful.

We'll look back at that. the moment when Colin Kaepernick shook up the league after the break. Before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, the 49ers quarterback wasn't someone anyone expected to become an activist, let alone someone leading one of the most significant social activist movements in U.S. sports history. It was a little weird for all of us because Kaepernick hadn't talked to us very much. At times had been rude and had been rude to his teammates. She wasn't the most, you know, chatty guy.

The athletics, Tim Kawakami, is a longtime sports columnist in the best of the best of the Bay Area. Kawakami says Kaepernick was shy, not the type to loudly proclaim his beliefs to his teammates, let alone the media. He didn't really talk to people, small talk. That wasn't him at all. It's fair, but it's also fair for people who go, my God, you're the starting quarterbacking, you don't want to talk to anybody. You understood he was stubborn because he'd been stubborn through some things. And I mean stubborn in a good way. I don't mean stubborn in a bad way. You understood that he might have the will to do something like this. So that wasn't the surprise. The surprise was this issue, this moment, this symbolism, and that's when it just mushroomed into something above and beyond.

But Kaepernick had been quietly getting educated on issues of civil rights. He had audited classes on African history at UC Berkeley and read books from influential black authors such as Malcolm X and Bell Hooks for the first time. This explosion of education collided with a string of deadly incidents of black Americans being killed by law enforcement. Breaking news in the police shooting of Philando Castile. The police officer who shot and killed him is being charged in the case. Freddie Gray died from a severe injury to his spinal cord. Cell phone video in the arrest shows police dragging him into a van. Six officers have now been suspended pending an investigation.

Tonight, new chilling images of that deadly shooting outside a Baton Rouge convenience store. One officer pinning 37-year-old Alton Sterling to the ground while another kneels on his arm. Heading into the 2016 preseason, Kaepernick decided he was going to send what he thought would be a quiet message. Instead of standing for the national anthem, he would sit on the bench. It wasn't like Kaepernick was saying,

hey, look at me, because he was sitting on the bench. I don't think it really registered with Colin. Like, he was doing it early in preseason, and nobody noticed. And as Kawakami points out, Kaepernick didn't draw a huge amount of attention in the first two games because Kaepernick didn't play a snap. We weren't just, what's Kaepernick up to? That wasn't the case because he was hurt or he was standing.

You know, he wasn't on the sideline. And I know it hadn't fully realized in his mind exactly what this was going to be other than he wasn't going to stand for the national anthem. The protests would change into an international movement on August 26, 2016. It was a Friday night game against the Green Bay Packers, the third preseason game of the season, a game where Kaepernick was finally going to play. Look, everything changed with the Colin Kaepernick stance. He bought blackness in society and the black disparity in society into the NFL realm.

That's Steve Weish, a national reporter for the NFL Network, who was covering the game that night in Santa Clara. As he'd done before, Kaepernick sat on the bench as the national anthem played. Weish took notice, and after the game, he asked Kaepernick why he was sitting. And the national everybody was like, oh, wow, okay. So now we really have, it's become political as well as it's become social as it has become athletic. And in a one-on-one interview, Kaepernick told Weish, I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. It was wild at the time.

I remember seeing it and didn't think much of it. Marcus Thompson II is a senior columnist for the athletic. based in the Bay Area. And it wasn't until he did the interview with Steve Weiss and said why. We were like, uh-oh. Uh-oh, it's on. So it begins. Ahead of the final preseason game for the 49ers,

Kaepernick decided to switch up his posture during his pregame protests. Some claims sitting during a national anthem was disrespecting U.S. military members. After speaking to Seahawks long snapper and former Army Green Beret Nate Boyer about it, Kaepernick saw where they were coming from. So, during the National Anthem before the game against the Chargers, Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reed chose to take a knee. Kawakami says the visuals from that protest ignited a controversy that would change Kaepernick's life.

He and Eric Reed knelt for the National Anthem. That became the image, and then that press conference afterwards was circus-like. We have cops that are murdering people. We have cops in the SFPD that are blatant. This was a person like kind of growing as we spoke. You know, the media painted this as, I'm anti-American, anti-men and women of the military. And that's not the case at all. It wasn't like this fully formed, like this is my protest.

I am now. This is who I am. I am Malcolm X. There were developments and stages. This was a early stage of Colin Kaepernick's social activism. He was kind of thinking it through. I think it will continue to be taken the knee as far as as how long this goes, I'm not sure.

It wasn't planned to go A to B to C, just not at that time. It grew to that. What I was thoroughly struck by was his calmness through it, through this storm. He never lost this temper, and he could have. The message is that we have a lot of issues in this country that we need to deal with. We have a lot of people that are oppressed. We have a lot of people that aren't treated equally, aren't given equal opportunities. You know, police brutality is a huge thing that needs to be.

addressed. Inside the 49ers building, Kaepernick's protests and the reaction surrounding it wasn't as big of a distraction as it was made out to be. Kawakami says ultimately, despite all the media coverage, the bulk of the team's focus remained on football. You know, the idea of this circus and it was terrible, it was tearing apart the team. It was a terrible team, first of all. And secondly, wasn't that much. I mean, quarterbacks always have perhaps conferences, right? That's what, and I do think the locker room had to kind of deal with it and understand it. Some of the veterans were Like, why are you bringing this to this team now? You know, but they got it.

They figured, like, this is it. This is an authentic feeling. And we can just keep playing football. That's fine. And Collins one's putting on his shoulders. Even at the higher levels of power in the 49ers franchise, Kaepernick saw support during his season of protests. Chip Kelly isn't your standard NFL coach, football coach,

who was just going to want authority, authority, authority. Probably a good coach to be in the middle of it. He trusted that Kaepernick meant it. I think Jed York was solid as he stood up behind him. Donated a million dollars, I believe it was. Probably 28 owners wouldn't do that. I think we know most of them would not. And there's also the fact of where Kaepernick played, the Bay Area.

It was wild just to witness in the Bay Area because that Bay Area has been central to so many of these kind of revolutionary moments, right? Marcus Thompson II says Kaepernick's protests were embraced by many in the community. And I don't know if history is going to see a football player in dealing as one of those, but you felt it at the time. You felt like, okay, I wasn't here for Tommy Smith and John Carlos, but this might be our version, right? So just like the way the Bay just kind of gravitated towards that moment, it was definitely surreal, man.

It was like, we about this life. And then as it unfolded and you started hearing Kaepernick talk about it, It became a consuming thing out here. With that being said, a tremendous amount of the attention towards Kaepernick was negative. I think it's ridiculous. It just pisses me off. You know, I'm just frustrated by that. A driver who hung an effigy of Colin Kaepernick from his truck's trailer hitch says there was nothing racially motivated about it. His arrogance is getting in the road.

Disrespect for this country. Period. I was a bit jarred by how universal the slander was and just the vehemates. To me, it's just, maybe because I'm black, it's just not uncanny for somebody to be like, I don't rock with the flag or I don't rock with the anthem, right? Like, this is something, I mean, I went to a HBCU. So maybe that's what it is, right? You just hear this stuff. It's not that uncommon, even with Mahmoud Abdul-Ru Roof, right?

It just wasn't uncommon. But I do think a lot of that stuff was a bi-prime. of 9-11. Like, we just didn't view it the same anymore. A handful of players across the league joined Kaepernick. New England Patriots players Martellus Bennett and Devin McCordy raised a fist during a national anthem. Outside of the building, it wasn't popular to be talking about social justice

or to be talking about how black people were treating our country. And a lot of people, I would say, weren't really receptive to it. McCordy says the reaction they faced made it clear that it wasn't just about the act of. of sitting or kneeling during the anthem. I remember Stacey James RPR guy brought me a thick pamphlet of different people emailing an organization of I should be fired. Like all these crazy outrageous things.

Most players in the NFL remained silent as a result. That isolation made it easy to single out Kaepernick. He's yet to be able to find a spot on a roster since that 2016 season. Kawakami says it was something that Kaepernick knew was a possibility, all along. He thought he might get cut by the four-niners the first week. He didn't know. And maybe that was a possibility. And I respect people who do things when they know that they're putting it on the line. And when they know their lives will never be the same again, it won't be comfortable. It won't be, there will be 28 owners that will never hire you ever, ever, ever, and probably 29 head

coaches. And while it didn't immediately have a widespread impact in the NFL, Kaepernick-Stand did influence athletes and other sports. Thompson sat in on a meeting with some of the NBA's most prominent figures, where they discussed how they should react to what Kaepernick was doing both on and off the field. And it was like just this deep conversation. It was impressive to see 20 young black millionaires who are consumed with basketball and whose whole life is dedicated to this sport stopping and saying, hey, yo, Kaepernick is doing this. What does it mean? and having a conversation about it. And you hear them talking about,

well, what can we really do that matters, right? It wasn't until the next season in 2017 when Kaepernick's protest became a larger movement in the NFL. And part of that was due to a strong reaction to the protests from the most powerful person in the world. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag

to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now out? He's fired. Fired! That's then President Donald Trump. At a Friday night rally in Alabama in late September of 2017, Trump aimed his vitriol and NFL players saying their protests were hurting the game, and had if fans agree with him, they should walk out of stadiums. Two days later on Sunday, the players returned with their response in an unprecedented scene

of unity across the league. From coast to coast, even in London, players linking arms like people. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, some raising fists like Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. After scoring a touchdown. Hundreds of players across several games knelt during the anthem. Some owners linked arms with and showed support for their players. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was a prominent Trump supporter, and he'd previously critiqued players for their protests.

But even he knelt with his players. We all agreed our players wanted to make a statement about unity, and we want to make a statement about equality. The Patriots, a team known for avoiding saying anything deemed controversial in an effort to focus on football, had more than 20 players who took a knee. Devin McCordy was among the group, and he said that doing so caused a stir,

both inside and outside the building. I was always very open with my teammates, with coaches, of what I believe and what I thought, you know, protesting and doing things during the answer, of what I was trying to bring from that. And, you know, 17 when we need during the Houston game, I got a chance to speak after the game. And I thought that was the best part.

I got to vividly express, you know, outside of taking it me. A lot of people said, don't do it on our time. We came to watch football. And I told them the truth is, if I did this on my time, no one would tune in. No one would care about these issues because they don't impact you. NFL network reporter Jim Trotter says the gap between Kaepernick kneeling in 2016 to the more widespread player protest in 2017

was a recognition from players that their voice is a powerful tool. Players didn't know how to respond, you know? It was all new. But in the aftermath of all that, once we got through a year of it, they started understanding their real power that they have. And they started using their voice

and saying what they were not comfortable with, what they were not going to accept, and pointing out issues when to ask about it. Trotter says that players realizing they're powerful when it comes to social issues is a part of a growing awakening within the league. The one thing I think that's important to us that the union, when DeMor Smith came in, he always said, I don't want these guys to think of themselves as football players. I want them to think as businessmen too. I want them to think as partners with NFL owners and not just employees.

And so I think that these generations that are coming in now are starting to understand that this is a business and it's not just a game. and that they do have power. For the most recent generation of pro athletes, there's a clear delineation between before Kaepernick and after Kaepernick. Before, you rarely heard a pro athlete being an activist. After, as Marcus Thompson the second states, being socially active became the standard. You know, my childhood was a lot of these athletes shook.

They don't care about nothing. You know what I'm saying? And it was like, where are the Jim Browns? Where are the career I'm doing your bars? So it was cool to see these players step up like that and not just be about the bread, you know? Like, I mean, they're about the bread and the bread helps. There ain't no mistake in that. But they could also do this other thing.

It began with Kaepernick just kind of being the first one to do it to just get fed up with it. The impact from Kaepernick's protests has mushroomed over the years. It's helped enhance the platform for athletes from other marginalized groups who were already addressing the issues they're passionate. about. I do think we miss it, but I do want to credit some of the women athletes and some of the, like, the amateur athletes who were actually risking it all. I remember high school kids was out here taking knees, right? Like, you know, women's soccer players is taking needs. Women's college basketball players. And then at that point, you can't be the non-gangster. Well, it's like a sophomore

wide receiver, like taking it on a chin in some middle American spot, right? Like, so I do think There was a lot of people who show, you know, we can do this. And it became a movement. It became a moment. That's to me what makes it like historic. Colin Kaepernick ignited something within the league. Black players, coaches, and executives have become more outspoken on matters of race and activism. And that's forced the NFL to react.

The NFL had to be dragged there. There had to be an explosion for this to happen. And Kaepernick, we were watching it. It was an explosion that you did not really know where it was going to go at the time. It was just a young man who felt strongly and was committed to it and was going to speak his truth. And that's what it was. On the next episode of Between the Lines, if you're going to benefit from the drive and motivation of these players that comes from a very specific place,

we'll hear from current and former NFL players who've incorporated activism into their careers. Then I think, yeah, yeah, they have an obligation to give back to the community, to the sources to the origin of why that is what it is in the first place. And explain why the NFL can no longer just be a bystander. Thank you for listening to Between the Lines. Deshaun Reed is the creator and host of the series. Matt Havia and Mike Smelts are the executive producers. And special thanks to Robert Mays and Michael Beller.