Joe Biden won the election, Colin Kaepernick beat Donald Trump.
It is essential for this, as we reflect on 2020, the year when black athletes reached their full perspective as leaders, disruptors and providers of social change.
With messages and hashtags on social networks. # ImWithKap and “Today is a smart day to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” and #BlackLivesMatter.
It ended with voting campaigns and projects that helped flood the polls in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, key states in the effort to drive a racist out of the White House.
From now on, we will see it as a turning point where athletes have jointly used their massive platforms as scenarios of social change, and this time, it seems permanent.
This makes Rube Foster proud.
I couldn’t have noticed this a hundred years ago.
Andrew “Rube” Foster, the most productive pitcher.
He was so smart that it was released with Cy Young and Mordecai “Three-Fingers” Brown. He was so smart that he won 44 games in a row in 1902. He was so smart that his recommendation on how to get out of a predicament seemed ridiculous.
“Don’t worry, ” said Foster, according to his access to the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Try to look cheerful and indifferent. I smiled at the full targets with two shots and three balls at the batter. me. “
Foster invented or perfected the screwball, and new York Giants manager John McGraw is said to have brought “Big Rube” to camp to teach Christy Matthewson the field.
But Foster was a black guy in a segregated America, so he wouldn’t have credit.
This truth is not going to stop it.
In 1920, he brought in combined entrepreneurs from midwest commercial cities – Chicago, Cincinnati, Dayton, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis — and sold them in a great vision: the Black National League.
It was bigger than baseball.
He summed up his argument in a Chicago Defender opinion column, saying his purpose of “creating a career that would amount to the ability to generate revenue from any other race. “
When they came here in combination to shape their eight-team league, they followed an ambitious motto: “We are the ship, and everything else the sea. “
He died in 1930, five years before Joe Louis and Jesse Owens began hitting the Axis’ head.
Dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler sought to be amazing every turn.
Have fun in a simple forum.
Mussolini, in 1935, clung to former heavyweight champion Primo Carnera as a powerful Italian.
Carnera a giant, so big that Louis had to take state-of-the-minute publicity photos on a walk.
Carnera’s team boasted that their man’s appetite was up to his stature and that he would eat 14 eggs, half a kilo of ham, a loaf of bread, two litres of milk and a liter of orange juice.
Mussolini threatened to invade Ethiopia, and sought Carnera to knock louis out as his first attack by power.
That’s not going to happen.
Black leaders ignored Louis and told him that bets had been raised, and in front of another 64,000 people at Yankee Stadium, the American beat Carnera in six rounds.
A year later, Hitler attributed his Nazi racist ideology to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
There were pamphlets, banners and Nazi speeches about the supposed superiority of white Germans over others of Jewish and African descent.
Then Jesse Owens was encouraged and taught Hitler what the “superior” looked like.
Owens won four gold medals on the track and field, an unparalleled feat in nearly 50 years.
He was at the forefront of a rate of African-American athletes who embarrassed Hitler at the Games and encouraged his countrymen to dream.
A young Jackie Robinson was among them. His older brother, Mack, won a silver medal in the two hundred meters, completing only Owens.
But Hitler had a hard head and tried to unite the Nazi aspirations for Max Schmeling while he was ready for a rematch with Joe Louis in 1938. Two years earlier, Schmeling had beaten Louis in the twelfth of a highly anticipated match at Yankee Stadium, but through the at the time of the fight, political rhetoric rose exponentially.
President Franklin Roosevelt also identified the strength of the game to shape hearts and minds when he shook Louis’ arm and said, “We want muscles like yours to beat Germany. “
Louis forced, getting rid of Schmeling in the first circular at Yankee Stadium.
“Me there, a black man,” Louis said. I had the burden of representing the entire United States. They tell me that I am guilty of many adjustments in race relations in America.
Young Jackie Robinson witnessed all of this, but it was a decade before it became a surname.
Jackie Robinson was smart in all baseball sports at UCLA.
Probably his most productive game is football. They called him “Lightning Jack” and took the country to the recoil yards for the undefeated Bruins of 1939. He was a convention runner, leading his team in passes, land yards and totals.
Robinson is also a prominent basketball player, a 5-foot 11-inch front and a dunk slam pioneer.
And he’s pretty smart in athletics, but not as acclaimed as his older brother, Mack, the Olympian.
But none of those sports were as big as baseball.
Then, although Robinson failed to succeed in his weight at UCLA, he became interested when Brooklyn Dodgers executive chief Rickey presented him with an opportunity.
Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 and remained silent at first, quietly facing taunts and threats.
But in 1949 he denounced racism in almost every possibility he had, even though his critics were looking for him to “stick to the sport. “He didn’t, and that year he won the National League Most Valuable Player award.
He stopped talking.
“I can’t stand up and sing the anthem. I greet the flag; I know I’m a black guy in a white world,” he wrote in his 1972 autobiography, “Never Had It Made. “
It was almost 50 years before Colin Kaepernick knelt down.
That’s 15 years after Robinson’s retirement.
And that’s right after the boos caused by Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Muhammad Ali.
No one was bolder than Tommie Smith and John Carlos, perhaps Muhammad Ali.
Ali on the most sensible thing in the world when he refused to be admitted to the US military. But it’s not the first time
“I have nothing against the Viet Cong,” heavyweight champion in 1966.
The following year, Ali stripped of his title, was suspended and threatened with five years in prison, which made him a hero and a villain.
“I met two black infants some time ago at an airport,” Ali said in an interview with Black Scholar in 1970. “They said, “Field, it takes a lot of courage to do what you do. If you knew where you were going”. now, if you knew your chances of going out without guns or without an eye, fighting with those other people in their own country, fighting Asian brothers, you have to shoot them, they never lynched you, they never called you, they never put a dog, never shoot your leaders, you have to shoot your enemies (they call them) and as soon as you get home you may not find work , going to jail for a few years is nothing compared to that. . »
This sounds reasonable, Ali has been described as “ungrateful”, “ruthless” and “unpathriotic”.
The protest in the air a year after Ali banned him from boxing.
Carlos and Smith have become key figures at the 1968 Summer Olympics when they put on black gloves, took off their shoes and raised their fists in the air in the medallion while the “star banner” sounded. They were against racism and social injustice in the United States.
But it was dismissed as a militant tribute to “black power. “
It’s outrageous.
Carlos and Smith were sent home where they gained death and harassment threats.
But some 50 years later, in 2019, the US Olympic CommitteeBut it’s not the first time He stated his mistake in supporting them and were in the Olympic Hall of Fame for “their character, behavior and contributions off the field. “
Meanwhile, Ali was reinstated and returned to the ring in October 1970, it would take him another 4 years to regain the title.
He left in 2016 and his memorial service attracted personalities such as Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Spike Lee, Will Smith and Jim Brown.
The widow of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump Ali, Lonnie, to tell him he hadn’t.
Things calmed down after Muhammad Ali.
Racism has stopped, of course.
Ask who has tried to order a school, or pay attention to the Central Park Five, discuss Willie Horton’s announcement with political science teachers, or tell Advocates of Police Reform about Rodney King.
But the athletes were largely, and visibly, silent.
Then, in 2012, Trayvon Martin killed through a security guard who followed him and followed him as he walked around the house dressed in a hoodie in South Florida.
The Miami Heat, led by LeBron James, responded with an online published photo of the entire team dressed in hoodies.
If you like it beyond generations, it may have been the end.
There is a gap between Rube Foster forming the Black National League in 1920 and the 1936 Olympics a gap between Louis-Schmeling in 1938 and Jackie Robinson in 1947
But there has been a constant presence of athlete activism ever since.
A year after Martin’s death, Dwayne Wade reacted on Twitter after the teen’s killer, an adult man who saw compatibility in firing a gun at a child, George Zimmerguy, discovered that he was not guilty: “Wow!Dizzy! Sad as a”. father!!!
The owner of the Heat franchise, Micky Arison, responded online with a message of condolence suggesting: “Justice does not exist. Life is not fair. You’re just doing what you can. Kiss those young men and tell them you love them. “
In 2014, Donald Sterling stripped the name of franchise owner Clippers after recording racist comments. Later that year, players wore “I can’t breathe” T-shirts to protest Eric Garner’s death.
In 2015, University of Missouri football players joined protesters calling for the dismissal of President Tim Wolfe, saying he was not acting fast enough to oppose racist incidents on campus. resigned or was fired. Two days later, he resigned.
In 2016, Colin Kaepernick knelt down and things took things to a whole new level.
Kaepernick’s protest against racism and police brutality in the national rite is warped in a protest opposed to the Anthem and the American Flag.
President Trump has Kaepernick’s staunchest critic.
In 2017, Kaepernick’s occasion expanded to all sports, culminating in WNBA players who refused to communicate with the media on issues other than social justice.
In 2018, it became clear that Kaepernick had made his last attempt in the NFL, but Nike still built an advertising crusade around him and players continued to kneel.
In 2019, Kaepernick and the NFL settled the former quarterback’s lawsuit by accusing team owners of conspiring to keep him off the field. Kaepernick organized an open workout, dressed in a “Kunta Kinte” T-shirt and bold to tell anyone he wasn’t. able to play.
By 2020, everyone had noticed enough black men killed in regime meetings, and when George Floyd died under the knees of a Minneapolis police officer, it became clear that Kaepernick had been right all along, not the anthem. It’s not a matter of flag, it’s racism and police brutality in minority communities.
The NFL’s biggest stars have made a video player-by-player “The Lives of Blacks Matter. “
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell put them as saying, “We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of blacks. We, the National Football League, admitted that we should not pay attention to our players before and all inspire others. “people to speak and demonstrate peacefully.
The NBA painted “Black Lives Matter” on the box and wore social justice messages on their T-shirts.
And when Jacob Blake shot in the back through the police in front of his youth about forty-five miles south of Milwaukee, the Bucks led a player’s coup that swept through the sports world.
Frustration, anger, disappointment, resentment, sadness and concern were channeled into causes, but none were more visual than election campaigns in the country’s cities.
In Arizona, where Cardinals star Larry Fitzgerald contributed to a verbal essay on the history of voter suppression, the Phoenix-area electorate gave Joe Biden a decisive advantage.
In Georgia, where Dream players competed with franchise owner Senator Kelly Loeffler, Atlanta’s electorate changed state to Biden.
The same is true in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where participation was greater than in 2016. Professional sports cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee provided the push to get rid of a president who said there were “very smart people” at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a president who told lawmakers from diverse backgrounds to “return” to their country , a president who called Latin American immigrants “criminals. Fix drug dealers and rapists. “
Joe Biden won the election; However, Colin Kaepernick, and the motion that led him to his career, beat Donald Trump.
It is essential for this, as we reflect on 2020, the year when black athletes reached their full perspective as leaders, disruptors and providers of social change.
This time it’s permanent.
This is because much progress has been made, there is still a long way to go.
Contact Moore at gmoore@azcentral. com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @SayingMoore.
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