Dabo Needs to Listen

Dabo Needs to Listen January 19, 2017

Kevin B. Blackistone:

They wanted recognition of their right to unionize, which they had done. They wanted their labor commensurately compensated rather than leaving them at or below the poverty line.

They wanted what compensation they did receive protected against the whims of bosses who often took it away at the slightest perceived transgression. They wanted health-care benefits, pensions and vacations.

So most of the 1,300 black men who buttressed the Memphis sanitation department went on strike in February 1968. A month later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined them. In April there, King was shot and killed.

Our newest college football championship coach, Dabo Swinney, didn’t sound aware of King’s last stand when he invoked King’s name at the start of the season to criticize San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s method of protesting police brutality against black men — kneeling during the national anthem. Swinney, the Clemson coach, recalled King, whose birthday this nation recognizes Monday, changing the world through “love . . . peace . . . education . . . Jesus.”

But as we all know, King altered the course of history through what King called — with credit to Mahatma Gandhi — direct action, exactly what Kaepernick exercised and others in the NFL and on college and high school football fields emulated in past months.

And I would wager that King not only would have supported Kaepernick’s protest but also would have opposed the stance of Swinney and others on the treatment of the college athletes who helped Swinney earn a $700,000 gratuity for winning the title, making the four-team playoff and finishing in the top five — all on top of his $5.1 million annual salary.

“As far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that’s where you lose me,” Swinney has said . “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.”

It was that sentiment by white management about mostly black laborers in Memphis almost 50 years ago that caught King’s attention and brought him to attempt a rescue. What roils college sports today, when mostly well-paid white management lives off the sweat and blood of poorly remunerated, predominantly black male labor, echoes the concerns of those striking Memphis sanitation workers King embraced early in 1968.


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