Jim Brown calls on Ray Lewis, other athletes for violence summit
In one of the more fascinating Muhammad Ali tributes you’ll read this week or any week, Yahoo Sports’ Eric Adelson took us back 49 years to a historic human-rights moment led by the late boxing great.
The “Ali Summit,” as it was later known, was an event organized in Cleveland by recently retired NFL great Jim Brown to support Ali and his controversial decision to oppose his being drafted into the war in Vietnam. Assembling on June 4, 1967 at the offices of the Negro Industrial Economic Union were prominent African-Americans of their time, including public figures outside of sports such as Carl Stokes (the first black mayor of a major U.S. city) as well as some of the top athletes of the day, including Brown, Ali, Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
In a scene that echoed that historic event on the day that Ali was laid to rest, ESPN brought two of the major figures from that event — Brown and Abdul-Jabbar — together on Friday to pay their respects and discuss the life and the mark of Ali. Toward the end of the discussion, ESPN’s Hannah Storm asked Brown what he felt Ali’s legacy on today’s athletes.
Brown’s answer was fascinating, and he seemed to suggest that a modern-day summit might be possible — and necessary — soon. Next spring would represent the 50th anniversary of the event, but Brown spoke with an urgency about a different kind of concern than the one Ali was facing many generations ago.
“Well if you ask me what I hope, I hope that Charles Barkley, that he will join Ray Lewis, Curtis Martin and myself,” Brown said. “I hope that 100 or 200 athletes will come together to use our money and our power and our love to be able to change the homicide rate in these black communities across the country.”
As Adelson points out in his story, sports protests are fairly rare events these days. But perhaps given the rise in violent crimes this year in several cities, especially Chicago (which Brown would mention), it’s time for athletes to wield their power to help curb the issue. That was Brown’s call on Friday.
“As we sit here and talk Ali, we neglect the fact that the homicide rate has gone up,” he said. “Chicago is a mess. You have the greatest activists in the world — Jesse Jackson, Reverend [Louis] Farrakhan — in that city. The president is from that city. And yet it leads every city in the country [in homicides].
“So I hope that we can all come together again, use our resources, use our influence, use our intelligence, and educate these young people so they won’t kill each other.“
African-American sociologist and scholar Dr. Harry Edwards, who also sat on the ESPN panel with Brown and Abdul-Jabbar, added his thoughts about the Ali effect, noting that violent crime went down this week in Louisville, Ali’s hometown, leading up to his massive public funeral.
“You talk about what we hope for these athletes,” Edwards said, “Ali’s influence was so great in terms of pointing out that your success is what you achieve, [but] your significance is what you leave. That he even made it necessary for me, as an academic, to understand it’s not enough to have a PhD and teaching at a major public institution. You’ve got to be an activist. You’ve got to go out there and change something. That is what you’re going to leave.”
Can Brown make this happen? Would prominent current NFL players attend? Lewis and Martin are two NFL greats and household names, but it might take the presence of more active NFL players to really resonate with today’s youth. It’s also worth noting that Lewis once was involved in a high-profile homicide case. Although murder charges were dropped, Lewis was given a year’s probation and the incident cloaks him to this day.
Another problem? Other than Richard Sherman and a handful of others, this generation of players — black, white or otherwise — tends to toe the line on serious and controversial issues. But the idea of Brown uniting some of the most powerful figures in sports could provide a strength-in-numbers cover for them individually, and if the end is realized it certainly would all be worth it.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm
