The decision last weekend by more than 30 black football players at the University of Missouri at Columbia to boycott all team activities, including games, unless the president resigned was unprecedented in higher education. The players’ protest amplified the already dramatic events that had been escalating on the flagship campus for weeks and marked a bold activism on behalf of their community off the playing field.
Their action brought widespread attention to racial discord on the campus. It was quickly effective, and it showcased the power that athletes have and should use more often to effect change for themselves and their community.
If not for the high profile of the athletes, there would not have been a national awareness that a graduate student on a hunger strike was risking his life to improve the university, or that an entire movement led by the Legion of Black Collegians had been going on for several weeks. And how many more people learned through the players’ protest that black students had been subjected to racial epithets or that a swastika had been smeared on a wall?
The players have said that the racial dynamics on the broader campus are not reflected within their own team but that they feel it is important to stand in solidarity with all black students on the campus. Invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the players posted on Twitter: “The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere.”
The full implications of their actions will take some time to fully appreciate, but there is a victory for the players in this moment: When facing injustice, they stood up to mobilize the power at their disposal.
As the sophomore defensive end Charles Harris put it: “Let this be a testament to all athletes across the country that you do have power. It started with a few individuals on our team and look at what it’s become. Look where it’s at right now. This is nationally known, and it started with just a few.”
But for all of the righteousness of the moment, the clear independence of the players’ action and their assertion of power has generated ambivalence, despite the official position of the athletic department, and the team, of unity. One report surfaced that some players and coaches were angry about the refusal of the involved players to participate in practice.
The football players who lent their voices to a fight for justice were carrying on the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., situating the quest for fair treatment as a matter of civil rights.
In the aftermath of President Wolfe’s resignation announcement, it was athletic department officials who took the podium to spin a different message than the one the athletes had articulated. The players’ actions were represented as emanating solely out of a concern for the health of a fellow student, not for the loss of confidence and credibility in the university’s corporate leadership. This attempt to distort or silence the message of outspoken athletes is all too common.
Two years ago, controversy erupted when college football players at Northwestern, the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill embarked on the All Players United Campaign, a silent protest marked by players wearing the initials “APU” on their armbands and gear. On the surface, athletic authorities offered support for the actions of the players, but college football coaches expressed an expectation that players could speak out only when they had received 100 percent support from their teammates and only after they had consulted with the coaching staff before they spoke out.
Indeed, within the confines of the highly regulated and regimented world of a Division I-A college football program, “unity” relies on a delicate ecosystem of relationships that exists within it and the tenuousness of those relationships (player to player; player to coach; player to audience): the pressure of being ready for a scheduled game on national television; the financial stakes of a multibillion-dollar industry; and the demands of a viewing public and fan base whose support for social justice may evaporate quickly, replaced with suspicions that players compensated with athletic scholarships had misplaced priorities in a hypercompetitive football culture where winning is the overriding goal.
This raises the question of whether the Missouri players placed themselves in jeopardy of losing their scholarships by boycotting. The Washington Post’s Sarah Larimer reported that the NCAA, when asked that question, said the terms of financial agreements varied from college to college. It seems odd that the rule makers did not point out that, under the NCAA regulation governing fraudulent misrepresentation, the players actually did run the risk of losing their scholarships. Perhaps it just wasn’t a convenient time to disclose that.
It is probably a testament to what the Missouri players’ accomplished that no one dared mention the possibility. Significantly, the young black men on the Missouri football team who lent their voices and their metaphorical muscle to a fight for justice were carrying on Martin Luther King’s work, situating the quest for fair treatment as a matter of civil rights. Their rights — as athletes, as students, as citizens, as workers — are by necessity rooted in civil rights. The rest of King’s quote that was referenced in the player’s tweet proceeds:
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” King wrote in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
As the reverberations of the day’s events echoed in college and university administrative offices, there was a recognition of the power of players to shine a light on issues that needed to be addressed, to heed the symptoms of problems that beg for change. College presidents and conference commissioners, athletic directors and administrators, should attend to the lesson here.
Ellen J. Staurowsky is a professor of sport management at Drexel University.
