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ACTIVISM AND REVOLT SPORTS AS A SITE FOR POLITICAL EXPRESSION HISTORIC DEBATE: THE ROLE OF SPORTS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE “SHUT UP AND DRIBBLE”/JUST PLAY! VS

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ACTIVISM AND REVOLT SPORTS AS A SITE FOR POLITICAL EXPRESSION HISTORIC DEBATE: THE ROLE OF SPORTS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE “SHUT UP AND DRIBBLE”/JUST PLAY! VS. SPORTS AS PLATFORM/IMPERATIVE TO SPEAK “DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS” • WEB DUBOIS (1903) BLACK AMERICANS EXPERIENCE A “DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS,” “ONE SOUL STRIVING TO BE AMERICAN, ONE SOUL STRIVING TO BE BLACK.” THAT • HEGEMONIC PATRIOTISM • PATRIOTISM • HISTORICALLY DESCRIBES AN ATTACHMENT TO AMERICA AS A HOMELAND, A COMMITMENT TO AMERICAN VALUES, OR A SENSE OF PRIDE IN THE JOURNEY, PROGRESS, AND/OR IDEALS OF THE NATION. • ASSOCIATED, HISTORICALLY, WITH WHITENESS AND THE IDEALS OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY WITH WHICH WE BEGAN THE COURSE • WHO IS IMAGED AS INCLUDED IN THIS PARTICULARIZED IMAGINATION OF PATRIOTISM AND NATIONHOOD IS NOT BENIGN • COUNTER-FRAMES TO DOMINANT NARRATIVES OF WHAT PATRIOTISM MEANS, ARE, THUS REQUIRED AND CONSTRUCTED AS JAMES BALDWIN DESCRIBED IT, “‘I LOVE AMERICA MORE THAN ANY COUNTRY IN THIS WORLD, AND, EXACTLY FOR THIS REASON, I INSIST ON THE RIGHT TO CRITICIZE HER, PERPETUALLY.’” IN THESE TERMS, PROTEST IS PATRIOTIC AND BENEFITS ALL AMERICANS AS ROUNDS NOTES: “BLACK AMERICANS, ALL THE WAY FORWARD TO KAEPERNICK, HAVE RECONFIGURED PATRIOTISM TO EMPHASIZE THE INSEPARABILITY OF DISSENT.” NATION • THE ONLY WAY WE CAN KNOW A “NATION” IS THROUGH ITS IMAGINATION IN MEDIA OR MEDIATED DISCOURSE • THE NATION IS NOT A THING, BUT A SET OF CONTINGENT AND ONGOING PROCESSES THAT ARE MOBILIZED FOR DIVERSE PURPOSES IN A RANGE OF CONTEXTS • WE CAN ONLY REALLY “KNOW” THE NATION BY EXAMINING THE WAYS IT FUNCTIONS AS A RESOURCE IDENTITY • OUR SOCIAL SUBJECTIVITY (WHICH IS CONTEXTUAL AND SHIFTING) AND ITS INTERPLAY WITH OUR EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD AND THE CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL SETTINGS IN WHICH THAT SUBJECTIVITY IS FORMED • IDENTITY IS PERFORMED, IN CONTEXT CITIZENSHIP • TRADITIONALLY REFERS TO THE STATUS OF BELONGING TO A POLITICAL BODY AND HAVING RIGHTS AND DUTIES AS A MEMBER • CONSUMER-CITIZENSHIP, AS WE WILL READ ABOUT AND DISCUSS IN DETAIL NEXT WEEK, DESCRIBES HOW THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP IN THE LAST FEW DECADES HAS, FOR BETTER OR WORSE, BECOME MORE CONSUMER ORIENTED. OUR SENSE OF BELONGING IS OFTEN ROOTED IN OUR CONSUMPTION PRACTICES AND “BRAND COMMUNITIES” AS MUCH AS IN FORMAL, POLITICAL BODIES. The Policing of Patriotism: African American Athletes and the Expression of Dissent Christopher D. Rounds Journal of Sport History, Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2020, pp. 111-127 (Article) Published by University of Illinois Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sph.2020.0025 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/765349 [ Access provided at 20 Feb 2021 00:40 GMT from University of California @ Irvine ] The Policing of Patriotism African American Athletes and the Expression of Dissent CHRISTOPHER D. ROUNDS† Allen University From the “Noble Experiment” of baseball player Jackie Robinson to the national anthem protests initiated by football player Colin Kaepernick, the manner in which African American athletes have responded to demands that they demonstrate their patriotism has been critiqued and regulated at every turn. This article seeks to chronicle that history, by exploring the experiences not only of Robinson and Kaepernick but all African Americans who, throughout the history of sport, have challenged preconceived notions and displays of patriotism. This includes boxer Muhammad Ali and sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, among several lesser-­known figures. What is remarkable is the connective tissue, the degree to which the activism of athletes from Robinson to Kaepernick, and the reactions to it, has not fundamentally altered in seven decades. KEYWORDS: patriotism, protest, athletics/sports, African American B y the early 1960s, Jackie Robinson had become a shining star of American conservatism. As the centerpiece of baseball’s “Noble Experiment,” Robinson had broken the sport’s color line and become for many white Americans a symbol of their own racial progressivism. Robinson had played the game “the right way,” with passion and dogged effort, and had won the acceptance of his fellow players and fans across the country. But despite his status as a trailblazing icon, his association with the Republican Party signaled for those All correspondence to crounds@allenuniversity.edu † Summer 2020 111 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY same Americans a rebuke of the more radical aspects of the civil rights movement that had emerged after his playing days concluded. Robinson had been critical of John F. Kennedy, corresponded with Richard Nixon, would spar with Malcolm X, and most notably was outspoken in deriding Muhammad Ali’s efforts to register as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.1 Yet the activist fire burned, and in his 1972 autobiography, I Never Had It Made, Robinson made comments that, if made in 2020, would be incendiary and find themselves among the headlines of every news-­media outlet: The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. . . . As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.2 In light of the recent protests initiated by football player Colin Kaepernick that center on the observance of the national anthem, Robinson’s words seem now to be prescient, if not prophetic. Before a preseason football game in August of 2016, Kaepernick, then with the San Francisco 49ers, remained seated on the team bench during the playing of the national anthem. When, after the game, he was asked about the genesis of his protest, Kaepernick explained: I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.3 In comments to the media two days later, Kaepernick elaborated that, while the focal point of his protest was the police brutality that plagued minority communities throughout the country, it was also a condemnation of a justice system, political leaders, and a government that, through their inaction, endorsed it. “This country stands for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now,” Kaepernick stated. “When there’s significant change and I feel like the flag represents what it’s supposed to represent . . . I’ll stand.”4 In an op-­ed in the New York Times, teammate Eric Reid noted that, after a conversation with former football player and Army Green Beret Nate Boyer—who had been critical of Kaepernick in an open-­letter published in an issue of the Army Times—Kaepernick and he decided that, going forward, they would kneel, rather than remain seated, during the anthem as a respectful, peaceful protest. The discourse their protest stimulated disclosed a deep cultural divide. Prominent figures in sports and politics praised Kaepernick, and within two weeks, he had inspired similar protests by amateur and professional athletes across the country. Seemingly, just as many condemned such protests as disrespectful to the flag, the country, and military personnel. The vitriolic response baffled Reid. “It has always been my understanding,” he wrote, “that the brave men and women who fought and died for our country did so to ensure that we could live in a fair and free society, which includes the right to speak out in protest.”5 From the playing days of Robinson to the backlash directed at Kaepernick, the manner in which African American athletes have responded to demands that they demonstrate their 112 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism patriotism has been critiqued and regulated at every turn. This article seeks to chronicle that history, by exploring the experiences not only of Robinson and Kaepernick but those of the aforementioned Ali and of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Their stories, among those of several lesser-­known figures, will be viewed largely through the perspective of Robinson, who, from his inaugural season in 1947 to his untimely death in 1972, was a highly visible public figure who spoke and wrote frankly on issues of sports and politics. His changing attitudes, over a tumultuous quarter-­century, are reflected in his responses to the activism of the individuals mentioned above and to the cultural context in which they took place. But even as Robinson changed, and much of the country changed with him, resilient forces of opposition confronted any African American athlete who had the courage to act on his or her convictions. What is remarkable is the connective tissue, the degree to which the activism of athletes from Robinson to Kaepernick, and the reactions to it, has not fundamentally altered in seven decades. What this article does not purport to be is a comprehensive account of African American social protest in sport. For example, when LeBron James and his Miami Heat teammates took their now-­famous “Hoodies Up” photograph in 2012 to memorialize the death of Trayvon Martin, it had a direct connection to Kaepernick’s stated protest of police brutality toward people of color in America, but it was not a challenge to any perceived notion of patriotism or national pride. That protest, and the widespread support it received, was not taken during the playing of the national anthem; nor was it an attack on American foreign policy, military action, or matters of national security. The same is true for the t-­shirts worn during pregame activities by many in basketball and football that called attention to the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown, John Crawford, Eric Garner, and twelve-­year-­old Tamir Rice, all at the hands of police officers.6 Despite the current high-­profile nature of these issues, the academic literature is sparse. The only recent entry in a peer-­reviewed journal is Micah Johnson’s “The Paradox of Black Patriotism” from the May 2016 issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. That study explores the double consciousness of black American patriotism in a modern era marked by publicized police killings of blacks, widespread antiracism protests, and concern for racially motivated violence. Through a series of first-­hand interviews with black Americans, Johnson asks three questions: how they interpret patriotism, whether their interpretations affirm or defy their black identity, and how tensions between race and nation manifest in their patriotic identity development. He concludes that many denounce hegemonic patriotism while constructing alternative patriotic brands.7 In a perspective piece for the Washington Post, Robyn Spencer touches on Johnson’s last point, explaining why black Americans’ patriotism often looks like protest, from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July” to Langston Hughes’s assertion that “I, too sing America.”8 Another particularly telling example is the manner in which black Americans of the early twentieth-­century adopted James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as the so-­called Negro National Anthem.9 Penned in 1900, the hymn quickly spread throughout southern black churches and was regularly played at ceremonies and before sporting events at historically black colleges. Musicologist Shana Redmond has said that the song speaks to a future that black Americans could aspire to, whereas the national anthem is “not about a future—other than a future already proscribed by what is assumed as a constant greatness.”10 As Spencer concludes, black Summer 2020 113 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY Americans, all the way forward to Kaepernick, have reconfigured patriotism to emphasize the inseparability of dissent. These displays were developed not because black Americans reject patriotism but because traditional patriotism rejects black Americans.11 While Johnson’s study does not deal specifically with athletics, the patterns he detects and that Spencer expounds on are nonetheless reflected throughout this article. Writing for a more popular press, Howard Bryant, a staff writer for the now-­defunct ESPN the Magazine, covered much of the same terrain in his 2018 book The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. Bryant provides some historical context, identifying Robinson and Paul Robeson as founders of “The Heritage,” which he defines as the “peaceful, symbolic response to racism and mistreatment of members of the black community.” He follows this through to a discussion of today’s black athletes who have re-­engaged with social issues. Based largely on player interviews and focused more on the divisive nature of protests in contemporary sport, The Heritage leaves room for an academic, nonpartisan chronicle of this long history that preceded even the career of Jackie Robinson.12 The history of African American athletes being harnessed to their double consciousness is not a recent one. Its roots run as deep as the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, where Jesse Owens’s four gold medals were heralded as a stinging invalidation of Adolf Hitler’s racial nationalism. Two years later, boxer Joe Louis’s second bout against German fighter Max Schmeling was hyped with a similar nationalistic fervor. Neither Owens nor Louis—both of whom were judged as moderate in their relationship to the nascent struggle for civil rights—ever consented to, nor were comfortable with, their performances being utilized in such a manner. Years later, their athletic careers over, both men experienced dire financial straits. Louis was plagued by failed investments and back-­taxes, and Owens was reduced to exhibition races against thoroughbreds. With their experiences no longer fitting into the larger narratives of national pride and American exceptionalism, the country turned its back on these two men. When the International Olympic Committee finally re-­embraced Owens in 1968, it would be to again insist that an athlete’s achievements on the field of play spoke louder than his or her words of protest off it.13 The athlete whose life was marked by the most frequent reconsideration was Jackie Robinson. When he was selected to break baseball’s color line by Brooklyn Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey in 1947, it was largely on Rickey’s need to find a player who had the “guts not to fight back” against the attacks on both character and the physical body that he knew Robinson would be subjected to. Rickey could have chosen a more established Negro League star, one with greater talent or more name recognition, but Robinson had the attributes Rickey sought. Robinson was young, handsome, college-­educated, and articulate, a military veteran. He was seemingly beyond reproach. Robinson had strong social and political convictions—demonstrated by a court martial he received while in the army for refusing to move to the back of a military bus—but Rickey concluded that Robinson could handle the pressure. The aggressiveness Robinson displayed at bat and in the field had to be matched with an equal passivity against any and all provocations. As Peter Drier notes in The Atlantic, when at the height of the Cold War in 1950 United Artists produced The Jackie Robinson Story, the film celebrated Robinson’s feat as evidence that America was a land of opportunity where anyone could succeed if he had the talent and will.14 The movie 114 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism opens with the narrator intoning, “This is a story of a boy and his dream. But more than that, it’s a story of an American boy and a dream that is truly American.”15 As with Owens and Louis before him, what was demanded of Robinson at midcentury was gratitude. Black athletes were to be thankful that their country allowed them the opportunity to make a living entertaining millions. This demand had also landed at the feet of Paul Robeson, a potentially explosive situation that Robinson would be called on to detonate. Robeson had been, in his youth, an elite athlete, twice named a consensus All-­American football player at Rutgers College. After graduation, he earned his law degree from Columbia University while playing football professionally during the 1921 and 1922 seasons. However, it would be his presence on stage, also honed in college, for which Robeson would become best known, embarking on a four-­decade career as an actor and recording artist. In 1949, Robeson, already well established as an antilynching and civil rights advocate, made a speech at the World Peace Congress in Paris that was critical of America’s slow pace on civil rights and declared that, while their will to “fight for peace is strong,” no black American would participate in a war against a communist nation, specifically the Soviet Union. “It is unthinkable,” Robeson was reported as having stated, “that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” Robeson’s speech rankled the members of the House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC) which, having long investigated the matter, concluded the year prior that communist political organizations had little success in recruiting African Americans. In response, the committee subpoenaed Jackie Robinson, in their view a “fine young American,” who had the heft to isolate Robeson politically and refute his claims.16 Feeling it was “pretty sensible for ball players to keep out of partisan politics,” a very tentative Robinson agreed to testify on July 18, 1949. In a widely publicized testimony, he dismissed Robeson’s claim as “very silly,” adding that African Americans would “do their best to help the country win the war—against Russia or any other nation that threatened us.” But Robinson also used the opportunity to take America to task for the embedded racial discrimination that posed an equal threat to democracy. “The fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges,” Robinson noted. The form that Robeson’s dissent took, Robinson was suggesting, did not invalidate its empirical validity. Robinson concluded by declaring that 999 out of 1,000 black Americans cherished their nation, as he did: “But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting race discrimination in this country until we’ve got it licked. It means that we’re going to fight it all the harder.”17 Robinson’s testimony, celebrated and denounced in equal measure, was the measure of a man at a personal, professional, and political crossroads. Robinson’s burgeoning consciousness off the field was matched by a more emboldened aggressiveness on it. As a league veteran, he no longer remained stoic when a pitcher threw up and in or a base-­runner slid in with metal cleats aimed at his shin. That outspokenness, Robinson learned, came with a price: As long as I appeared to ignore insult and injury, I was a martyred hero to a lot of people who seemed to have sympathy for the underdog. But the minute I began to Summer 2020 115 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY answer, to argue, to protest—the minute I began to sound off—I became a swellhead, a wise guy, an “uppity” nigger. When a white player did it, he had spirit. When a black player did it, he was “ungrateful,” an upstart, a sorehead.18 In what would become a reoccurring admonishment to black athletes who criticized the establishment, be it in sports or politics, Robinson was told to mind his tongue. The Sporting News instructed him, “Put down your hammer, Jackie, and pick up a horn.” Repay baseball, he was advised, with “glad tidings.” “The implication,” Sport magazine argued in his defense, “is that he should have kept his place, should have stayed out of arguments, should have confined himself solely to hitting, to running the bases and playing the field.”19 In modern parlance, Robinson was instructed to “shut up and play,” and the negative reactions to Kaepernick and the national-­anthem protests illustrate that the passage of seven decades has not altered the dynamic confronted by any prominent black American tasked with the entertainment of millions. “Affluent African-­American entertainers,” Jelani Cobb maintains, “are obliged to adopt a pose of ceaseless gratitude.”20 On his ascendancy to the major leagues, Robinson had been invited to chronicle his remarkable journey for readers across the country. His nationally syndicated column “Jackie Robinson Says” initially stuck to matters of sport, such as the challenge in adapting to big-­league pitching. By the later years of his career, however, Robinson channeled the column into a critique of America’s social and political failings regarding race and civil rights. In 1956, for example, he produced a two-­part condemnation of continued segregation throughout the southern states. This sparked a rebuttal from New Orleans Times-­ Picayune columnist Bill Keefe, who claimed that it was men like “the persistently insolent and antagonistic trouble-­making Negro of the Brooklyn Dodgers” that were responsible for the redoubt of full-­measure southern segregation. In his response, Robinson asserts his pride in his heritage as a black American seeking only to live as the nation’s constitution provided. In closing, he puts a question to Keefe: “Am I insolent, or am I merely insolent for a Negro who has courage enough to speak against injustice?”21 After he had played his last game in 1956, Robinson threw himself into fifteen years of political and civil rights activism. His legacy as such would be cast, and recast, during the turbulent 1960s. At the commencement of the decade, he supported the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, as he found John F. Kennedy ignorant of the racial problems that plagued America. In Robinson’s judgment, Kennedy was a “fair-­haired boy of the southern segregationist.” He found equal fault with the militancy of Malcolm X, whom he feared a threat to the tenuous well-­being of black Americans. After Robinson had been critical of Malcolm X in a column that ran in the New York Amsterdam News in November 1963, Malcolm chided Robinson in a personal letter, attacking him on a number of fronts, including his 1949 testimony before HUAC. “Your White Boss sent you to Washington to assure all the worried white folks that Negroes were still thankful to the Great White Father,” Malcolm X leveled, “. . . [t]hat Negroes were grateful to America . . . and that Negroes would still lay down our lives to defend this white country.”22 In an equally strongly worded response, Robinson denounced what he saw as Malcolm X’s racist views and refused to dignify the criticism of his HUAC testimony.23 Conservative leaders were quick to defend Robinson, even as his own social and political leanings were becoming increasingly complicated. 116 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism The Republican Party’s nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964 shook Robinson. It was not only an indication that the Grand Old Party was tending to right-­wing extremism but that the country as a whole was continually unresponsive to the violence and injustice visited on black Americans in the North and the South. And he worried that the time would soon come when black Americans could not, and would not, forever turn the other cheek as Branch Rickey had asked him to do nearly two decades prior. Central to this were a slew of high-­profile cases in which white men, charged with the slaying of black victims, were acquitted by all-­white juries. That a number of these cases resulted from the shooting of black youth by white police officers demonstrates that the forces compelling Colin Kaepernick have deep historical roots. In the aftermath of the Harlem Riots of 1964, sparked by the acquittal of police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan in the shooting death of unarmed fifteen-­year-­old James Powell, Robinson warned of future violent insurrection to come: “No one will be glad when it comes, but come it must if something is not done to curb the unbridled murders in the South and the slightly more subtle murders in the North which pass under the guise of police vigilance.” After the Watts Riots the following summer, Robinson criticized the “Storm Trooper methods” of Los Angeles law enforcement, again questioning the right of a police officer to apply brutal force. Most damning of all was his declaration that the states of Alabama and Mississippi were police states where injustice stood in high honor under the Confederate flag, “and to hell with Old Glory!” When, he mused, would the Kremlin get around to pinning a medal on the chests of the Klan and their defenders for proving the idea of democracy “a very poor joke.”24 Robinson’s evolving attitudes, especially concerning rising black militancy and the specter of violent insurrection, were framed by the dramatic emergence of Malcolm X’s pugilistic acolyte Muhammad Ali. At the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, eighteen-­year-­ old Cassius Clay won the gold medal in the light-­heavyweight class. On returning to his native Louisville, Kentucky, Clay claimed that he threw his medal into the depths of the Ohio River in a fit of anger and disillusionment following a violent confrontation with a white supremacist.25 While the veracity of the story—first recounted by Ali in his 1975 autobiography The Greatest—has long been questioned, it has entered into the Ali legend as representative of his growing discontent with American society and his place in it as a superlative black athlete. Four years later, he converted to Islam with the sponsorship of Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, and under the tutelage of its star minister. To challenger Floyd Patterson, who insisted on calling his opponent by the “slave name” Clay (and as the white and black press still regularly referred to him), Ali’s association with the separatist Nation of Islam was an insult to and rejection of his country. Before their championship bout in 1965, Patterson asserted, “The image of a Black Muslim as the World Heavyweight Champion disgraces the sport and the nation.” Like Sonny Liston before him, Patterson was appropriated by defiantly patriotic, conservative Americans; the bout was not so much about boxing as it was about politics, specifically about what kind of nation America was to be. In response, Ali dominated Patterson through twelve brutal rounds; in Jackie Robinson’s telling, “Clay played with him, toyed with him, tortured him with an unforgivable cruelty and viciousness.” But what troubled Robinson more was that Clay’s attitude displayed that he had not yet grasped the tremendous opportunity that came with the championship, “to accomplish beautiful things for his people.”26 Summer 2020 117 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY In April 1967, Ali refused induction into the United States Army after the local draft board in Louisville denied his application for conscientious objector status. As a Muslim, Ali argued that he was prohibited from fighting any war, excepting those sanctioned by Islam. Toward the end of a lengthy question-­and-­answer session with reporters, however, a weary Ali disclosed a more socially and political motivated objection, when he declared, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.”27 Ali’s stance led him to question the very nature of the matter: “What was patriotism,” he asked, and “what was treason”? He noted that beloved prior champions such as Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey held the title while turning blind eyes toward the suffering of fellow Americans. “Those who were denouncing me so bitterly had never said a single word against the injustices inflicted upon my people in America,” he wrote in The Greatest. “I felt they were saying they would accept me as the World Heavyweight Champion only on their terms. Only if I played the role of the dumb, brute athlete who chimed in with whatever the establishment thought at the moment even if it was against the best interest of my people or my country.”28 Ali’s decision precipitated a four-­year legal battle during which he was stripped of his title by the World Boxing Association and barred from fighting in the United States during his physical prime. While he received support from the Nation of Islam and from Martin Luther King Jr., positions on Ali’s protest did not break neatly along racial lines. He was criticized by military veterans, including Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, the latter of whom disapproved of Ali’s protest for many of the same reasons that he himself was once denigrated, namely, a lack of properly demonstrated gratitude for all America had provided. In an open letter, Robinson questioned King’s support of Ali: “I can’t help feeling that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. I can’t help wondering how he can expect to make millions of dollars in this country and then refuse to fight for it.”29 For his comments on Ali’s protest, Robinson received criticism from the more militant branch of the civil rights movement that had emerged in the late 1960s. Firebrands such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown went after Robinson, whom they branded a “house Negro” and an “Uncle Tom.”30 All the while, Robinson’s own criticisms of the slow progress on civil rights and the war in Vietnam were continuing to take shape. Prior even to his letter to King, Robinson had acknowledged that “Clay is hated because he is a Muslim. He is also hated because he speaks his mind.” He was sincerely convinced that Ali was fighting for a principle, if not one he could yet support.31 Robinson had expressed concern that the growing antiwar protests at home would serve to disillusion young black men, like his son, who were proudly serving their country in Vietnam, while simultaneously warning that it would be a crime to humanity were those same men to return home and find they had been fighting in vain, as racial violence and injustice continued to roil the country. “Make no mistake about it,” Robinson wrote in a remarkable 1968 column, “Black people are not afraid to die and there are hundreds of thousands of young black people who would rather make a last-­ditch stand for freedom in the ghettos of their cities than in the jungles of Vietnam.”32 Robinson had, by that time, broken completely from his support of Richard Nixon. Especially abhorrent to him was Nixon’s perceived alliance with avowed segregationist Strom Thurmond. “I am militantly and aggressively opposed to Richard Nixon,” he wrote in 1968. How could anybody, of any race, Robinson wondered, trust a man that would aspire to the White House by doing business with bigotry? During a television appearance, 118 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism Robinson doubled down on the primacy of his racial identity: “I am a black man first,” he stated, “an American second, and I will support a political party third.”33 The age of grateful platitudes and uncritical displays of patriotism had also passed. “I wouldn’t fly the flag on the fourth of July or any other holiday,” he told the New York Times in 1969. “When I see a car with a flag pasted on it I figure the guy behind the wheel isn’t my friend.”34 In pitching the autobiography he would soon write with Alfred Duckett, Robinson came to terms with America and the demands that famous black athletes like him should endlessly express gratitude. “This country has done a lot for me and I have done in return, the best it has let me do for it,” he wrote. “That is why I do not have to wave flags or have stickers on my car or wear patriotic cufflinks or armbands on my sleeve.”35 He sought, also, to make amends for allegiances he had made in the past, particularly his testimony to HUAC. With twenty-­three years of hindsight, Robinson had come to understand why Paul Robeson had made the statements he did. “Even after he became an eminent artist,” he wrote of Robeson, “he learned with resentment and sorrow that after the applause had died, he was once again a nigger.” In Robinson’s view, Robeson had struck at racial inequality in the best way he knew how. Of his own testimony before HUAC, Robinson recalled, “In those days, I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I have today. I would reject such an invitation if offered now.”36 And while Robinson maintained that the armed forces offered black Americans opportunities that they were denied in civilian life, his son’s troubled service was cause for further reflection. Jack R. Robinson Jr. served in Vietnam for three years and sustained shrapnel wounds in battle. Family and close friends felt that his stint recovering in a military hospital may have contributed to the drug addiction he developed soon after. Even before his son’s death in an automobile accident in 1971, the elder Robinson could no longer support the war: I cannot accept the idea of a black supposedly fighting for the principles of freedom and democracy in Vietnam when so little has been accomplished in this country. There was a time when I deeply believed in America. I have become bitterly disillusioned.37 In just twenty-­five years, Robinson’s experience as a black man in America had taken him from civil rights hero (when he kept his mouth shut) to “uppity nigger” (when he no longer could) to conservative stalwart and an “Uncle Tom” (when he did not go far enough) to outspoken advocate, a disillusioned black man, and, tragically, a heartbroken father. In October 1972, his body weakened by diabetes, Jackie Robinson died of a heart attack. He was fifty-­three years old. Social and political dissent in sport reached a fever pitch in 1968, owing, primarily, to the protest of black American athletes at that summer’s Olympic Games in Mexico City. What has become ensconced in memory as a singular act by sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos was, in fact, a broader organized effort that had long been in the planning. Its originator was Harry Edwards, a former athlete and then an assistant professor of sociology at San Jose State University. Edwards started the Olympic Project for Human Rights to advocate a boycott of the games as a condemnation of the pervasive racism of American sports. The list of demands drafted by the organization varied from the restoration of Summer 2020 119 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY Muhammad Ali’s world heavyweight title to the appointment of black coaches and black leadership officials to the United States Olympic Committee and the prohibition of individuals and teams from apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia from participation in the Olympic Games.38 The planned boycott first received widespread media attention in 1967 with the support of All-­American college basketball player Lew Alcindor. When pressed for comment Alcindor, a young man greatly influenced by the rhetoric and activism of Malcolm X, said of America, “It’s not really my country.” Bigots spewed every slur imaginable at Alcindor, and the black-­owned and -edited Chicago Defender labeled him ungrateful.39 On learning of the proposed boycott, Jackie Robinson admitted he had mixed emotions, but ultimately he supported the young men organizing the effort. “Maybe we, as Negro athletes,” he wrote, “have been around too long, accepting inequities and indignities, and going along with worn-­out promises about how things were going to get better.” This was more than mere rhetoric on Robinson’s part. He had made his last public appearance, just nine days before he passed, before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series. A clearly weakened and prematurely silver-­haired Robinson used the occasion to renew his push for the hiring of the league’s first black manager, a post it was speculated he would someday hold. Robinson had criticized baseball’s “white-­collar racism” for two decades to no avail, and it is possible he had this in mind—black athletes using their leverage to desegregate sport at the administrative level—when he supported the call for an Olympic boycott.40 While Alcindor made himself unavailable for certain inclusion on the men’s basketball squad, a larger boycott failed to materialize. Nonetheless, the Olympic Project for Human Rights made its mark thanks to the actions of Smith and Carlos, who had been recruited by Edwards while student-­athletes at San Jose State. During the medal ceremony following the men’s 200-­meter final, gold-­medalist Smith and bronze-­medalist Carlos each raised a fist, clenched in a leather glove, in a defiant display of black power. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck as an emblem of racial pride and went shoeless (as did Carlos) to symbolize the poverty that afflicted black Americans at a disproportionate rate. His teammate wore beads around his neck to signify the countless, often nameless, victims of racial violence, and both men bowed their heads in remembrance of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and others who had perished in the struggle for black freedom.41 In a sentiment that both Robinson and Kaepernick would come to share, Edwards wrote that, for the black man in America, there was certain “hollowness in the anthem’s phrases.” “To expose this hypocrisy,” he continued, “we intended to inject a small bit of truth and honesty in the name of black dignity.”42 Smith was even more strident, refusing to honor a flag that didn’t represent him fully, “only to the extent of asking me to be great on the running track, then obliging me to come home and be just another nigger.”43 The moment was an electrifying one that immediately energized the debate over the place of politics in sports. At the urging of Avery Brundage, then head of the International Olympic Committee, Jesse Owens spoke with the track team (whom he derisively referred to as “kids”) and tried to dissuade them from staging a protest. “This is the wrong battlefield,” he told them. “[T]here is no place in the athletic world for politics.” In an interview after the fact, Owens stated that, while “[Smith and Carlos] were trying to bring out what is wrong in our country . . . their running performances would have done more 120 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism to alleviate the problem. Rather than the disrespect they showed to our flag.”44 Joe Louis, likewise, posited that black athletes needed to consider themselves as Americans foremost, and “colored Americans” second, concluding that, when one has a chance to do something positive for one’s country, one should do so. Robinson, on the other hand, maintained his support of Smith and Carlos, noting the intense racism that brought such feelings to bear. The protest was, in his opinion, “the greatest demonstration of personal conviction and pride I have ever really seen.”45 Smith and Carlos received a lifetime ban from the International Olympic Committee, but when nineteen-­year-­old boxer George Foreman celebrated his gold-­medal-winning performance in the ring by waving a small American flag, he received an invitation to the White House and a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson. According to Ali, Foreman’s act was attributable to his being a “brainwashed black super-­patriot.” The “slave masters” that governed American life, Ali reasoned, “get a freakish thrill making the slave cheer for slavery.”46 The committee’s ban did not have its intended effect; at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, American sprinters Wayne Collett and Vince Matthews stood together on the medal stand following the men’s 400-­meter final. As the national anthem began, they stood with their track-­jackets unzipped, hands-­on-­hips, and arms-­crossed, respectively, dismissively talking among themselves. Collett later stated, “I couldn’t stand there and sing the words [of the anthem] because I don’t believe they’re true. I wish they were. I think we have the potential to have a beautiful country, but I don’t think we do.”47 Like Smith and Carlos before them, they received a lifetime ban. That the anthem and the flag have continued to be the subject of such contested terrain was the source of discontent for those that saw the prominent black athletes of the late 1980s and 1990s as riding the coattails of the Robinsons and Alis but unwilling to push progress forward in their own right. In 1990, Michael Jordan was the target of such criticism when he declined to publically support the candidacy of Harvey Gantt—then the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina—during his racially charged senatorial campaign against incumbent Jesse Helms. In response to this criticism, Jordan remarked to a friend, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” This infamous comment, though largely unsubstantiated, has become enmeshed in Jordan lore and earned condemnation from Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (formerly Lew Alcindor) who chided Jordan for choosing “commerce over conscience.” Similarly, in Forty Million Dollar Slaves, William Rhoden targets Jordan, in particular, his conduct during the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. After Jordan and his “Dream Team” of professional compatriots annihilated the competition en route to a gold medal, he draped an American flag around his neck not out of patriotism or protest but allegedly to hide the Reebok label and safeguard his lucrative personal endorsement deal with Nike. Jordan has long since struggled to shake the image of an apolitical, corporate shill. Rhoden criticized Jordan and other contemporary black athletes for being unwilling to rock the boat collectively. This new lack of interest in the larger world occurred just at the moment in their evolution when black athletes had more economic muscle and cultural influence than ever. As Rhoden put it, “At a time when they could actually own the boat—rather than just rock it—the level of apathy is greater than ever before.”48 Summer 2020 121 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY There were, of course, exceptions. Among them was Craig Hodges, a teammate of Jordan from 1988 to 1992. When the Chicago Bulls visited the White House after winning the National Basketball Association title in 1992, Hodges handed President George H. W. Bush a letter asking that he do more to end injustices toward African Americans. Neither the Bulls nor any other team in the league signed Hodges for the next season, ending his ten-­year career. Hodges sued the league, claiming it had blackballed him because of his outspokenness, but the lawsuit failed. More notable was the experience of stand-­out Chris Jackson, who in 1991 converted to Islam and took the name Mahmoud Abdul-­Rauf. Starting in 1995, Abdul-­Rauf stopped standing for the national anthem before games, either stretching along the sideline or remaining in the locker room. When pressed for comment Abdul-­Rauf explained that he perceived the American flag as a symbol of oppression. He was “a Muslim first and a Muslim last,” and his duty was to his creator, not to a nationalist ideology. The league responded by suspending Abdul-­Rauf indefinitely. Two days later they reached a compromise. Abdul-­ Rauf would stand during the national anthem but would close his eyes and cast his head slightly downward in recitation of Islamic prayer. As with Ali, his shifting identity was, in and of itself, seen as a repudiation of everything America stood for. The American Legion considered his actions “treasonous.”49 Abdul-­Rauf ’s protest, however brief, provides a template for better understanding that undertaken by Colin Kaepernick. Reflecting on the controversy years later, Abdul-­Rauf did not regret the stance he took but acknowledged that his initial act of stretching along the sideline was not a wise approach. This parallels Kaepernick’s initial act of sitting on the bench during the national anthem, then altering his approach, and kneeling among his teammates along the sideline. Such restrategizings, as slight as they may have been in actual physical adjustments, had a tremendous impact on how the protests were received by others. Such optics are front and center in the debate over Kaepernick’s protest. Writing for Al Jazeera, Khaled Beydoun argues that Kaepernick’s “afro and unapologetic Blackness” have led to his being blackballed by the league, the alleged result of owner collusion.50 The “otherness” that Kaepernick’s appearance engenders and the disrespect for the flag and the country that his critics claim his protest demonstrates have, in Jelani Cobb’s judgment, allowed the true objective of his protest to be “hijacked.” The debate over the national anthem, he argues, has clouded Kaepernick’s stated intention of raising awareness about an endemic system of police brutality toward people of color nationwide. There is the danger also that the meaning and power of Kaepernick’s protest will be appropriated by those with a stated objection to it. After President Trump’s demeaning comments on professional football players in September 2017, entire teams linked arms and took a knee, including the Dallas Cowboys, together with owner Jerry Jones, who had previously threatened to bench any of his players that “disrespect the flag.” Be it for money or political purpose, the National Football League (NFL) power structure has a history of “defending the shield.”51 The protests initiated by Kaepernick may have been unsettling to many in football’s ownership ranks precisely because they challenged the profitable manner in which the NFL, and other American sport leagues, has long utilized pregame activities and half-­time shows to demonstrate patriotism. These activities often include the unfurling of massive 122 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism American flags, on-­field salutes to the armed services, and fighter-­jet flyovers; in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, they expanded to include tacky camouflaged team uniforms. In 2015, a report commissioned by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake disclosed that pre-­game military tributes were staged events for which the Department of Defense had paid $6.8 million over three fiscal years to franchises throughout the professional and collegiate ranks. The report concludes, in no minced words, that “the military was using sports to sell the business of war.”52 Kaepernick and others were expected to participate in this unblinking history of militaristic ritual, and, in their refusal, they were judged to be disrespectful. This polarizing debate has played out over the backdrop of Kaepernick’s charitable activities. He established the Colin Kaepernick Foundation “to fight oppression of all kinds globally, through education and social activism” and has completed his pledge to donate one million dollars to “organizations working in oppressed communities.” In the process, he has called on, and matched, donations made by a “Who’s Who” of figures from across sports and entertainment, including African American athletes Stephan Curry, Kevin Durant, and Serena Williams.53 In this regard, Kaepernick has been consistent with the best of Jackie Robinson’s postbaseball activism. Aside from his work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Robinson accepted an executive position with Chock Full O’ Nuts in the early 1960s due to that corporation’s record of hiring African Americans to management positions. In the years to follow, he established the Jackie Robinson Construction Corp. to build good-­quality homes for low-­income families and was a founding investor of the Harlem-­based, black-­owned Freedom National Bank in 1964. Professional athletes like Robinson and Kaepernick are supposedly inoculated by the privilege afforded them by wealth and fame, but, as Michael Eric Dyson noted in the wake of the Kaepernick controversy, “At their best, the blacked blessed have always spoken up for the beleaguered.” These figures, Dyson concludes, “are patriots, true lovers of democracy, who want to see substantive social change. That cannot happen without agitation and resistance, without protest and uncomfortable moments of reckoning.”54 These actions have made Kaepernick a hero for many social-­justice advocates, one of whom staged a similar protest thirteen years prior. In 2003, Toni Smith-­Thompson was a member of the women’s basketball team at Division III Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. As the country neared entrance into the Iraq War, Smith (who is from a self-­ described “mixed racial and ethnic background”) began to turn her back on the American flag during pregame playing of the national anthem. Smith’s silent protest evoked a rabid and divisive response, foreshadowing that which met Kaepernick thirteen years later. The rafters at home games filled equally with supporters and angered detractors, the court lined by local and national media outlets. Smith, today an employee with the New York Civil Liberties Union, spoke with political sportswriter Dave Zirin shortly after Kaepernick’s protest began. “Kaepernick has a vastly greater platform than I did, which will make his protest more visible, more impactful and more dangerous,” she remarked. “I hope sports fans who cheered him on for his athletic skills will stand by him still and affirm that we don’t check our freedoms in the locker room.”55 Kaepernick has succeeded in making his protest a populist one, as it has inspired an ever-­growing list of athletes across the sports landscape to join him in taking a knee. One of Summer 2020 123 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY the first to do so was women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe. In September 2016, Rapinoe, already an advocate for LGBTQ causes, knelt during the national anthem before a game with the Washington Spirit. Later that week, the Spirit management released a statement: “To willingly allow anyone to hijack this tradition that means so much to millions of Americans and so many of our own fans for any cause would effectively be just as disrespectful as doing it ourselves.” Female athletes have been especially responsive; entire rosters of the Women’s National Basketball Association have taken a knee during the national anthem, a series of protests they continued after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017. The protests persisted into 2018; several national-­anthem performers have taken a knee, as have members of collegiate marching bands, cheerleading squads, and even youth football teams. In contemplating his cover art for the January 15, 2018 issue of the New Yorker, artist Mark Ulriksen asked himself what Martin Luther King Jr. would do were he alive today. Taking the title from King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “In Creative Battle,” the cover features King kneeling in protest between Kaepernick and Michael Bennett, then of the Seattle Seahawks.56 But the praise heaped on Kaepernick has sidestepped one inconvenient criticism of the protests he initiated. In his conversation with Kaepernick, Nate Boyer asked him what the goal of the protest was, what measureable objective did Kaepernick hope to achieve. The answer, Boyer reported, is something that Kaepernick struggled to articulate at the moment, and the passage of four subsequent years has brought no clearer response. Kaepernick’s actions started a national discussion, but one that has not grown any less divisive, especially after Kaepernick’s controversial decision to become the new face and voice of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign in the fall of 2018. And he was rightly criticized when he abstained from voting during the 2016 presidential general election and the 2018 midterms, claiming that “[t]he oppressor isn’t going to allow you to vote yourself out of oppression.”57 This is a position in direct contravention to much of Dr. King’s life’s work. These are critical issues to confront. For as much as Jackie Robinson represented the difficulty of the World War II generation in coming to terms with their patriotism and service to the country during the evolving civil rights movement and as Ali advanced the discussion for the emergent Black Power struggle, Kaepernick has the opportunity to do so for the generation that proclaims Black Lives Matter. His protest has made him saint and demon; his actions are celebrated by some, denounced by others, and policed by those who wished he would just “shut up and play.” NOTES 1. Jackie Robinson’s attitudes toward these matters are found in Michael Long, First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson (New York: Times Books, 2007). 2. Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (New York: Putnam Books, 1972), xxvi–xxvii. 3. Colin Kaepernick, quoted in Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem,” NFL.com, 27 August 2016, http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000691077 /article/colin-­kaepernick-­explains-­why-­he-­sat-­during-­national-­anthem [accessed 6 May 2020]. 4. A full transcript of Kaepernick’s comments to the media are included in Eric Branch, “49ers’ Colin Kaepernick Transcript: ‘I’ll continue to sit,’” San Francisco Chronicle, 28 August 2016, https:// www.sfchronicle.com/49ers/article/49ers-­Colin-­Kaepernick-­transcript-­I-­ll-­9189548.php?t=537358b38 124 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism c7d4f3860&cmpid=twitter-­premium&fbclid=IwAR3Va6_wrcxt66wZvxdv5O4GWzf0r-­ctzmUyOEjT 8JL3TW4CecdUz8feg08&psid=3vemc [accessed 6 May 2020]. 5. Eric Reid, “Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee,” New York Times, 25 September 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/colin-­kaepernick-­football-­protests.html [accessed 6 May 2020]. 6. Jody Avirgan, “Hoodies Up,” 30 for 30 Podcasts, 14 November 2017, https://30for30podcasts. com/episodes/hoodies-­up/ [accessed 6 May 2020]. 7. Micah Johnson, “The Paradox of Black Patriotism: Double Consciousness,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31 May 2016, 1971–89, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2017.1332378 ?journalCode=rers20/ [accessed 6 May 2020]. 8. Robyn C. Spencer, “From Jimi Hendrix to Colin Kaepernick: Why Black Americans’ Patriotism Often Looks like Protest,” Washington Post, September 29, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news /post-­nation/wp/2017/09/29/why-­black-­americans-­patriotism-­has-­often-­looked-­like-­protest/ [accessed 6 May 2020]. See also 9. Brandon E. Patterson, “Black Americans Have Our Own National Anthem—Stand Up and Sing it with Us,” Mother Jones, 12 November 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/11/black -national-­anthem-­lift-­every-­voice-­and-­sing-­it-­with-­us/ [accessed 6 May 2020]. 10. Shana Redmond, quoted in Avirgan, “Hoodies Up.” 11. Spencer, “From Jimi Hendrix to Colin Kaepernick.” 12. Howard Bryant, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 13. “Jesse Owens,” American Experience, directed by Laurens Grant (Arlington, VA: PBS, 2012); Joe Louis: America’s Hero Betrayed, written by Ouisie Shapiro (Santa Monica, CA: HBO, 2008). 14. Peter Drier, “The Real Story of Baseball’s Integration that You Won’t See in 42,” The Atlantic, 11 April 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/the-­real-­story-­of-­baseballs -­integration-­that-­you-­wont-­see-­in-­i-­42-­i/274886/ [accessed 6 May 2020]. 15. The Jackie Robinson Story, directed by Alfred E. Green (Hollywood, CA: United Artists, 1950). 16. The contents of Paul Robeson’s speech discussed in Long, First Class Citizenship, 5. 17. Robinson’s testimony recorded in “Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups—Part 1,” Hearings before the Committee on Un-­American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-­First Congress, First Session 1949, 479–83. 18. Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 78–79. 19. Editorial, “You Owe a Great Deal to the Game,” Sporting News, 2 February 1955; The editorial “Boo Him if You Want . . . We Salute Him,” originally appeared in Sport magazine and was reprinted, with permission, on page 14 of the 6 November 1954 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier. 20. Jelani Cobb, “From Louis Armstrong to the N.F.L.—Ungrateful as the New Uppity,” New Yorker, 24 September 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-­desk/from-­louis-­armstrong-­to-­the -­nfl-­ungrateful-­as-­the-­new-­uppity [accessed 6 May 2020]. 21. Robinson’s two-­part essay, “After 10 Years in the Majors,” ran in the Pittsburgh Courier on 12 May and 19 May 1956. Keefe’s response and Robinson’s answer ran, in full, in the Courier on 4 August 1956, 25. While it is suspected that the “Jackie Robinson Says” column was initially ghost-­written by Robinson champion and confidante and Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith, by 1956 the column focused more on Robinson’s personal social and political viewpoints. 22. Malcolm X, quoted in Long, First Class Citizenship, 182–83. 23. Robinson, quoted in Long, First Class Citizenship, 186–87. 24. For Robinson’s critiques of police violence, see “Jackie Robinson Sees a Parallel,” from page 4 of the 19 September 1964 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier; “Mississippi and Alabama Keep Police State Stench,” on page 10 of the 22 May 1965 edition; and “More Bad News in Store for Watts,” on page 8 of 18 June 1966 edition. Summer 2020 125 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY 25. Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story (Los Angeles: Graymalkin Media, 1975), 46. Similar experiences of refused service were reported by track-­star Wilma Rudolph who won three gold medals at the 1960 Olympic Games. 26. Robinson, “Clay Proved a Champ, Floyd Proved a Man,” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 December 1965, 8. 27. Ali, The Greatest, 109. 28. Ali, The Greatest, 130. 29. Robinson, quoted in Long, First Class Citizenship, 257. 30. Robinson discusses these criticisms in his “Jackie Robinson Says” column, “Could Never Live with Uncle Tom,” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 January 1968, 7. 31. For Robinson’s view on Ali, see “In Defense of Cassius Clay,” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 March 1967, 7; and “Cause of Concern over Muhammad Ali,” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 October 1967, 7. 32. Robinson discussed his son’s service in Vietnam in “A Soldier’s Father Discusses Vietnam,” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 November 1965, 10. He was critical of Nixon’s conduct of the war in “Nixon Candidacy Imperils America,” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 August 1965, 7. 33. Robinson, quoted in Leah Wright Rigueur, “Jackie Robinson: Militant Black Republican,” The Root, 13 April 2016, https://www.theroot.com/jackie-­robinson-­militant-­black-­republican-1790854938 [accessed 8 May 2020]. 34. Robinson, quoted in Long, First Class Citizenship, 295. 35. Robinson, quoted in Long, First Class Citizenship, 303. 36. Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 100–103. 37. Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 215. 38. Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 49–53. This printing is a fiftieth-­anniversary edition of the original run published by The Free Press in 1969. 39. John Matthew Scott, “‘It’s Not Really My Country’: Lew Alcindor and the Revolt of the Black Athlete,” Journal of Sports History 36.2 (2009): 223–44. 40. Robinson, “Mixed Emotion over Boycott of Olympics,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 December 1967, 7. In this same column, Robinson discusses his support for a proposed boycott of the New York Athletic Club. The club, host to one of the country’s largest and most prestigious indoor-­track meets, prohibited black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish members. The 1968 meet was boycotted by more than a hundred black athletes, including Tommie Smith and John Carlos; Robinson’s call for a black manager discussed in “Jackie Robinson’s Blast Jolts Baseball’s Bosses,” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 August 1969, 15. 41. Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 86. 42. Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 85. 43. Tommie Smith, quoted in Robert Philip, “Gloved Fist Is Raised in Defiance,” Daily Telegraph, 11 October 1993, 38. 44. Owens, quoted in Rhonda Evans, “Jesse Owens and Athletes Who Protest (or Don’t),” New York Public Library, 12 September 2017, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/09/12/jesse-­owens-­protest [accessed 8 May 2020]. 45. Dave Zirin, A People’s History of Sports in the United States (New York: The New Press, 2008), 170–71. 46. Ali, The Greatest, 51. 47. Wayne Collett, quoted in Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 293. 48. William Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 217. 49. Jim Hodges, “N.B.A. Sits Abdul-­Rauf for Stance on Anthem,” Los Angeles Times, 13 March 1996, http://articles.latimes.com/1996-­03-­13/sports/sp-­46409_1_mahmoud-­abdul-­rauf [accessed 8 May 2020]. 126 Volume 47, Number 2 Rounds: The Policing of Patriotism 50. Khaled A. Beydoun, “Blackballing Kaepernick: Fear of the Black Athlete,” Al Jazeera, 9 August 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/blackballing-­kaepernick-­fear-­black-­athlete -­170804124710556.html [accessed 8 May 2020]. 51. Cobb, quoted in All in the Game: The Black Athlete in America, produced by Matt Spolar (New York: Retro Report, 2017). 52. Ken McLeod, “The Construction of Masculinity in African-­American Music and Sports,” American Music 21.2 (2009): 204–26; the full text to “Tackling Paid Patriotism: A Joint Oversite Report by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake,” at https://archive.org/details/TacklingPaidPatriotism OversightReport [accessed 8 May 2020]. 53. For an account of Kaepernick’s charitable activities, see the official website of the Colin Kaepernick Foundation at www.kaepernick7.com 54. Michael Eric Dyson, “Famous Athletes Have Always Led the Way,” New York Times, 21 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/opinion/sunday/famous-­athletes-­have-­always-­led-­the-­way .html [accessed 8 May 2020]. 55. Toni Smith-­Thompson, quoted in Dave Zirin, “Thoughts on Colin Kaepernick from an Athlete Who Walked That Path,” The Nation, 29 August 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/thoughts-­on -­colin-­kaepernick-­from-­an-­athlete-­who-­walked-­that-­path/ [accessed 8 May 2020]. 56. For a discussion of Ulriksen’s piece, see Francoise Mouly, “Mark Ulriksen’s ‘In Creative Battle,’” New Yorker, 8 January 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-­story/cover-­story-­2018-­01-­15 [accessed 8 May 2020]. 57. Matt Maiocco, “Kaepernick: ‘It would be hypocritical of me to vote,” NBCSports.com, 13 November 2016, https://www.nbcsports.com/bayarea/49ers/kaepernick-­it-­would-­be-­hypocritical-­me -­vote [accessed 8 May 2020]. Summer 2020 127