Dr. Harry Edwards on the NAACP’s Call to Boycott Gerrymandering States

After the Supreme Court gutted the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, states such as Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana immediately moved to redraw and eliminate majority-Black districts, muting their political voices. What those states have in common—aside from revanchist politicians pining for a return to Jim Crow—is a social, political, and economic addiction to college football, an institution dominated by Black athletes. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, these are states that deify Black talent, love Black entertainment, and depend upon Black labor, but demean and politically silence Black people.

In response, the NAACP dropped a political bomb last week, calling upon Black high school athletes to boycott universities in states that are gutting the voting rights of Black residents. Their call immediately sparked a series of debates: Can threatening the South’s obsession with college football produce positive political change? Will teenagers and their families being offered NIL (name, image, likeness) money accede to this? Is it even fair to ask 16-year-old Black kids to sacrifice these kinds of opportunities? Why should they have to deal with the failures of older generations, to protect what so many sacrificed to achieve? And shouldn’t this call extend to white athletes as well, in the name of solidarity, if nothing else?

The NAACP’s new campaign has launched a thousand opinions—but there is one we should care about hearing above all others: that of Dr. Harry Edwards. Now 83 years old, the sociologist and activist has spent his career organizing Black athletes to see themselves as a community that can exercise power, make demands, and speak their minds. Dr. Edwards is perhaps best known as the lead organizer of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which led the attempted boycott by Black athletes and their supporters of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. For the past three decades, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he played an essential role in establishing sports sociology as an academic discipline. His studies of sports through the prism of race changed how all culture—music, film, dance—has been interrogated. Unlike so many offering opinions on the NAACP’s boycott proposal, he is someone who has not only been in the trenches—he dug the trenches.

When I reached out to Edwards about the NAACP decision, he replied with a long and thoughtful answer. Here is what he said.

The NAACP needs some historical insight regarding their proposed Black athlete boycott and to consider their own potential contradictions as well as counterproductive outcomes. I want to make it clear from the outset that I am not averse to their proposal. I’m just pulling their coattails on the complexities of their proposed effort—not to speak of the fact that the athletes haven’t been heard from yet. There is better than just a possible chance that, as things now stand, many Black athletes will ignore or be outright opposed to the NAACP regarding a Black athlete boycott strategy, especially under circumstances of there being no “Black movement” in the broader society sufficiently influential and compelling enough to travel over stadium walls and through pavilion turnstiles to provide athletes with an ideological and definitional strategy, with political identity and ideological affiliation within a broader society-wide movement—one that informs, frames, and fuels their involvement and generates the popular political connection and support they need and deserve as they put everything on the line, their present and their future.

The situation at this point should be about messaging—how many ways are there to get the message out to both Black athletes and the states targeted? And what determines what would be a suitably urgent and creditable range of responses—not just from the athletes and schools but from the states involved. Organized and politically educated Black athletes collectively, certainly, might be able in the short run to pursue some gains directly associated with their sports involvement: e.g., they might be able to drive up the NIL price of their participation in the SEC, and ACC, or be able to send a message to two or three states on a “targeted” school-by-school basis. (Of course, the schools targeted would enlist their former Black student athletes to speak against the NAACP effort and dissuade any current athletes from supporting the NAACP. ) But no organized Black athlete effort will be met with institutional acceptance: Here will be a price to pay principally by the activist athletes. Still, whatever the goals, clarity in messaging from the outset is critical. In September of 1967, in the run-up to the Olympic Project for Human Rights, I organized a boycott of the University of Texas, El Paso versus San Jose State season opening football game. Then in February of 1968 we sent a further “message” by organizing a total boycott of the NYAC indoor track and field classic. We “sent a message” during the most politically violent five years in America since 1860–1865. That was 1963–1968: a time that consumed a president, a presidential candidate, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, and civil rights workers and leaders. In the end, our implemented strategy was a combination of boycotts and protests, highlighting the strategic need for flexibility and multiple options.

It would appear to be more efficacious today for the NAACP to target two or three schools with the threat of others being singled out for targeting in the NEAR future. And it’s not too late for the NAACP to downsize and diversify its boycott effort in this fashion. But I’m still not convinced that the NAACP’s goals can be achieved in the absence of a broader, society-wide, Black popular political movement. Today there is nothing like the post–World War II civil rights movement, which gave us the social-political context for Major League Baseball’s “Great Experiment,” Jackie Robinson, the desegregation of professional football and basketball, and Wilma Rudolph’s post-1960 Olympics desegregation efforts. There is nothing like the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, which saw the Muhammad Ali Cleveland Summit, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, nor the Black Lives Matter movement, with Ariyana Smith, Colin Kaepernick, and countless others; nor the rise of women’s sports coinciding with Roe v. Wade, Title IX, and the #MeToo movement. In calling for today’s athletic boycott, the NAACP has not, to my knowledge, discussed the imperative of embedding any athlete boycott effort in a broader popular political movement context that would provide imperative political framing and scaffolding within a broader-based societal movement.

As we look at the challenges strategically facing the NAACP today, with so much of the organization’s focus clearly on college football and perhaps, in some part, on basketball, we must also remember that in most past instances, it was Black women in sports who ignited the relevant movements. In 1959, at the Chicago Pan Am games, Rose Robinson sat on an ice cooler during the playing of the national anthem in protest of racial segregation—a year before Elgin Baylor, and nearly two years before Bill Russell boycotted participation in NBA games over segregated dining facilities at their team hotels. Ms. Robinson’s protest, staged during the anthem, was almost 10 years before Smith and Carlos [raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics].

After the 1960 Rome Olympics, it was Wilma Rudolph who refused to participate in racially segregated parades and dinners in celebration of her three gold medal performances at the games and who subsequently undertook to desegregate her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, not Ali, who didn’t become outspoken on racism until after his defeat of Sonny Liston in 1964. In 2014, two years before Kaepernick took his knee in pre-game protest during the anthem, Knox College basketball player Ariyana Smith lay on the gym floor for four minutes and 20 seconds during the presentation of colors and playing of the national anthem at a game in Staten, Missouri, about 12 miles from Ferguson, in a commemorative protest of the four hours and 20 minutes that police blocked the family of Mike Brown from retrieving his body from the street where he was killed by a white police officer. In July of 2020, the women of the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA mobilized to drive out a member of their team ownership—also a US senator—who spoke derisively and condemned the Black Lives Matter movement, in the process leading a drive to elect two Democrat senators to the US Congress from Georgia for the first time since the era of the Dixiecrats.

Sports recapitulates society, so don’t look for a leader such as a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to emerge and spark that imperative, broad scale movement in society. Rather, look for the next Claudette Colvin or Rosa Parks—if history is any guide, she is already on her way—and in this male-dominated, patriarchal society and sports institution, the leader will likely follow.

So the question must be raised: Does the NAACP’s proposed boycott encompass women’s collegiate sports, or just revenue-producing men’s collegiate sports? If not, the effort will be denying the relevance of both women’s sports and the historic role-potential of women athletes in igniting protest movements in both sports and society. Clearly, then—and this is my broader and more basic point—a great deal of strategic analyses and a lot of groundwork must be done regarding the NAACP’s proposed Black athlete boycott of collegiate sports if there is to be any chance of even a minimally successful effort. Furthermore, we must not ask Black athletes—male or female—to squander their hard-won power resources for lack of thorough analyses and planning.

As Trump attempts to distribute his $1.776 billion slush fund to the right-wing mob that trashed the capital; as 10,000 white South Africans are being given US citizenship while hundreds of thousands of people waiting for green cards are being told to leave the country; and as Black voting rights are being eradicated, this is a red-alert, wake-the-fuck-up, moment for anyone who doesn’t think we should live under the heel of white supremacist violence. And while this kind of a boycott could have an incredibly positive effect, Edwards reminds us that “waking up” is insufficient. We have to organize “over the stadium walls and through the pavilion turnstiles” to actually see results. Or, as Harry Edwards said in 1968, “Activism divorced from thorough strategic analyses is conducive to nothing so much as contradiction, chaos and ultimately failure.”