As Vice President Mike Pence’s post-national anthem exit from last Sunday’s NFL game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Indianapolis Colts made abundantly clear, the ripple effects of the protest that former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick started last season are only widening. Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reid began kneeling during the singing of the national anthem before preseason games last summer, and President Trump’s tweets of complaint about other kneelers as this season began moved many more players to take a knee, and ignited a national debate on whether sports are the proper forum for protests.
Before there was such a thing as professional football, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was first performed at a baseball game during the seventh inning of the first game of the 1918 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, 13 years before it officially became the national anthem. With the country embroiled in World War I, a military band took the field and began to play. Fred Thomas, the Red Sox third baseman, on leave from the Navy, quickly took his cap off and snapped to attention, according to reports of the day. The other players also removed their caps and placed their hands over their hearts. A symbol of patriotism was born.
The U.S. Navy had adopted “The Star-Spangled Banner” as its official song 19 years earlier, and in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ordered that it be played at “military and other appropriate occasions.”
In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play for a major league baseball team in contemporary times. The move roiled American sports and society, but propelled integration forward in this country. Nonetheless, Robinson endured racial taunts almost everywhere he played, so perhaps he, as well as anyone, would have understood what has unfolded in the NFL over the past year.
Kaepernick, and all the players since who have kneeled, linked arms or remained in the locker room during the national anthem, say they are protesting racism and social injustice in the U.S. — and they weren’t the first athletes to do so before a huge television audience. At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter dash, raised black-gloved fists as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played during their medal ceremony. Many Americans were outraged by that demonstration nearly 50 years ago, and fans who have voiced their disapproval of the NFL players’ gesture this season claim that they are disrespecting the flag and the soldiers who fought to protect our freedoms, and infringing on football fans’ escape from the concerns of the real world.