Protests bringing national attention to racial injustice inspired two young athletes in Texas and cost them their spots on their high school football team.
The boys, Cedric Ingram-Lewis and Larry McCullough, attend Victory & Praise Christian Academy in Crosby, Texas. On Friday’s game Ingram-Lewis, a sophomore, raised his fist as McCullough, a senior and Ingram-Lewis’ cousin, knelt during the national anthem.
According to the Houston Chronicle, head coach Ronnie Mitchem approached the boys when the anthem was over and asked them immediately to hand in their uniforms.
“He told us that disrespect will not be tolerated,” Ingram-Lewis told the Chronicle. “He told us to take off our uniform and leave it there.”
Mitchem, a former Marine and pastor of Victory and Praise Worship Center, cited his military service as why he feels so strongly about the protests.
“I’ve been very patriotic my whole life,” Mitchem said to the New York Times. “I believe everybody has a right to protest, and I let those guys do their protests. But the rule was, if you did this protest, you wouldn’t be on the team.”
Mitchem told KTRK, an ABC News affiliate in Texas, that he stopped watching NFL games in light of the recent protests, which he said are disrespectful to veterans, the outlet reported.
But according to the cousins, their actions symbolized something more important than playing on the team.
“We had to get our message across: End racial injustice and the oppression of Black people,” Ingram-Lewis told the Times.
Ingram-Lewis’ mother, Rhonda Brady, described Mitchem as “a man with no integrity” and said she does not want her son or nephew back on the team.
“A man with integrity and morals and ethics and who truly lives by that wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said to the Chronicle.
She also told KTRK that Mitchem “has a slave master mentality.”
“If you were to go back to that when they wanted to tell us this is what you are going to do and this is how you do it. And if we didn’t comply, we were beaten, whooped or even killed,” she said.
But according to Ingram-Lewis, the protests are not against the military or the flag.
“That’s not our intent. That wasn’t Kaepernick’s intent when he first kneeled,” he told the Times. “It was about police brutality and racial injustice.”
Former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began taking a knee during the national anthem at football games last season. This year, players across the NFL have stood or rather, knelt in solidarity with Kaepernick.
More than 200 players joined in solidarity Sunday to protest Trump’s assault on their right to protest racial injustices.
Critics of the protesting have, like Mitchem, called it anti-military.
VoteVets, a progressive organization dedicated to veterans’ issues that “give[s] veterans a voice,” according to its website, tweeted last month that to protest is a constitutional right that veterans fought to protect.
As veterans, we swore an oath to support and defend the Constitutional rights of all citizens to speak freely and protest. #TakeAKnee pic.twitter.com/sk51t7QxJ8
VoteVets (@votevets) September 24, 2017
Alejandro Villanueva, a Pittsburgh Steelers player and former Army ranger, made headlines when he was the only member of his team standing on the field while the rest of the Steelers stood behind him in the tunnel.
“You tell me which of those children’s mothers are a son of a b. That is racism,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said.
Villanueva later said he did not intend to be separated from his teammates and added that he understands why NFL players are in fact protesting.
“Every single time I see that picture of me standing by myself, I feel embarrassed,” he told reporters after the fact. “This national anthem ordeal has sort of been out of control, and there’s a lot of blame on myself. Every single one of my teammates is extremely supportive and extremely patriotic.”
“For anybody who thinks that Coach Tomlin is not as patriotic as you can get in America … I’m offended by that,” he added. “I will support all my teammates, and all my teammates and all my coaches have always supported me.”
