The Civil Rights Legacy That Led to Mizzou

In the world of big-time college sports, it has become intensely controversial that the star athletes who create wealth for universities and television networks and merchandise companies receive no remuneration themselves. The Northwestern football team tried to unionize. Players at Grambling State, an iconic HBCU, boycotted a game against Jackson State, largely to draw attention to the draconian budget cuts Grambling had endured under Louisiana's right-wing Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. The issues that catalyzed the Missouri football players this week, however, had to do with an overall campus environment, not inequality or exploitation solely within high-stakes sports.

As many Americans now know, Missouri's black players had vowed to boycott all their upcoming games unless the university's president, Timothy M. Wolfe, resigned for his perceived failure to addresses a series of racist incidents on the campus. Having lost the support of the faculty senate and student government as well, Wolfe capitulated on November 9. The university's chancellor accepted a lesser role just hours later.

In their protest, the Missouri football players joined a decades-old tradition of African-American athletes leveraging their sporting celebrity—and the economic power it translated into for white America—for the cause of racial equality. Broadly speaking, one might conceive of this history in terms of three waves: one formed by the Depression and World War II, one by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s, and one by the Black Lives Matter grassroots phenomenon of the past few years.

The first generation included such figures as Paul Robeson, an All-American football player at Rutgers in the 1920s, who became one of America's most vocal and visible Communist Party members during a period when the party was just about the only mostly-white entity in the United State to press for racial equality. Robeson's near-contemporaries, the boxer Joe Louis and the Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, engaged in a more implicit form of activism by defeating the top athletes produced by Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship, whose secular theology was of Aryan racial supremacy.

The heirs to Robeson, Louis, and Owens arose amid the political turmoil of 1960s America. Cassius Clay famously disavowed his "slave name" to be reincarnated as Muhammad Ali, a follower of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Jim Brown, the star fullback of the Cleveland Browns, proposed that black athletes form a labor union. In 1964, the first African-American to register as a guest at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, in St. Augustine, Florida, was Willie Galimore, a local star football star, first at all-black Florida A&M University and then with the Chicago Bears. The sociology professor Harry Edwards persuaded such African-American athletes as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then still known as Lew Alcindor) to boycott the U.S. Olympic team in 1968. Two of the athletes who did participate, trackmen John Carlos and Tommie Smith, famously hung their heads and gave a clenched-fist, black-gloved salute a la the Black Panthers on the medal stand in Mexico City.

In the realm of college football, no incident more pointedly expressed the dilemma of black players at mostly white schools than the "Black 14" controversy at the University of Wyoming. With the Cowboys unbeaten and ranked 12th nationally, the team's 14 African-American members declared their intention to wear black armbands for the upcoming game against Brigham Young University—a protest against the Mormon Church's policy barring black people from the lay priesthood. Wyoming's coach kicked all the black protesters off the team and the conflict made Sports Illustrated. (About a decade later, the Mormon Church reversed its racial doctrine, and in the early 2000s the University of Wyoming reconciled with the Black 14.)

As important, if less widely known among white Americans, the coaches and student-athletes of the HBCUs contributed their efforts and even their blood. Jesse Jackson, for instance, was both the quarterback and civil rights leader as a student at North Carolina A&T. The football team at South Carolina State, tacitly supported by an idealistic coach named Oree Banks, joined the protests against segregation off the campus in Orangeburg, South Carolina. One of them was gravely injured and a local high school player killed when an all-white force of state police opened fire on nonviolent protestors in February 1968 in what soon became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Less than a year later, the largest act of public desegregation since the Civil War took place at a football game, as a racially mixed crowd of 45,000 saw Florida A&M defeat the University of Tampa, a predominantly white team.

So the mobilized black players at Missouri came from somewhere deep and profound. There are, of course, plenty of contemporary factors in the their stand, as well. Many players come from the St. Louis area, where racial friction has been elevated ever since the fatal shooting last year of Michael Brown in the suburb of Ferguson by a white police officer, who was never indicated. Black Lives Matter has profoundly influenced protest movements on college campuses around the country, and has also been embraced by such pro stars as Lebron James and Derrick Rose, providing a new activist athlete role model.

The Mizzou players' boycott threat explicitly wielded economic clout—the millions of dollars Missouri football brings in annually and stood to lose with games cancelled—in pursuit of racial justice. Gary Pinkel, the team's white head coach, endorsed the boycott, in what was a startling reversal of the norm for coaches of any color to dissuade players from political involvement. By aligning themselves with their African-American classmates, the football players at Missouri embodied both parts of the student-athlete hybrid at a time when critics of the NCAA's amateurism model have questioned the value of that role on college campuses. They have helped to move history forward, and expanded a national conversation—about racial inequality, about college athletes—that needs to keep going.