The NAACP is calling for Black athletes and fans to boycott public universities in states attacking Black voting representation. On its face, it seems a powerful campaign. But, it also raises questions that must be reflected on.
Recently, the leadership team at Shoemaker campus invited Gerald Dessus to join our faculty and help write a curriculum focused on youth social justice movements because we believed something to be true: young people are not waiting for permission to make history. They never have.
Huey P. Newton taught us that the revolution belongs in the hands of the youth. But that truth cannot become an excuse for adults to outsource sacrifice to children, students, and most recently, young athletes while we admire their courage from a safe distance.
If the revolution belongs to the youth, then the sacred responsibility of previous generations is to honor them by providing space, tools, lessons, protection, and cover so they can move faster, act bolder, and bring their own vision into being. That is our duty.
Across many Indigenous traditions, we are reminded that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. In Black freedom traditions, we say something similar: we train and develop our replacements. We prepare young people not to mimic us, but to surpass us. That is the spirit that should guide us constantly.
Teaching Movement Preparation
One of the central lessons Gerald Dessus built into the eighth-grade social justice course at Shoemaker was that young people have always been the engine of social movements. He reminded us that educators do not control the world students enter when they leave our classrooms, but we are responsible for how prepared they are to engage that world.
That is Black freedom movement pedagogy. It treats children as people already living inside political conditions, already asking hard questions, and already making meaning.
Four 18-year-old North Carolina A&T freshmen sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, and helped ignite a wave of direct action across the South. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became the only national civil rights organization led by young people.
Young demonstrators of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade faced arrests, police dogs, and fire hoses in 1963. Freedom Schools were youth-centered organizing too — Charlie Cobb was only twenty years old when he pitched Freedom Schools. They were designed to help young Black Mississippians articulate their own desires, demands, questions, and new directions for action.
The justice focused 1960s were not powered by courage alone, but by organizations that built platforms, programs, political education, community defense, and daily service. The Black Panther Party matters here because Huey Newton and Bobby Seale canvassed their community, gathered residents’ concerns, and built the Ten Point Platform and Program from what people said they needed.
The Panthers were not only raising fists. Their survival programs fed children, sponsored schools, opened health clinics, created Freedom Schools, and organized sickle-cell testing. That history shows young people that protest must be paired with care, study, discipline, and a plan for survival.
They were not alone. The Young Lords fought for health care, education, housing, employment, and survival programs. The Brown Berets organized around police brutality, education, voting rights, and community patrols. AIM grew from Native people’s determination to take control over their own destiny and build survival schools. Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity pushed toward a political coalition of African-descended people across the Americas. This is the tradition Gerald was teaching about at Shoemaker.
Gerald’s course was not built to have students memorize heroes and dates. It helped them study movements, study power, study themselves, and then practice what it means to act. The course used case studies from African American and South African history so students could think critically and take effective action in their own communities.
The course also required practice. Shoemaker students surveyed more than 2,500 community members about pressing justice issues in West Philadelphia, then formed coalitions and created action plans. Gerald put it plainly: if we are really going to talk about social justice, students need to get into the community and do something, whether that means protesting, practicing sit-ins, or choosing whatever action makes the most sense to bring about justice.
Dr. Harry Edwards Is Pulling Our Coattails
My former principal, Mama Fasaha, one of the founders/principal of Nidhamu Sasa, recently reminded us of Dr. Harry Edwards’ warning about athlete boycotts and movement scaffolding. I am grateful for that. She is still teaching and pointing the broader community in the right direction.
The concern at hand is the NAACP’s Out of Bounds campaign, a national call for Black athletes, families, fans, alumni, donors, and consumers to withhold support from public universities in states attacking Black voting representation. But Dr. Edwards is not just another commentator. He organized the Olympic Project for Human Rights, pioneered sports sociology, and has spent his life helping Black athletes understand their collective power.
That specificity matters. The NAACP is asking top football and basketball recruits to withhold commitments from targeted programs, current athletes to elevate the issue and consider their options, and fans, alumni, donors, and consumers to redirect money toward HBCU athletics, scholarship funds, NIL collectives, bands, and alumni foundations. The NAACP isn’t the first to call for such a boycott.
Edwards said he is “not averse” to the NAACP’s proposal, but is “pulling their coattails on the complexities” of the effort. He is not dismissing athlete boycotts. He is asking questions the rest of us should sit with:
Has the groundwork been done? Are the athletes protected? Is the message sharp enough? Is the action connected to a broader movement that can absorb the backlash?
I am not against young people using their power to confront racism, voter suppression, gerrymandering, or any other attack on Black life and Black political power. But there appear to be missing pieces.
One of Dr. Edwards’ most important cautions is that Black athletes have not yet been heard from. He is also raising the larger question: without a Black political movement strong enough to provide identity, ideology, and support, many athletes may ignore, resist, or be left vulnerable by the call.
Mama Fasaha’s reflection helped me sit with another hard question, one Don Matthews raised sharply:
Is it moral to ask Black children to carry this fight? Don’s challenge should not be brushed aside. He is asking why all students, all student-athletes, alumni, fans, donors, and institutions are not being called to sacrifice, and why Black children, many from poor and working-class families, so often absorb the risks while middle-class adults protect more of their own comfort.
That critique stings because there is truth in it, but I do not think the moral question is whether Black young people should be part of the fight. Injustice has already enrolled them.
I was raised as a Black Panther Cub, one of many Children of the Struggle. My parents kept lists of products and companies that supported apartheid in South Africa, and we boycotted them. We boycotted fruit companies ravaging people’s land in South America. We were taught early that our choices either support oppression or support the fight for justice.
My Mama only left us home from one protest that I can remember. I was frustrated, but she knew that one had the propensity to become violent. We were at almost every other one, and I later took her grandchildren to protest the Iraq War. So I do not believe it is wrong for children to understand, inherit, or participate in the fight.
But they must be part of a larger, coordinated, sustainable attack on injustice, not called into sacrifices that privileged and comfortable adults are unwilling to make themselves.
There is an old movement story about a revolutionary who was arrested and mocked. “Where are your soldiers? Where is your support?” he was asked. His answer was that they were on the laps of their mothers. I believe they are there, and I believe they are also in the classrooms of our schools.
But do not send them to the front lines while adults are, as Chris Stewart says, eating cucumber sandwiches, sipping lattes, hosting banquets, issuing statements, and calling that movement work.
As Mama Fasaha reminds us, HBCUs grew out of the soil of injustice. So did every Black institution we built in a country that denied us equal schools, equal courts, equal medical care, equal safety, and equal humanity.
Every underfunded school district is already a moral question. So is every segregated opportunity, every Black child tried as an adult, and every attack on food assistance, maternal health, voting power, and public education.
In Islam, we are taught that when we see wrong, we should change it with our hands if we can, with our tongues if we cannot, and with our hearts if that is all we can do.
But do not merely hate injustice in your heart while sending children to change it with their hands.
The NAACP legal team continues to fight important battles, and for that we should be thankful. But I am wondering whether the NAACP can play a much larger coordinating role and bring its power back to the level of its best history.
Not just issuing statements, filing lawsuits, or calling for boycotts, but building the political education, athlete networks, family engagement, legal defense, communications strategy, and local scaffolding that could make a boycott meaningful and sustainable.
This cannot simply become our answer to Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation is not the first institution to write a long-game plan for power, and it will not be the last. We cannot organize as if our purpose is to chase every white backlash document with a counter-document of our own.
Call it “Black Print,” not a reaction to one election, administration, or conservative blueprint, but a living Black agenda rooted in the Black blueprint our children inherit from Africa and the African Diaspora, from the Niagara Movement’s demands to Mary Church Terrell’s “lifting as we climb”, Garvey’s Black independence vision, Anna Julia Cooper’s insistence on Black women’s leadership, Lucy Craft Laney’s Haines Institute, and Nannie Helen Burroughs’ National Training School for Women and Girls.
The harder critique is that too many Black institutions accepted the lie that a post-racial society had arrived, or was close enough to reach through individual accolades, elite access, symbolic appointments, and personal success stories. Too many of us let collective power shrink into representation while the right kept training, funding, litigating, and governing for the future.
We do not need to be hand-wringing reactionaries. We need to be bold, studious, rigorous, futuristic implementers of living plans that place the well-being of Black children at the center. We should never have let our foot off the gas pedal for equity.
History keeps teaching us that even a pinkie-toe step toward justice can provoke a violent reaction from people committed to white domination. Reconstruction’s promise was not fragile because Black people lacked vision; it was made fragile by white supremacist backlash, federal abandonment, racial terror, and state and local resistance. Our progress cannot keep collapsing like a deck of cards every time the white onslaught comes.
If the NAACP is asking young Black athletes to sacrifice scholarships, recruitment opportunities, NIL money, and possibly their standing in their own communities, then we have to ask: What is the organization modeling?
What institutions are adults willing to boycott? What money are national organizations willing to risk? What relationships are leaders willing to strain? Who is being organized around these young people? What are we prepared to lose before we ask them to lose?
John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and the Cost of Courage
I met John Carlos during one of his many trips to Philadelphia. He was always a hero of mine because of what he sacrificed. I revered the image of him and Tommie Smith on that Olympic podium, refusing to let America use Black excellence to hide Black suffering.
But we should remember the cost. After Smith and Carlos raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics, U.S. Olympic officials suspended them and sent them home under pressure from the International Olympic Committee. Smith called the protest “a cry for freedom and for human rights”, while Carlos said, “I went up there as a dignified black man and said: ‘What’s going on is wrong.’”
That kind of courage should humble us. It should not tempt us to ask the next generation to stand alone.
In Smith and Carlos’ time, athlete protest was part of a broader Black freedom struggle, antiwar struggle, student movement, and global anti-apartheid consciousness. Their protest happened during the violence and upheaval of 1968: the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy, antiwar protests, and police attacks on demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention.
Dr. Edwards also points us back to the blood cost surrounding that era, reminding readers that the years between 1963 and 1968 took Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, a president, a presidential candidate, and many civil rights workers and leaders.
People were sacrificing their lives. Students were stepping up with sit-ins, boycotts, marches, Freedom Schools, voter registration, and community organizing. Athletes were not being asked to be the whole movement. They were acting inside one. That distinction is everything.
History Rewards Our Research
Dr. Edwards put it plainly: “Activism divorced from thorough strategic analyses is conducive to nothing so much as contradiction, chaos and ultimately failure.”
That quote should be written on the board in every leadership meeting where adults are making plans that require young people to take risks.
Malcolm taught us that history rewards our research. It gives us more than heroes to admire. It gives us patterns to study, mistakes to avoid, strategies to sharpen, and responsibilities to accept.
We also have to tell the truth about how movements are remembered after the danger has passed. In August 1966, only a third of Americans had a favorable view of Dr. King, while 63% viewed him unfavorably.
So if many Americans thought King was too radical, imagine what they thought of Malcolm. Imagine what they thought of the Panthers. Imagine what they thought of young people sitting in, walking out, shutting down, refusing to move, refusing to be quiet, refusing to make oppression convenient.
Every generation has people who celebrate yesterday’s courage while telling today’s young people to be patient, polite, and practical.
That is why Dr. Edwards’ caution matters. He is not saying do nothing. He is saying do the work.
Black Women Are Not an Afterthought
Dr. Edwards also reminds us not to overlook Black women athletes. Rose Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Ariyana Smith, and the Atlanta Dream all help us see how Black women in sports have helped ignite protest movements and connect sports to broader social change.
Regardless of the revenue disparity between men’s and women’s sports, we undermine our own efforts when we ignore Black women’s gravitational and seismic role in every movement for justice.
Malcolm’s human rights vision was not narrow. After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm founded Muslim Mosque, Incorporated, and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, seeking to unite Africans and African-descended peoples across the Americas.
Malcolm’s fight for justice cannot be separated from the Black women who shaped, carried, defended, and clarified Black freedom work. More broadly, Black women were the backbone of the modern civil rights movement, serving as strategists and advocates despite violence, homelessness, unemployment, sexual assault, and death.
The Panthers tell a similar truth. At the Black Panther Party’s height, a 1969 Bobby Seale survey found that women made up more than 60% of Party membership, and Panther women ran programs, taught children, staffed clinics, produced newspapers, theorized, organized, defended community, and led. In SNCC, women worked at every level of the organization, their intellectual contributions were valued, and their courage and strategic thinking helped ground the work.
And Ella Baker is not an add-on to this history. There would not have been a SNCC without Ella Baker, who helped bring sit-in leaders together at Shaw University, encouraged them to form their own organization, and insisted that young people were “the hope of any movement.”
So if a movement is built only around the most visible revenue-producing men’s sports, it will miss the power, courage, and strategic brilliance Black women have always brought to freedom struggles. That is not just morally wrong. It is strategically weak.
The Sacred Responsibility of Elders
The revolution belongs in the hands of the youth. But the responsibility to prepare the ground belongs to us.
Our job is to make sure young people are not sent into battle with slogans when they need strategy, or asked to sacrifice without support. Our job is to make sure they inherit more than trauma, hashtags, and unfinished fights.
We owe them curriculum, history, political education, legal protection, and institutions that will not abandon them when the backlash comes. We owe them elders who tell the truth with love.
That is what Gerald Dessus was doing at Shoemaker. He was helping eighth-graders study the architecture of courage and see that movements are made by ordinary people who organize, listen, build coalitions, take risks, and refuse to accept the world as it is.
That is what Dr. Harry Edwards is still teaching us. Do not ask athletes to carry a movement adults have not built. Do not confuse a call to sacrifice with a strategy for liberation. Do not romanticize the raised fist while forgetting the scaffolding that made it possible.
And that is what Mama Fasaha was doing when she pointed us back to Dr. Edwards’ wisdom. She was reminding us that elders are still responsible for teaching, warning, guiding, and protecting the next generation.
Because if we are serious about freedom, then we must be serious about preparing those who will carry it farther than we ever could.
