Why it’s important that white quarterbacks are speaking out about civil rights

Several of the NFL’s and NCAA’s most prominent quarterbacks have spoken out on the George Floyd matter. Here’s why it’s important.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” —Frederick Douglass

During his fight against Major League Baseball in the late 1960s and early 1970s, outfielder Curt Flood — who merely wanted for himself and all other players the right to be free agents — took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. There, in Flood vs. Kuhn, in 1972, the Court ruled that though baseball was a business, the reserve clause — the clause that kept players bound to teams on a year-to-year basis for the entirety of their careers — did not violate baseball’s antitrust exemption. Flood lost the case, 5-3. Eventually, free agency was created by writ of arbitration, and players in all sports benefited with billions of dollars in contracts and the very American ideal of freedom of movement, but that’s another matter.

Jackie Robinson testified on Flood’s behalf during the Flood vs. Kuhn battle. It was testimony that, as Flood later said, “was a soliloquy that would send chills up and down my spine.”

Throughout Flood’s cases that went up through district court to the highest court in the land, only Robinson, former team owner Bill Veeck, and a handful of retired players would testify for Flood’s overriding principle. Not one active player came to Flood’s defense at any point in time.

“We lost because my guys didn’t stand up with me,” Flood recalled in Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary. “And I can’t make any excuses for them. Had we shown any amount of solidarity — if the superstars had stood up and said, ‘We’re with Curt Flood,’ — if the superstars had walked into the court and made their presence known — I think that the owners would have gotten the message clearly, and given me a chance to win.”

It’s not always easy to speak out about a controversial topic in a way that could negatively affect one’s livelihood. You could have asked Flood, Muhammad Ali, or Colin Kaepernick about that over time. But just as it is difficult, it is also incumbent on those athletes whose gifts have afforded them unique privilege in the world to speak out when things go too far and must be corrected.

Which is why it was profoundly encouraging to see so many NFL and future NFL quarterbacks speaking out following the death of George Floyd — the 46-year-old black man who died Monday after a white police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Riots have exploded all over America ever since.

Not only prominent quarterbacks, but white quarterbacks. At a time where these players could have backed off in fear of whatever response, they instead walked into the court, so to speak, and said what they felt.

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz was perhaps the most eloquent and heartfelt on the subject.

Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, the first overall pick in the 2020 NFL draft, was pointed in his own personal response.

And Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, who could well be the first overall pick in the 2021 NFL draft, made his own remarkable statement.

Cowboys quarterback Andy Dalton, who Burrow replaced in Cincinnati, also spoke out.

It is not the nature of the language that is the most important thing here; one does not necessarily congratulate or condemn these players because their language is too incendiary or not incendiary enough. It is the fact that several of the human beings who play the most important position in America’s most prominent sport decided, independent of one another, to put their names on the line and say, in different ways but as one voice, that enough is enough. That these human beings and their messages cannot summarily be dismissed because of the color of their skin makes the telling of those messages all the more important.

There are simply times where the only thing left to do is to testify.