Harry Edwards' Perspectives Remain Prescient

Today, I listened to one of the NFL’s non-playing heroes – Harry Edwards, Ph.D. – who spoke about Titans’ quarterback Vince Young, who is facing challenges that I hope he is able to fully overcome.

Some people still harbor a strong resentment for Edwards’ part in defiant American Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists to bring attention to the fact that the American civil rights movement had not gone far enough and to draw attention to the continuing poverty of black Americans and racism.

Sadly, blacks continue to be discriminated against and poverty in black communities throughout the country continues to trap many black Americans. These legacies of our racist past can be traced directly back to the slave-trading “Devil’s Triangle” that brought shame to a so-called Christian nation that from many – not all – pulpits preached an immoral sermon that sought to justify slavery.

Although a biracial man may be elected president, the malignancy of our racist past remains a cancer today that eats away at our nation’s soul.

In an interview that appears to have been conducted in 2004, due to the story’s copyright, on Sports Business Simulations by David Leonard, Edwards’ perspectives are prescient.

Here’s some of what Edwards told Leonard: “The talent pool in the black community has been so eroded that when you have a sport that is 80 percent black, like the NFL, or 88 percent, like the NBA, the fallout is going to show up. ... We are jailing, burying and disqualifying our potential point guards, wide-receivers, running backs, power forwards, centers, and so forth, at a very early age.”

Thus, Edwards concludes that the golden age of black athleticism has passed.

“I think over the next 30 years we are going to continue to see a decline of black athletic participation,” Edwards said. “I think we are also going to see, more importantly, a phenomenal split within the black community, as a consequence of that. The black middle class moving on to become doctors, lawyers and engineers.

“The black masses, in traditional black communities, not moving at all. Being left behind and increasingly in the 21st Century living an early 20th Century existence. That is going to be a particularly explosive situation.”

We ignore his perceptive insights at our nation's peril.