On the other side of the divide, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr says Kaepernick and his fellow athletes should be considered patriots. Their goal, after all, is to build a better, more equitable nation. “Where’s your heart? Where’s your compassion?” asks Kerr. “Whatever side of the Kaepernick issue you’re on, if you’re helping your fellow man, that’s the most important thing.”
The activist athletes insist that they respect the military and say they chose the anthem to protest because discomfort draws eyeballs. “Colin’s trying to reach the far ends of this world,” says John Carlos, a former track-and-field star whose famed black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics prompted a similar backlash. “I could have gone to Central Park and did it, but it never would have received the acknowledgment and created the conversation.”
By his measure, Kaepernick’s protest has thrived. The artist Common, who in May spoke at Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights” camp for kids—created to teach at-risk youth lessons on education, self-empowerment and engaging with police officers—spotted Kaepernick jerseys at his October concert in South Africa. “They were like, ‘Man, I don’t know how your country would think that talking about equality is wrong,’” he recalls. Jay-Z wore a Kaepernick jersey on the season premiere of _Saturday Night Live_. Young fans dressed as the quarterback for Halloween, while some older ones mocked him with racist costumes.
As Kaepernick continues to train, hoping for another shot at the game that first made him famous, others with no connection to the NFL have taken up his protest. Members of a high school cheerleading team in Michigan knelt during the anthem before a game. Gyree Durante, who played quarterback for Albright College in Reading, Pa., defied a team decision to stand. He was booted off the team but says he has no regrets. “Kaepernick showed me, and others around the country, to fight for what you believe in,” says Durante. “Don’t back down.” Chuck Warpehoski joined three other members of the Ann Arbor, Mich., city council in kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of a meeting. “Most of the people who took the time to call me,” he recalls, “were there to tell me to burn in hell.”
Kaepernick, meanwhile, has floated above the fray. But he’s close to fulfilling a pledge to donate $1 million to community organizations and charities. Muhibb Dyer, co-founder of the I Will Not Die Young campaign in Milwaukee, used part of his $25,000 donation from Kaepernick to buy a casket he uses as a warning prop while addressing high school students. “Colin should be celebrated,” says Dyer. “His protest has never been about the flag. Human beings are losing their lives. That’s the point of it all.”
Representative John Lewis, who helped lead the 1965 Alabama march from Selma to Montgomery that devolved into the “Bloody Sunday” beatings of nonviolent protesters, likens Kaepernick’s leadership to that of civil rights icons like himself. “There are individuals who come along from time to time, they have what I call an executive session with themselves,” says Lewis. “He has a sense that this is the right thing to do, right now. For some, it’s almost a calling.”
Kaepernick is an imperfect figurehead for a movement designed to raise social consciousness. He’s worn socks depicting police officers as pigs and refused to vote in the 2016 presidential election. But he isn’t trying to win a popularity contest. After all, he took a stance that cost him his career. “He’s the Muhammad Ali of this generation,” says Harry Edwards, a University of California, Berkeley, sociologist who organized the 1968 Olympic protest and has advised Kaepernick. “I’m not worried about Colin. I’m more worried about the rest of us.”
_—With reporting by Alana Abramson/New York_
_Lead photograph by Al Messerschmidt—AP_