Houston Rockets forward Robert Covington shared a powerful story from his past to explain his support for the U.S. racial justice movement.
“It’s time for us to make a change for what’s right and what’s wrong,” the 29-year-old Covington said on a Zoom media session Friday. “Racism isn’t a color. It’s just racism, period. What’s right and what’s wrong.”
Covington went into great detail about a story from his middle school days, when he and a cousin were misidentified, racially profiled, arrested, and detained. The officer was fired, eventually.
“I basically had a cop falsely detain me,” Covington said. He continued:
He took me and my cousin off our home property — we were sitting on our front porch — and he told us to come to his car because two other kids were disrespecting a man’s yard. Another two police cars came up and arrested us for playing football in the street and being on another man’s property. But the man came out and told [the officers] that we weren’t bothering him, that we were fine. The cop didn’t care. He arrested all of us, put us in backup cars and took us down to the station.
From there, Covington got his foot stuck in the police car due to his height, and he explained the problem to the officer. According to Covington, the officer replied by saying:
If you don’t get out of this car, I’ll break your leg so you get out of this car.
Covington was able to exit the car, but he was detained by police for several more hours before he was finally released after his grandfather and godmother came to the police station. (His parents were working.)
In Friday’s interview, Covington said that was not the only example in his life of a negative interaction with a police officer.
However, Covington — who recently helped lead cleanup efforts in Nashville during the NBA’s COVID-19 hiatus — said he believes that protests to support the movement should remain peaceful.
“I’m just trying to do what I can in my second home in Nashville,” he said. “A couple guys I’m working out with, we all came together and put together a plan to let people understand rioting isn’t the way to make a change. Everyone has to live here, we don’t want to see those things. We want to see peaceful protests, things that people have been doing.”
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