The Beaumont Bulls, a youth football team in Texas, had its season cancelled because the players (11 & 12 year old boys) and coaches protested racial injustice. Yes, let that sentence sink in for a moment. We are all familiar with the painstakingly, patriotic protest of 49ers qb Colin Kaepernick and the ire it has drawn around the country. To be fair, the protest has its supporters as well. Many of those that support Kaepernick are collegiate, high school, and now youth athletes.
In an article by Bleacher Report’s Adam Harris the young Bulls felt the cause Kaepernick is protesting was worth taking a stand. Beaumont is a town in south east Texas located between Houston and Lafayette, Louisiana; two regions that are no strangers to police brutality and racial injustice. It’s no surprise a team of young black boys coached by black men would feel a certain type of way about the Kaepernick protest. The coaching staff actually met to discuss the possibility of staging their own protest and originally decided against it. However the young boys said they wanted to take a knee.
The team received permission from the league to protest and after taking a knee before a game in early September, the young boys and their families began receiving death threats. Initially the league and the team’s executive board stood behind the coaches and the young boys. Then out of nowhere, the team’s executive board told the team they were no longer allowed to protest. The young boys and the coaches still felt strongly about the cause and continued to kneel during anthem’s before games. The executive board then immediately suspended head coach Rah-Rah Barber and ultimately cancelled the team’s season.
I want to be clear and state, I have no idea why the executive board suddenly withdrew their support of the team. I have my theories and I’m sure you do as well. However let’s focus on the young boys that had their season taken away from them. Football is religion in the south and this goes all the way down to the pee wee level. How is it that a group of adults (executive board and by extension the league) decided to punish young boys for exercising their most fundamental and basic American right? The fact that adults have canceled their season, and denied these young boys a chance to play, is unconscionable. The rhetoric around football is that it’s patriotic and teaches great lessons. What lessons does this teach the young boys? What has it taught them about the right to protest?
Once again, the initial cause and reason for an action is muddled and lost by the actions of short sighted, ignorant, and immature individuals. Unfortunately that has become too commonplace in society. Those young boys are heroes and here’s hoping that common sense and justice wins out and their season is reinstated.
Flip the page to see the kids kneeling and why they wanted to spark a conversation…