Brown’s Boldness and Breaking the Silence

May 22, 2023 Michael Olesker

Jim Brown goes to his grave as the man who showed professional athletes they could also be full American citizens.

For better or worse.

When he died last week at 87, the former Cleveland Browns fullback was lauded as the most dominant football player of his generation. No other player combined his strength and speed and bad-ass boldness.

Some of us are old enough to remember Brown playing here in 1959 when the defending champion Baltimore Colts’ defense included such legends as Gino Marchetti, Art Donovan and Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb. All Brown did against those granite defenders that day was run for 178 yards and five touchdowns.

Year after year, no other player ever ran up such rushing statistics, or such video highlight reels, as Brown.

And no other player was ever so unapologetically outspoken on race, on war, on economic fairness, on politics.

For better or worse.

In Brown’s era, you never heard John Unitas or Raymond Berry or Lenny Moore talk politics in public. To this day, we don’t know how any of them ever voted for president. They were part of a silent generation of athletes.

Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality was still 60 years in the future.

Before Jim Brown, the theory in professional sports was about maintaining a certain athletic purity. Your heroes were judged by their ability to club a baseball over a fence or hit a wide receiver on the numbers from 40 yards away.

You didn’t want to compromise the loyalty of the hometown fans. You didn’t want them thinking, “Yeah, he’s a good player, but he’s a Democrat,” or “Why does he keep talking about this racial equality stuff.”

Brown is the guy who said he was more than a jock, he was also a citizen entitled to opinions.

When he finished his All-American college career at Syracuse University and joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957, he founded what became the Black Economic Union to help create jobs in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Later, he founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation to teach basic life skills to gang members and prison inmates and steer them from violence.

When political figures talked about racial divisions in America, it was Brown who insisted the issue wasn’t just black or white but green. He meant economic fairness.

When Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War and was denied the right to make a living in the boxing ring, it was Brown who defended him and then yanked in a bunch of other famous athletes who’d previously been mute on political issues.

Until then, they’d been as silent as generations of athletes before them.

For better or worse.

Brown infuriated lots of people over the years. Some people didn’t like his politics. Some didn’t like the very idea of jocks speaking out. They wanted their idolatry to remain pure. They wanted their childhood fantasies intact.

And Brown had a bad record of violence against women (and, as Brown himself pointed out, against men, too.) He was an imperfect man.

But he insisted on being a full American citizen, able to speak his mind and still make a living. For American athletes of his generation, this was a revelation. For American audiences, too.

Michael Olesker’s latest book, “Boogie: Life on A Merry-Go-Round,” was recently published by Apprentice House. It’s the life story of Baltimore legend Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass, an original “Diner” guy who grew up to create the Merry-Go-Round clothing chain and contribute millions to charity. Olesker is also the author of “The Colts’ Baltimore: A City and its Love Affair” (Johns Hopkins University Press).