Standing on the San Francisco 49ers field at 6-foot-8, Harry Edwards could easily be mistaken for a former football player. However, Edwards isn’t a professional athlete. The sociologist and retired UC Berkeley professor is an advocate for human rights in American professional sports who has consulted for the 49ers and Golden State Warriors and counseled quarterback Colin Kaepernick on taking a knee to protest police brutality in Black and brown communities.
Perhaps Edwards’ most famous contribution to activism in sports was founding the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an organization that challenged segregation and racism in athletics and called for the exclusion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. The image of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising the Black power salute on the podium in Mexico City has been an enduring symbol of the movement for civil rights in sports.
Today, Edwards, 78, works as a consultant for player personnel and staff development with teams in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, and he’s still speaking out and teaching about the state of race relations on and off the field in America.
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This interview is part of Lift Every Voice, a series that connects young Black journalists with Black elders in our communities to celebrate and learn from their life experiences. The San Francisco Chronicle has joined Hearst newspapers, magazines and television stations to publish dozens of profiles as part of the project.
Sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards created the most famous protest in Olympic history. He sits down to talk about the legacy of the Black power salute, where Colin Kaepernick belongs in history and why the younger generation gives him hope for the future.Caron Creighton
Q: What current issues do Black pro athletes have in mind and how do we address them?
A: There are all kinds of issues. The challenge becomes how do you prioritize them? The NFL has a major problem in terms of its distribution of funds to athletes who have begun to show signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, dementia or some other cognitive decline suspected of being football-related. As it turns out, qualification for those funds is “race normed,” with white former players having a much lower threshold than Blacks in terms of qualifying for that money, because the working medical presumption is that Black players start off with a lesser intellectual ability and therefore have to present increased signs of cognitive deficiency before qualifying for the funds that the NFL has set aside. (Earlier this month, the NFL vowed to stop the practice in response to a petition, outcry from medical experts and a civil rights lawsuit by retired Black players.)
If you look at circumstances beyond the locker room, there are all kinds of things that come over the wall of the stadium. The athletes are very much concerned about the ongoing challenge of police brutality and murder under the cover of the badge. I mean, LeBron James knows the only reason that it was George Floyd who was murdered by police and not him was that he was not there. The women of the WNBA know that the only reason that it was Breonna Taylor who was murdered in her own home by police is that they were not there.
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The voter suppression thing is something they’ve been concerned about for some time, because all of the demands being made in terms of change, reimagining policing, dealing with the issues of inequality and injustice in society, depend upon putting people in positions of power in the government who can make the changes that are being asked for.
Q: Can athletes have an impact on big, societal issues outside the arena of sports?
A: Athletes can have a tremendous impact in terms of continuing to organize and mobilize around getting out the vote. They can have a tremendous impact in terms of convincing people they should get their vaccinations. They can have tremendous impact in terms of helping to convince people that they should wear masks, that they should use sanitizer and deal with some of the more obvious issues that divide us.
Q: You have been addressing systemic racism in the sports industry for decades. Have you seen any positive changes?
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A: Well, there have been positive changes, but whether those changes have been progress, that’s another issue. We’re still battling to get representative access in front-office and coaching positions at the NFL. The locker rooms are about 74% Black, but we are now down to four minority coaches overall and only three Black coaches in the league. The problem is that all of these changes are taking place, but they haven’t been based upon morality or constitutional guarantees of equality, freedom and justice; they’ve been transactional.
When Jackie Robinson broke in (to Major League Baseball), it was proclaimed as a major step in progress. Nobody said, “Yeah, but what about predatory inclusion? What about the collapse of the Negro Leagues? What about the fact that most Negro League teams were not compensated for the players who were taken out by the Major League teams?” How does one determine that that constitutes progress when they didn’t bring over the managers, they didn’t bring over the team owners, they didn’t bring over the front offices?
Q: Has there been recognition of predatory inclusion in the sports industry?
A: If you go on any college campus today, in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education, there has never been a representative proportion of people of color on the faculty, in the student body and in the administration. But when you look at revenue-producing sports, such as football and basketball, you tend to find that Blacks are overrepresented. That situation continues to this date and much the same way as the Negro Leagues were destroyed with the predatory inclusion of Black baseball players — not one athlete was picked out of a historically Black college or university this year in the NFL draft. What that means is the schools developing the top Black athlete candidates are the predominantly white schools. They’re bringing in most of the blue-chip Black athletes, which is destroying athletic programs at HBCUs, just as surely as predatory inclusion by Major League Baseball destroyed the Negro Leagues.
Q: Do you feel as though your decision to be an advocate for humanitarianism in the sports industry was a choice?
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A: It became very clear to me early on that something needed to be done about the headlock that American sports and the American sports media had on Black people, if for no other reason than we were wasting some of our most talented, competitive, determined and committed young people in this mad pursuit of athletic stardom in the circumstances where they had a greater chance — statistically — of being hit by a falling star, then becoming a star in the NFL or the NBA.
Only 2% of all athletes who participate in collegiate sports ever sign a professional contract, not to speak of the 98% who, after they played their last home game, for all practical purposes, were back on the street (because many didn’t graduate). They ended up finishing up their athletic eligibility with no degree, and no means of going to school to complete the degree. They wound up back home in their old bedroom at their mom and dad’s house if they were lucky. If not, they ended up on the street, trying to figure out how they were going to make a living and survive.
Q: Tell me about your experience with mental health among Black athletes. How much of a concern is it in the industry and are there enough resources to provide support?
A: One of the things that we’re trying to put together at the University of California at Berkeley is a program in the Department of Social Work (under its dean, Linda Burton). Former athletes will be recruited into a program where they are trained as clinicians, community workers and so forth. (They will be) certified with a master’s in social work degree to work in that extended capacity, not just with athletes but defunding police departments and shifting those funds to other categories of city workers who are more qualified to go out and deescalate the situation where there may be a mental health issue, a drug problem, a domestic violence problem involved.
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Q: When implementing representation at the highest levels in sports, wouldn’t it be logical to look at the statistics of minorities in the U.S. and have those numbers reflected in management?
A: If we use that measure for the front office, why not for the locker room? So in the NFL, rather than 74% Black players it would be 13%, and in the NBA rather than 78% Black players there’ll be 13%. So, when we begin to talk about representation based upon the populations, what we’re really talking about is quotas and not opportunities. Once you open it up to opportunities that are transactionally based, then whoever competes and becomes the best at winning begin to be the ones that show up. That is the measure that you want applied.
Q: Are you hopeful for the future of race relations in America?
A: I’m not hopeful; I’m confident, because I know the history of the struggle in this country that has gone on since the first Africans arrived on slave ships, since the first Native American was murdered for their land.
I understand that America has been through worse and come out better. We went through a bloody Civil War that took more people than the other (American) wars combined, but we came out with an end to slavery, with Reconstruction and other efforts to broaden the basis of democratic participation. We went through a civil rights movement that killed — between the turn of the 20th century and the assassination of Dr. King — three times as many people as were killed in 9/11, but we came out of it with a Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Open Housing Act. We came out with more Black officials in public office than at any time since Reconstruction.
America is built from movements. We come up with the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the gay rights movement, the Me Too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement today. That is part of the American political legacy and always will be. That is where these young people are today. I’m not only still hopeful, I feel confident that this struggle will continue to progress. It will not be linear, but Americans are better at this kind of struggle than any of the people on the face of this Earth, and that is something that is not going to simply come to an end because of our divisions.
A special thank you to San Jose State University for hosting the photoshoot with Harry Edwards.
Lift Every Voice connects young Black journalists with Black elders in our communities to celebrate and learn from their life experiences — deepening connections with the past to position us all for a better future. The San Francisco Chronicle has joined Hearst newspapers, magazines and television stations across the nation to publish dozens of profiles as part of the project.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, began as a poem in 1900 for schoolchildren. Before long, the song spread across the nation at NAACP events, within Black churches, and in community meetings, gaining prominence each time it was sung. Known as the “Black National Anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a triumphant story that chronicles and acknowledges the past while marching forward toward freedom.
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