The Greene County Democrat

Tag: athletes

  • Newswire: The NAACP is Calling for Athletes to Help Fight for Voting Rights

    Newswire: The NAACP is Calling for Athletes to Help Fight for Voting Rights

    by Caleb Pugh, Our Weekly

    The NAACP is calling on athletes to hold Southern states accountable for their radicalization of state maps, as many disfranchise black voters and leaders. While this has been an ongoing problem in various Southern states over the years, Louisiana recently made headlines after redrawing its congressional map, eliminating two predominantly Black districts by splitting them and forcing former district leaders, Tony Carter and Castro Fields, to compete against each other for one district. They also limited the importance of the Black vote, as now predominantly Black communities are overshadowed by the majority of white voters in those districts.

    The campaign, according to the release, focuses on flagship public universities that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue in eight Southern states: Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia. This would include Ole Miss and Mississippi State University.

    “This generation of Black athletes understands something that those who came before them were never afforded the chance to say so plainly: your talent is yours, and so is your community’s political power,” stated Tylik McMillan, the national director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division, in the release. “The state that is working to erase your grandmother’s congressional district is the same state whose governor will stand on the field and celebrate your touchdown or game-winning shot.”

    While it’s seldom that players have spoken up about the racial messages on their school campus, as Kylin Hill, a former running back for Mississippi State, posted on social media in 2020, politicians need to “change the flag or I won’t be representing this state anymore.” That year, the state changed its Confederate-themed flag to the current magnolia version.

    “For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in American life,” the caucus said in a statement. “Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”

    The campaign also asks fans, alumni, and donors to stop buying tickets, merchandise, and licensed apparel from targeted programs and divert those funds to historically Black colleges and universities and related organizations.

    Featured Image: U.S. Supreme Court Building (iStockphoto / NNPA)

  • Study: Black athletes in football, men’s basketball lag in degrees

    Associated Press

    Football

    PHILADELPHIA — Young Black men playing basketball and football for the country’s top college teams are graduating at lower rates than Black male students at the same schools — despite having financial and academic support that removes common hurdles preventing many undergraduates from earning degrees, a new report has found. While 58 percent of black male undergraduates at the 65 schools in the Power 5 conferences got degrees within six years, 54 percent of black male student-athletes at the same schools graduated, according to an analysis of the 2014-15 academic year by University of Pennsylvania researcher Shaun Harper.
    Harper said the graduation gap represents a wide and systemic issue worse than isolated scandals seen on individual campuses.
    “It happens just about everywhere,” said Harper, director of Penn’s Center for Race and Equity in Education. “Generations of young black men and their parents and families are repeatedly duped by a system that lies to them about what their life chances are and what their athletic outcomes are likely to be.”
    Just as the attention of the sports world shifts to March Madness, the home page for the NCAA’s website features data on how few student-athletes are drafted to play professional sports, promoting its efforts to educate college players. The NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments begin this week.
    According to estimated data from the NCAA, only 1.2 percent of college men’s basketball players are drafted by the NBA and only 1.6 percent of college football players are drafted by the NFL.
    “Although there is a great deal of interest in basketball this time of year, we think it is important to remind fans of what our mission is — to provide student-athletes educational opportunities that will last a lifetime,” Bob Williams, NCAA senior vice president of communications, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
    The statement also said graduation rates rose 13 percentage points in football and 15 percentage points in basketball for black student-athletes at all Division I programs between 1995 and 2005.
    Nationwide, black men comprise 2.5 percent of undergraduate students but make up 56 percent of college football teams and 61 percent of men’s college basketball teams. Harper says college is failing a large number of these students, who also graduate at lower rates than student-athletes overall (69 percent) and undergraduates overall (75 percent) at these schools.
    A recent NCAA report on graduation data shows the graduation rate for black male players at all Division I basketball programs was 72 percent for the class that started in 2008. For football, the number was 69 percent. On its website, the NCAA says graduation rates are higher than ever, and 15 percent of student-athletes say they wouldn’t be in college without sports.
    But the numbers don’t hold up when looking at the NCAA’s main revenue-generating sports at elite programs.
    “When coaches are looking for the best athletic talent, that’s what they’re looking for,” Harper said. “They’re not really concerned with academic talent.”
    Harry Swayne, who played football at Rutgers University for four years before a 15-year NFL career from 1987 to 2001, said he saw the shift in mentality from the idea of college as a path to education to a pipeline to a professional sports career.
    “Statistically, more than likely, they won’t make it,” Swayne said. “We don’t want to talk them out of their dreams; we just want to give them some reality, too. We want to introduce them to some other possibilities for when football is over, because it is coming to an end sooner than they think and sooner than they’re ready for.”
    Swayne said schools should look at student-athletes more as people than players and help them prepare for life beyond the game.
    Harper said the solution is less likely to come from colleges than parents whose children are being recruited. He encouraged families to ask coaches about their overall student-athlete experience before committing to schools.
    “Sometimes, young men get so excited about the prospect of playing for a particular place and coach,” Harper said. “We’re going to have to see more student activism, where black players say, ‘You’re going to graduate me, or I’m not going to play for you.’”