Let’s imagine, in marking a half century since his assassination, that Martin Luther King Jr. were still alive today. He’d be 89 now, not impossibly old.
What he might say about 2018 issues has been the subject, in the past few days, of all sorts of public ruminations and speculations. My own curiosity, as a sports journalist, relates to how the business of fun-and-games has become so ingrained in society as to be inseparable from our politics, sexism, racism and culture wars.
How might King respond to the president suggesting that NFL players be fired for protesting against police treatment of minorities? What might he say about Fox News host Laura Ingraham rebuking basketball star Lebron James for “talking politics” by telling James to “shut up and dribble”? To what extent might King see sports as a primary arena in the fight for civil rights and justice?
Twenty-five years ago, for the 25th anniversary of King’s death, my editors at Newsday allowed me to ask some of those questions of former King associates and King scholars. There were no definitive answers, of course. But the basics of what they told me then ring a lot of bells now.
Harry Edwards, University of California sociology professor emeritus and longtime activist, noted then how society had “compartmentalized” blacks right out of the civil rights discussion. “By that, I mean the black athlete—who is on TV, day in and day out, making millions of dollars, driving a hundred-thousand-dollar automobile, with his pick of women and vacation sports, with his pick of the good rewards of society—becomes totally out of sync with the masses of black people. Those athletes are neutralized, made safe, neatly bounded off.
“And then it becomes very easy, once that process is established, to say: ‘Hey, you are an athlete. What are you doing talking about the lack of blacks in high-prestige occupations? You just play ball.’”
Which sounds like “Shut up and dribble.” Or claiming that Colin Kaepernick, as a $19-million-a-year backup quarterback, was in no position to speak for the oppressed in 2016.
At the time of King’s murder—April 4, 1968—sports had not yet pushed from the fringes to the center of social events. The Super Bowl was a two-year-old curiosity. The World Series was years from going to prime time. The NCAA basketball tournament was nowhere near its current March Madness.
Muhammed Ali had refused induction into the army two years earlier, which certainly caused a stir, but Ali lost that fight—banned from boxing for five years. King, meanwhile, was busy enough dealing with institutional segregation, with the Vietnam War, even a divided black community.
“To be frank about it, we had not gotten around to sports in 1968,” the Rev. Joseph Lowrey, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King, told me 25 years ago. But, by 1993, Lowrey argued that there was “hardly anything, except maybe Michael Jackson or Oprah Winfrey, that can match the Super Bowl for getting into American homes—not only as entertainment, but also a something with an educational value that helps form opinions.”
Months after King was slain, Tommie Smith and John Carlos used their platform as star athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics as a call for social awareness and a plea for the disenfranchised. By raising black-gloved fists during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, they were a Kaepernick moment decades before Kaepernick.
But Harry Edwards had failed to engineer a black boycott of those Games. His argument was that “sports inevitably reflects, reproduces society and social environment. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I think Dr. King would look at that and understand that. Sports not only has greater importance because of the increasing number of blacks involved, as a direct consequence of the atmosphere brought about by Dr. King, but because it is so magnified by the media. And this is exactly the same conversation I had with Dr. King in 1968.”
King’s oldest son, Martin Luther III, told me during those 1993 interviews that he didn’t remember his father ever attending a sports event, though “I know he admired Jackie Robinson…” and, during SCLC retreats, “he’d always play softball. He could jump high, to be so short. Daddy was 5-7, maybe 5-8, but he could leap. And he was an excellent swimmer.”
In the spring of 2014, on one of my last assignments before official retirement from Newsday, I was sent to Memphis to cover a weekend of March Madness action. With a little time to spare, I took the ¾-mile walk from my hotel to the Lorraine Motel, site of King’s murder.
It was like time-traveling back to 1968, and surprisingly sad. As part of what now is the National Civil Rights Museum, the motel’s exterior has been preserved to look exactly as it appeared in newspaper photos the night King was shot 50 years ago. Two vintage cars, a 1959 Dodge Royal and 1968 Cadillac, are parked in the motel lot.
So we can only imagine. The consensus among those who knew King was that, while impossible to divine his exact reactions to 2018 doings in sports, he would be “vocal.” Whether through protest or negotiation, his voice would be heard.
