This past Monday was the annual national celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Coincidentally, it was also the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States of America.
But it is a misnomer to characterize this country as united. In the 248 years since its founding on July 4, 1776, the now 50-state collective, which began with the 13 original colonies, has always been divided and morally compromised, anguished by its original sins of enslaving Africans and tormenting the indigenous people who inhabited the land.
Sports is a throughline that has connected Dr. King and Mr. Trump. Both have leveraged their visceral and tangible capacity to influence the masses. Dr. King for the greater good of racial and social equality, and Trump for personal economic gain and sustaining racial and cultural fissures.
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Trump, the former owner of the defunct New Jersey Generals football team, has long been a prominent figure in the sports world. He has shrewdly attached himself to powerful billionaire owners of sports franchises who are among his largest financial donors, as well as praised athletes who share his MAGA ideology. In an exercise of polarization, Trump has strategically attacked many athletes, such as former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for their championing of racial and social justice.
Before Kaepernick, LeBron James, numerous WNBA players, and a plethora of others who have been at the forefront of today’s battle for racial and social justice, many athletes actively engaged in the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. King during its height in the 1960s, including basketball great and intellectual Bill Russell, and Jackie Robinson, a pioneer who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, becoming its first Black player.
Dr. King and Robinson developed a close relationship. Robinson stood just feet away from Dr. King when he delivered the seminal “I Have a Dream” speech at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Dr. King described Robinson as “… a pilgrim that walked in the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”
In turn, speaking at the Southern Christian Leadership Council during its annual Freedom Dinner in Birmingham, Alabama in September 1962, Robinson effusively encapsulated his perspective of Dr. King.
“People used to tell me a lot of things about Dr. King, that he was trying to take over the world, that he was making money on the civil rights issues,” Robinson elucidated. “I didn’t believe them, of course. I knew this was a dedicated man and that he has made tremendous personal financial sacrifices in the cause.”
In what at the time seemed to be an incongruous union, Dr. King and Cassius Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali on March 6, 1964, forged a bond as their objective to liberate Black people from the bondage of Jim Crow and oppression, and foster fundamental global humanity. It was symbiotic. A well-documented example is their clarion opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Dr. King’s and Ali’s association, evidenced by phone conversations that were covertly recorded by the FBI, was intentionally kept from public consumption by them to shield Dr. King from the virulent criticism he would have undoubtedly been subjected to for interacting with a man who was falsely portrayed as espousing violence and hatred of white people.
Dr. King’s dream has yet to be realized. But sports is a vessel by which it still palpably lives.
