The Ali Summit Revisited

By DON ROLLINS

It was on June 4, 1967, when cameras captured iconic photos of four Black athletes, seated at a press conference table in Cleveland, registering in no uncertain terms their outrage against racism and war.

Flanked by seven other Black sports stars and the soon-to-be mayor of the city, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali and Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) had ostensibly come to support Ali and his decision to refuse a Vietnam War draft notice. But while the particulars of the preceding discussions are still a point of contention, the images themselves portray a focused, undistracted protest in real time.

Yet today the “Ali Summit” is considered a primer in the use of media to advance sports-related antiracism. Determined Black and other sports figures of color have since followed suit, using available technology to call out the White supremacy culture manifest in America’s professional sports.

When it comes to accountability within today’s convoluted professional sports, its impossible to single out the baddest of the bad actors. For all appearances to the contrary the Big Three in America — the National Football League, National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball — seem intent on outdoing one another when it comes to racist practices.

But as of Feb. 1, the NFL reclaimed the spotlight of racial infamy when former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and three individual teams. The action alleges two of the teams held “sham” interviews with him, designed only to meet a 2003 rule requiring each team to interview at least two outside minority candidates when seeking a new head coach.

Flores also asserts the Miami ownership asked him to violate league rules in order to gain a higher draft pick. When Flores refused, he reports being branded a trouble maker and problem employee — a known tactic used to dismiss coaches of color.

Flores’ case unfolds against the background of an NFL in which roughly 70% of the players are Black, but only 1 of the 27 currently employed head coaches are Black. (As of this issue, there are five vacancies.) This status quo becomes even more indefensible when tallying the number of Black majority stake owners in the league’s history: zero.

Flores’ suit includes monetary damages as well as systemic changes to the way the NFL does business: Install Black persons in primary decisionmaking positions; Require teams to give written records of each hiring process; Publish the compensation levels of ownership, coaches and assistants; Create a committee structure to encourage diversity among owners.

As would be expected, the NFL and three teams named in the suit deny Flores’ claims, issuing statements denying the existence of racism at any level of their organization. The league’s version of events was put forth as though the current 1/27 ratio doesn’t even exist:

“The NFL and our clubs are deeply committed to ensuring equitable employment practices and continue to make progress in providing equitable opportunities throughout our organizations. Diversity is core to everything we do, and there are few issues on which our clubs and our internal leadership team spend more time. We will defend against these claims, which are without merit.”

Borrowing a page from the Ali Summit, ESPN’s Marcus Spears and other sports commentators have taken to the cyber and network worlds to rebut the league’s rebuttal: The power to reverse this state of affairs resides with the team owners and NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell. All else is a distraction.

Back to that warm day in Cleveland, there’s no evidence the Ali Summit changed the minds of the power brokers of the day. Two weeks after the photos were taken, an all-white jury found Ali guilty of draft evasion. It took them 20 minutes.

But that fateful press conference is held in sacred memory, not because it spared Ali from conviction, but because when faced with punishment, he and those around him would not be distracted by what might happen next. They stayed the course.

That’s a cautionary tale from 1967 Goodall and his enablers aren’t likely to hear, but surely should.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022

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