They wanted what compensation they did receive protected against the whims of bosses who often took it away at the slightest perceived transgression. They wanted health-care benefits, pensions and vacations.
So most of the 1,300 black men who buttressed the Memphis sanitation department went on strike in February 1968. A month later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined them. In April there, King was shot and killed.
Our newest college football championship coach, Dabo Swinney, didn’t sound aware of King’s last stand when at the start of the season he invoked King’s name to criticize San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s method of protesting police brutality against black men – kneeling during the national anthem. Swinney, the Clemson coach, recalled King, whose birthday this nation recognizes Monday, changing the world through “love … peace … education … Jesus.”
But as we all know, King altered the course of history through what King called – with credit to Mahatma Gandhi – direct action, or exactly what Kaepernick exercised and others in the NFL and on college and high school football fields emulated in past months.
And I’d wager that King would not only be supportive of Kaepernick’s protest, he’d oppose Swinney’s stance, and others, on the treatment of the college athletes who helped Swinney earn a $700,000 gratuity for winning the title, making the four-team playoff and finishing in the top five – all on top of his $5.1 million annual salary.
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“As far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that’s where you lose me,” Swinney has said. “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.”
It was that sentiment by white management about mostly black laborers in Memphis almost 50 years ago that caught King’s attention and brought him to attempt a rescue. What roils college sports today, where mostly well-paid white management lives off the sweat and blood of poorly remunerated predominantly black male labor, echoes the concerns of those striking Memphis sanitation workers King embraced early in 1968.
Take, for example, a study from Drexel University several years ago that estimated how much college football and basketball players are worth to their institutions and how poorly what remuneration they do get provides them to live. The Drexel study estimated that college athletic scholarships left well over 80 percent of recipients living below the federal poverty line despite having an average fair market value to their schools between $120,000 and $265,000. Since then, some colleges and conferences have increased the true value of full athletic scholarships to offset such a shortfall.
But fans often confuse what college athletes get in return for playing their games as “free education,” as many responses to my tweet last weekend in the immediate aftermath last Monday of Clemson’s 35-31 victory over Alabama for the national title evidenced.
There is nothing free about an opportunity for an education provided only if you sprint, lift weights and perform publicly for the institution on scheduled nights and weekends in accordance with a for-profit TV schedule.
But the lack of equitability in college sports is beyond a mere paycheck. Like the workers tasked with keeping Memphis clean, the brief livelihoods on college campuses by athletes often are not protected against managers – i.e. coaches – who control their scholarships, influence which classes they can take and can refuse their wish to transfer to another school if they decide the one they’re at is no longer in their best interest. The past few years, some colleges and conferences, like Maryland and its Big Ten association, began guaranteeing athletic scholarships for all athletes as long as they stay in good academic standing.
That was one of the main reasons college football players at my alma mater, Northwestern, tried to get recognized as a union a few years ago. Though the National Labor Relations Board ultimately denied them, that same board last summer reversed an old ruling on its part from a Brown University case. It had used that decision to reject Northwestern’s unionization attempt. But now it recognizes that graduate students who do research and teach – contributing to the higher education corporation – should be treated as university employees, which removes the argument of education as remittance for the reason why college athletes can’t be viewed as the same.
And among the primary demands of the Northwestern unionization effort, as borrowed from the National College Players Association that has been advocating for college athletes for years, are better health-care benefits, just like the Memphis trash collectors who King rallied around. After all, CTE, the brain disease costing so many professional football players the ability to live post-sports lives in good mental and emotional health, doesn’t start with the first NFL practice. College athletes suffer it, too. They suffer broken bones. And worn-down bodies. They don’t deserve to have to pay out of pocket for the sports-related injuries that linger throughout their lives when those who manage the college games rake in hundreds of millions off their toil and have health care for life. Colleges should pick up those tabs out of requirement, and not option from the heart.
Sports were little more than a footnote in King’s life. He met with Muhammad Ali in March 1967 in Ali’s hometown of Louisville during Ali’s forced exile from the boxing ring because of his strident opposition to the Vietnam War, and, not coincidentally, gave his seminal public speech denouncing the U.S.’s incursion in southeast Asia shortly thereafter.
In December 1967, King joined a meeting in New York organized by black sociologist Harry Edwards and several black aspiring Olympians who demanded Ali’s boxing license be restored, U.S. Olympic boss Avery Brundage be sacked because of his dictatorial style and bigoted pronouncements, and the U.S. Olympic team hire more black coaches.
King didn’t support those struggles because they were in sport anymore than he turned up for the Memphis sanitation workers because they were public employees. He engaged with them because of his oft-repeated belief that injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere. Not recognizing college athletes as other labor is just that.