Ku Klux Klan members marching in Washington, D.C. (1926) 

A post today on the meaning of one of the major items in the news. I think that many observers in recent weeks have not grasped that the NFL football players who have been going down on one knee during the national anthem are demonstrating a wonderful thing; if we analyze it carefully, we can see that. 

Why would I say so? Because when we go back over what African-Americans have suffered over the past four hundred or so years, and what they are still suffering in many parts of the U.S., we can't help but think that these young NFL players are showing remarkable restraint. 

For the first 250 years during which slavery was legal in the U.S. (early 1600's to 1865), African

American slaves could be whipped, beaten, mutilated, raped, and murdered with no threat of punishment whatsoever for the white owners who committed these crimes. Under the law in those times, these acts weren't crimes. Slaves were property and a white owner could do pretty much whatever he wanted to with his property. And make no mistake: these crimes in many states, but especially those South of the Mason-Dixon line, went on constantly. Beatings and rapes especially were daily occurrences. 

With the end of the Civil War, and the North's victory, slavery was finally legally abolished. In a decade or so, there were significant numbers of African-Americans being elected to Congress. Then in a generation all of that was reversed. The laws in the South were altered by whites in ways that enabled local justices to refuse voting rights to anyone who could not explain the Bill of Rights or a section of the Constitution. It became easy for white judges to refuse to accept a black person's explanation. Soon few to no black persons in the South could vote and shortly thereafter, the numbers of black persons who got elected to Congress dropped to near zero. Other laws were also easy to stack against African-Americans. Schools, hospitals, jobs, rights ...these all receded and receded out of reach if you were black. In the U.S., these laws were known as "Jim Crow" laws, and this time was the Jim Crow era.  

And it still wasn't enough. Any black person who was deemed by whites to be getting "uppity" was a target of the Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary group that unofficially but effectively ruled the South by the 1890's. They lynched "uppity" black people routinely. How powerful were they? By the 1920's, tens of thousands of them could march in Washington with their hoods off, showing their faces, and fear no repercussions whatsoever. And they did, while lynchings were going on in the South at a rate of nearly two per week.  

The power of the Klan has gone up and down in several cycles since those times. The FBI has gone after them hard. But the Klan's power is far from quelled even now. 

In more recent times, we are seeing disproportionate numbers of young black men getting shot by police in cities all over the U.S. It is this injustice that the NFL players going down on one knee during the national anthem are now trying to get the rest of the population to focus on and work to correct. 

It's not as if other countries in the world don't have problems with race. The troubling thing is that in the U.S., the problems are so much larger than in the other nations of the West, and they seem so intractable. Millions of white people seem determined to not budge an inch. 

So why are these football players in the U.S. remarkable? Because they could so easily be doing other acts so much more inflamatory and destructive. But they're not. They are keeping their protests peaceful, respectful, and fully in compliance with the law. 

Personally, I can't help but wonder if I were black whether I would be so restrained. 

 These men have heard all of the stories that go back for generations about the abuses that their parents and grandparents suffered at the hands of white people, but they are reaching out in a way that tells the white folks: "This systemic criminal behavior practiced by one group in our society against another group must stop. We know most of you are not monsters. But nevertheless, this criminal behavior by police against black men must stop. Answer the better angels of your natures. Help us." 

These NFL players and the large majority of African-Americans they represent, by their firm but restrained protest, are showing that they still believe in the decency in most white people and in the dream of what America could be. They are still trying to reach out.

In the U.S. as in all democracies worthy of the name, either our values as we have espoused them really do matter to us and we really will act to see them practiced by all citizens toward all others, or we abandon them entirely, and as Lincoln said, die by suicide. 

And still, in spite of so much vitriol aimed their way, and the facts in their home towns remaining so intractable, these men refuse to give in to violence or to despair. They keep believing in the real American Dream. A country that contains liberty and justice for all. 

Yes, high-sounding ideals. But these ideals have endured and gotten stronger - in fits and starts, but, nevertheless, with real measurable progress - for 241 years. Life is still stacked against you if you're born black in these times in the U.S. It's just not as stacked against you as it was in the 1850's or even the 1950's. There has to be something driving that history. What else could it be but a quiet, internal committment to those high-sounding words, by millions, black, Asian, indigenous, and Caucasian, who believe that with courage, intelligence, and love, those words could still be made true. 

From the point of view of History, the behavior of these young men is showing us once more that love is hard and it takes patience, but it really is stronger than hate.   

The way to see the young men taking a knee at NFL games is as the most loyal patriots of all. They believe in the founding fathers' vision; they are trying their best, in a way that is open to them because of their athletic ability, to make it come true. 

   

            Buffalo Bills players take a knee during the national anthem (credit: NY Daily News)