College Athletes Are, Once Again, Protesting Racism. Could This Time Be Different?

Athletes at the University of Texas at Austin demanded last Friday that the institution become a more inclusive place for Black athletes and the Black community.

In a letter posted on social media the athletes, including football players, listed their demands, saying that without an official commitment from the university, they will not participate in any recruiting efforts or donor-related events. One of the many requests is to abandon a campus anthem, “The Eyes of Texas,” which was once performed at minstrel shows. Another is to donate a portion of the athletics department’s annual earnings to the Black Lives Matter organization.

Catalyzed by the death of a Black man, George Floyd, in police custody, college athletes across the nation are lending their voices and their clout to protest systemic racism. If it feels like history is repeating itself, that’s because Black college athletes have long been advocating against racism, both on campus and on the national stage. The current moment is reminiscent of 2015, when football players threatened a boycott at the University of Minnesota. But its roots stretch back much further, to the late 1960s after colleges began to integrate, according to Amira Rose Davis, an assistant professor of history and African American studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Courtesy of Amira Rose Davis

Davis studies race, gender, sports, and politics, and is writing a book titled “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow. She spoke with The Chronicle about this iteration of collegiate activism, where it comes from, and where it could lead. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2017, you spoke with an NPR Code Switch reporter about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem. One quote of yours stuck with me. You said, “Sport has often been a site for not only the expression of tensions in society, but it’s also been a laboratory of sorts.” Can you expand on that idea?

Certainly. Sometimes we get lost in the metaphor of sports as a reflection. Like if a trend is happening in society, then it’s also happening in sports. Part of my effort within that quote is to also understand how sports can be a driving force in a lot of these discussions, and that it’s not always just playing reflection. When it comes to the long history of Black athletes protesting within college spaces, there is actually proof to that, particularly after integration — and here I’m talking about men’s sports, but I’ll circle back to talk about women’s.

So when we talk about the late ‘60s early ‘70s, when we see a huge cluster of Black collegiate athletic protests, it’s in the wake of integration. So what you get across the country is a lot of schools where the only Black kids on campus are the football team. So they’re integrated, but conditionally. In this moment, those students also have a particular leverage. If you’re one of the 35 Black players at Berkeley in the late 1960s, if you’re one of the 19 Black players at the University of Washington, oftentimes, you have a particular leverage because you are — for a lot of your schoolmates and for the school officials — the only Black people that they’re in proximity to, and the only ones that they’ll really listen to. It’s the same effect that you get now when LeBron speaks up. It’s the same effect when you have these professional athletes, like the NFL players who made a response video to [the NFL Commissioner] Roger Goodell, who seize upon the value of their labor, who understand that this whole league, this whole thing, falls apart without their labor. And they’re going to tell you, “What if I was George Floyd?” We’re not going to let you think that we’re just your entertainment, or just your Black friend that you’re friendly with because I score a touchdown for the school you happen to root for. We’re going to use this position to actually raise our voices or stand in solidarity.

So this played out a few different ways. Partnerships happened between Black student unions and the football teams. Here at Penn State for instance, in 1969, the Black Student Union partnered with Black players on the football team and nonblack allies to disrupt the halftime of the game and mount their demands for inclusion, for better treatment of Black students, for more Black professors. And then you have actual protests by players themselves. One of the most notable cases is the Wyoming 14. Fourteen black players had taken action because they were playing BYU. BYU is affiliated with the Mormon church, which at that time was not recognizing Black people as, you know, humans. The players were wearing black armbands, and basically what happened is they were dismissed from the football team and essentially expelled from the school.

This year, 1969, saw a number of small protests — from arm bands to walking out to demands about hiring more Black coaches — and it led to a five-part Sports Illustrated series called “The Revolt of the Black Athlete.” The demands often dealt with accommodations. A lot of times these students were housed very far away from other dorms for fear that they would mix and mingle with white women. Then, when the players were in partnership with other Black students, the demands would be about admission policies, about hiring Black professors, about general racism around the school that needed to be eradicated.

When you walked me through that history, it hits home that the things that the UT-Austin football players and other athletes are demanding are situated in a much longer context.

And we don’t have to look back that far. We can look at Mizzou. There had been Black students at Mizzou who had been protesting, who had been kneeling, who had been doing hunger strikes, who had been raising these issues for a year, a year plus. And it’s not until they organize with the Black football players, until the Black football players literally say, “We’re not going to play. Very clearly the system that you’ve constructed on our backs does not work without our labor,” and all of a sudden, a lot of these demands were taken care of.

That’s so interesting because it sounds like as college athletics have become this massive cash cow, the power of Black athletes has, in some ways, increased exponentially. But also it’s a power disadvantage of a large proportion, because they’re not getting paid for that work. It’s an interesting dichotomy.

Exactly. For me, one of the things that’s happening in this moment is that many students are kind of awakening to that power. So people at UT do have the power to say, “Hey, if you care about this so much, then we’re going to force you to contend with these larger demands.”

I do want to highlight the fact that for Black women athletes, there’s still a history of protest, but integration for them doesn’t happen for them in quite the same way. For Black women, a lot of their agitation was for the formation of competitive programs in the first place. By far the most opportunities for them were at historically Black colleges and universities. We see protests from Black women college students at the Olympics where they have leverage.

Wilma Rudolph, Wyomia Tyus, all of their global exploits and protests happened while they were college students. But we don’t frame it in the same way. The other area that gets overlooked is Black cheerleaders. There are cheerleaders, for instance, who held up their fists and protested the Confederate flag while cheering for Ole Miss. Often, the style of cheer that Black students were bringing was different. So part of their argument was, “This is not just about integration.” Or, “it’s not integration if it’s one sided. It’s not integration if I join your cheer squad and do the same rigid moves. What it actually looks like to have citizenship, to be a fully functioning member of this squad or of this university, is to let me into that space and also bend your style to meet me.”

When you’re tying these movements together — especially if you want to do a comparison of what we are seeing now — they’re all saying, “We’re in this space, and we need to be able to function fully.” That’s some of what you read within the demands of the players at UT. It’s like: “We labor for you. We generate all this income. We are starting to have an understanding of just how much is wrought on our backs. At the very least, we understand that we have a platform that many other Black students at these schools do not.” How can you expect Black students to thrive here if they’re going to a school in a hall named after a racist? How do you want them to feel like part of campus and not feel like second-class citizens if these basic things haven’t happened?

A lot of the essence of Black athletic protest, whether you want to go back five years or to the end of the ‘60s and the ‘70s, is the same.

I’ve seen a couple of stories in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that are making a case that until recently, university administrators and coaches have tried their best to silence outspoken athletes. But now, players and coaches “have seized their influence for a display of political action,” according to the Times. What do you make of that argument?

I’m a skeptic. You have to take public gestures with a grain of salt and be ever-vigilant to watch what’s happening behind the scenes. I’m going to return to five years ago, at Mizzou. The coach stood with his players in protest, which is one of the reasons why it worked so well. Under the cover of the good press, Mizzou quietly wrote into its bylaws that coaches could not stand in any kind of strike effort with his players moving forward. For me, this moment feels similar to the one weekend in the NFL where everybody knelt. You get a photo-op of [the Dallas Cowboys’ owner] Jerry Jones kneeling with his players, and everybody was like, “Whoa. This is really a moment of change.” And it’s like, “No.” Two weeks later, Jerry Jones is like, “I’m not signing anybody who doesn’t stand for the anthem.” So I think this moment is giving a larger platform and more cover to players who might have felt scared about speaking out before. I also think it provides cover for institutions to get behind them. But make no mistake: A lot of these programs are thinking about how they can nullify this. How can we prevent this mobilization before something really radical happens, and people say they’re not going to play unless they get paid? What breadcrumbs can we toss to appease some of these student athletes while maintaining these exploitative systems?

A lot of colleges have been putting out these statements of solidarity. When you said breadcrumbs, it made me think of the criticism of some of those statements — that they’re saying Black Lives Matter but they don’t have any real momentum behind them.

We’ve seen a wave of corporate and institutional responses, and some have been better than others. I think that these statements, when they come with action or resource allocation or something else than just empty words, you can see a little bit more substance behind them. Then there are some places that are tweeting out these statements but have never demonstrated themselves to care one iota about the Black lives that they have within their program. So like, Ole Miss Athletics. They went on a march and they talked and they spoke out. And it’s one of those things, like — and it’s good for them to do it. But how can that university offer anything other than empty words when they still have a Confederate monument right in the center of campus? When they’re named the Rebels?

You can’t, today, in 2020, make a declarative statement and tweet out five lines and have that erase a century-plus of inaction. I saw a great tweet that was talking about all these schools putting out statements about institutional racism. And it was like, You are the institutional racism. I think that’s why a lot of them are things to kind of be considered skeptically. I don’t think that that means that no institution is taking any steps worth consideration, but I do think a healthy dose of cynicism is good, because I think under the cover of this moment, a lot of schools will get away with pacifying donors and students and fans alike, and do the absolute least possible to take actionable steps toward what student athletes and Black students in general are asking for.

I think it’s particularly important to make sure we’re tying this into a conversation about Covid-19, because we’ve already had a number of college coaches like Mike Gundy from Oklahoma State, who weeks ago suggested that they need to get football back and running. And he said the quiet part out loud. He said something like, We need to get football going because even if they get sick, they’re 18, 19, 20. They’ll be fine. But ultimately we need to get money rolling through the state of Oklahoma again.

These schools are rushing to go back in the fall in part to preserve the football season, which is disproportionately sacrificing the bodies of Black men and Black boys in a particularly violent sport as it is, while there’s a global pandemic.

You said you’re a skeptic. Do you think the student athletes who are now finding their voice have a shot at getting what they want?

I think the needle will move. It’s just about how far it goes. I think the best thing that they can do is also make sure that they are connecting and mobilizing and organizing with other folks on campus. There’s a lot of people who are there to build with.

So if I have anything approximate to hope, it is the hope and inspiration derived from organizing, derived from the activist tradition, derived from the links that people make on the ground in the face of rampant white supremacy and ingrained institutional racism, with a common goal to get free.