Official 2017 College Football Thread

Like today’s protesters, Dr. King faced critics who claimed that they agreed with his ultimate aim of justice but simply disagreed with his methods. They said that they agreed – as you do – that citizens have the right to protest, but they felt that there was an appropriate time and place for it. Your statements encouraged athletes to keep their protest off the field. Dr. King’s critics didn’t say that his methods were “wrong.”

Instead, in the letter, Dr. King reminds us that his critics called his tactics “unwise and untimely.”

Dr. King began his response by reminding his critics of why he was in Birmingham. He said, “I’m here because there is injustice here.”

Coach, you may be thinking that Dr. King was in Birmingham in 1963 and here we are at Clemson, South Carolina, in 2016. You would be right to point out that our circumstances are very much different.

However, it may also be possible that your position as a well-paid and celebrated white coach has shielded you from some of the injustices that persist here and now.

Clemson Professor Dabo Swinney
Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika (Photo/Twitter, @catchatweetdown)

The fact that our state leads the nation in women killed by their domestic partners is injustice. It is injustice that Clemson students, including most athletes, will face a post-job economy with record poverty and unemployment. The criminalization of the mentally ill and the exploitation of prison laborers in our state is injustice. The deaths of people like Walter Scott, Joyce Curnell, Ernest Smalley Jr. and Zachary Hammond at the hands of police officers were injustices.

The lack of answers and accountability about the death of Clemson student Tucker Hipps is an ongoing injustice. I could go on, but you get the point.

And there are also opportunities for change at our own university.

I want the best for our students that are also working athletes. But when I heard that we were building a $55 million dollar facility that won’t be available to most students, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other challenges at our university could be solved with $55 or even $30 million.

The insecure working conditions and low pay of our dedicated and excellent custodial, food service, and administrative staff is injustice. They work relentlessly everyday, with a positive attitude, running this university. But they also suffer a variety of ongoing problems and challenges.

The abysmally low levels of recruitment and especially retention of students and faculty of color at Clemson is injustice. In truth, the low recruitment of people of all ethnicities from the poorest parts of our state is injustice. The treatment of Clemson’s vulnerable international graduate students is injustice. The lack of a day care center is injustice. The fact that our most recognizable building bears the name of the white supremacist terrorist Ben Tillman is injustice. It is injustice when students protest these conditions and they are arrested, their reputations tarnished, and their careers threatened.

In the face of the injustices in his own time, Dr. King called for direct action, not press conferences.

He and those that fought with him brought the struggle to buses, games, counters, workplaces and other places that were deeply inconvenient and often illegal. Dr. King points out that none of these direct action efforts were “well timed” in the eyes of his vocally supportive but privileged and paternalistic critics.

Coach Swinney, based on your statements, I think that maybe you would not have liked Dr. King if you had known him.

Dr. King worked closely with Jackie Robinson, whose presence and success on the field was a protest. But his relationship with Dr. King became closer when he rejected the idea that his individual success was enough and that he should only engage with docile forms of protest that didn’t inconvenience anybody.

Dr. King also came to be friends with Muhammad Ali, who used his platform in the most confrontational ways to stand up against the Vietnam War. When people criticized Dr. King’s own stance against the war, he quoted Ali saying, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all — black and brown and poor — victims of the same system of oppression.”

As Dave Zirin reminded us in an article in The Nation, the two men also appeared together at a fair housing rally in Ali’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

You mentioned that you felt that Colin Kaepernick’s protest was divisive. Dr. King’s critics also called for unity and claimed that protesters in Birmingham were raising tensions.

Dr. King reminded these critics that “Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.”