Introduction: racism, protest, and the antecedents of the Black Lives Matter movement in the world of sports

Abstract

Ever since the untimely death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin just over a decade ago in Sanford, Florida, the sporting world has been at the forefront of calls for racial justice and a focal point for a number of high-profile athlete-led protests. Many of these protests have formed part of the wider Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that erupted in the aftermath of the controversial investigation into Martin’s death, which saw Martin’s shooter, George Zimmerman, acquitted in July 2013 and sparked widespread uproar across the United States. Though BLM is by far the largest activist response to these events (and the wider problems of racial injustice in the US), as the co-editors of a recent special issue of Sport and Society noted, athlete activism in response to Martin’s death predated the formation of BLM, with major sporting stars such as LeBron James of the National Basketball Association (NBA) taking to social media to demand justice within weeks of the fatal shooting. Perhaps the most influential and imitated protest of this period came when National Football League (NFL) player, Colin Kaepernick, ‘took a knee’ during the US national anthem in 2016 in an overt display of his dissatisfaction at the state of racial (in)justice in the United States. This form of protest was later replicated not just by Kaepernick’s teammates and other US teams across various sports, but internationally. Indeed, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 saw widespread renewal of ‘taking a knee’ against racial injustice in competitions that often had no US involvement at all, such as the Union of European Football Associations’ (UEFA) Euro 2020 soccer tournament. Yet, as BLM and the sporting world’s related protests grew in both scale and controversy, supporters and detractors inevitably began to draw links between these modern manifestations of sporting activism and historical precedents. In 2017, Bernice King, the daughter of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., tweeted two spliced images that made the historical resonance of Kaepernick’s