MR. BREWER: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live for another program in our “Race in America” series. I’m Jerry Brewer, a sports columnist here at The Post. Joining me today is a man who was just inducted into The–let’s not forget The–Iowa State University’s Athletics Hall of Fame. And he joins me to discuss his new book, “What Winners Won’t Tell You.” Super Bowl champion and former NFL star Malcolm Jenkins. Malcolm, welcome to Washington Post Live.
MR. JENKINS: Jerry, I appreciate you having me.
MR. BREWER: My pleasure. Well, let’s get right to it, man. Most players, if they’re going to write a memoir, they’re going to take some time after they’re done playing, reflect, and then write. You decided to start this memoir while you were still playing. Why?
MR. JENKINS: Well, I think, you know, I was one of those guys that always wanted to leave the game of my own accord. You know, I didn’t want to get kicked out of the game. I didn’t want to get too old or be injured. And so I really saw the light at the end of the tunnel and began to think about my own story. And athletes oftentimes have everyone else tell our stories for us, and I wanted to make sure that I told my own story. And that just–you know, the beginning of that was, okay, let’s reflect on these 13 years, what did you learn? And then that pushed me back into my college years. It pushed me back into those years where I was young and growing up in New Jersey, and you begin to see a lot of these connectivity points. And for me, I have two young daughters. And you know, God forbid something happens, there’s so much information and so much experience that I’ve had through my life through sports and athletics, that I want to pass on to them, to the next generation, to those who’ve seen my example. And so it was important for me to pen my own memoir and really contextualize, you know, what my life has been up until this point.
MR. BREWER: Malcolm, let’s talk about your upbringing in New Jersey and the culture shock you had when you went to Ohio State. I want to read something that was interesting to me early on in your book. “When I was six years old, I attended the Chad School, a private all-Black K-12 school in Newark, New Jersey, that prided itself on teaching its students Black history, culture and identity. Instead of pledging allegiance to America’s flag every morning, we’d sing James Weldon Johnson’s ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ We referred to classmates and teachers as brother and sister.” How did you go from that upbringing to finding community and identity in college?
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, I grew up with this, you know, idea of a tribe, you know, where everyone is brother and sister. I grew up in a neighborhood where your neighbors’, you know, parents might discipline you. Everyone’s connected. It was no–you know, no one’s on their own.
And you go to Ohio State, you know, and you get dropped into a very White Ohio, especially when you’re in the athletic department, you don’t get exposed to many things. And I talk about in my book how I was homesick and was struggling with my own identity and luckily found Black student life on campus that got me involved with Omega Psi Phi fraternity in the Divine Nine, but also getting into Black churches and finding kind of this home away from home. And what that did to my entire college experience, I had an experience at Ohio State that I think was far different than that of my teammates. And it’s because I was able to kind of shake myself off of the conveyor belt and get into these spaces throughout campus.
MR. BREWER: Malcolm, before we get into your activism, I want to talk about what inspired you to stand up and fight for others. I love the story about your grandmother Barbara encouraging you to get into a fight. Briefly tell us about that.
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, I was dealing with a–with a neighborhood bully. I’m sure they’re in every neighborhood. But you know, I had decided I would avoid the confrontation and just cut my losses and go back in the house, only to find the front door locked and my grandmother standing on the other side of the screen. And she essentially said you won’t come back in this house until you go fight that bully. And she told me–and she instructed me to go punch him in the face actually. And I proceeded to do that.
And I put that story in the book really just to showcase, you know, all of these moments in my life where I’ve had to show up as a fighter where I’m going against other entities or companies or people, players that are bigger than me. That fight comes from these moments in my life–and ironically from the women in my life–right?–that that have pushed me back out there and said, no, have pride in your community, have pride in yourself. And so when we talked about like my activism, the things I wanted to do in a community, that also came from those early points in my life where my father made us clean up not only the houses in front of my house, or the curb in front of my house, but two houses to the right, two houses to the left, and build this ideology around this is our neighborhood, this is our home so we’re responsible for the place that we call home.
And when you look at the things I’ve done through my foundation, or through the Players Coalition, I’ve always focused that work on the places that I’ve called home, whether that’s Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. We’ve spread work throughout all of that and it’s really off of those principles, that foundation that was laid by my mother and father.
MR. BREWER: All right, Malcolm. So, let’s go to 2016. You know, Colin Kaepernick decides to take a knee to protest police brutality. What he’s doing spreads throughout the league. It gets to you. At one point in your book you wrote, you are inspired by the momentum that had been created by his stance, but you say you hadn’t anticipated organizing would be so damn difficult. Tell me about your efforts to get players to support the movement.
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, for me, it became very apparent, you know, when you saw what Colin did those first few weeks when he took a knee, you know, it spread not only just across the country; it spread across the world. You had athletes and people internationally talking about this stance.
And so to me, I knew this was a moment that we can’t allow to pass and not get behind. And you expect that if you do some things during the national anthem, you take a knee, you raise a fist, whatever it is, you expect to get the blowback from the external–right?–from the opposition. That’s kind of expected. What I didn’t expect was that it would be hard, or as difficult as it was to kind of organize guys under the name of social justice. You know, we all showed up with the same intent, but we realized there are different methods, different ideologies, different strategies. And that part became very, very difficult to fight a very public battle between players who are trying to draw awareness to issues but also, you’re defending off the team owners, you’re defending (phonetic) off the media, you’re defending off the president of the United States at one point in time, and you’re trying to manage a bunch of alpha males that are living in different time zones, while still playing full-time professional sports.
So, it was definitely an undertaking, but the poise and work that we put in in those years, here we are seven years later, and it manifested into something that I don’t think we could even have dreamed of. We started with about, you know, 12–let’s say 12 players has now grown into over a dozen professional sports leagues, with athletes, coaches on all levels doing work across the country. And that’s something that’s never been done before, especially organizations that are player-led.
So, you know, that part, which was probably the most surprising part of that whole ordeal, was getting on the same page, trying to present a united front when it wasn’t always that case behind closed doors.
MR. BREWER: Malcolm, let’s talk about your form of demonstration. Undeniable, the Black fist to the air. I want to read once again, because I think this was–this was a bar to me.
“When you see a Black man raising his fist in protest, you don’t need to hear his words in order to know what it’s fighting against. It can’t be misconstrued, and it can’t be misunderstood.” Explain what that symbol means to you and where you first saw it.
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, I first saw it, you know, in that that image with Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the ’68 Olympics. It’s stained in my memory. I grew up seeing that image. It’s an image I have on my walls now. And so it’s one where I knew that’s what I automatically related it to, but it spans back long before ’68. This is just a normal or regular symbol for any resistance across the world. It’s it represents oppressed people. It represents the idea that, you know, these fingers are weak as individuals, but together we’re strong. All of that messaging is not new. And so when we looked at how the media was taking the knee and trying to misconstrue it into something new about the anti-military or anti-flag, I chose the fist because I wanted to forego those arguments about what it meant and what it stood for. We already know the history behind the fist.
MR. BREWER: Tell me about some of your experience and how it formed your views now on the criminal justice system. You talked about the ride along you had with a third-generation cop, I believe. And then you went with the ACLU to a Pennsylvania prison. What did you learn? And it feels like those things stay with you now, even as you retire.
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, I think the things I’ve learned the most are that the stories are most important. You know, like, we can argue about the semantics and the need for reforms back and forth, the statistics. They’re all there, and most of the time they get ignored. But I’ve learned more spending time with people who are closest to the issues, going to prisons, and talking to juvenile lifers who have been incarcerated for longer than I’ve been alive and hearing them talk about what they want to do in their communities. And then thinking about myself and how many times I’ve, you know, evolved as a person in 30 years–I’m 35 years old; I’ve been a different person at least four or five times. So, there’s a capacity for change and second chances that we–that we don’t consider when we look at crime and when we lock people away for a long time.
I talked about in my book, my childhood best friend deterring me from gang life and how close I was to being in a gang and people looking at me like I’m this gold standard. And I’m like, no, I was one choice away from being in the same boat. It’s part of the environment that we’re coming from. And so there’s a need for, you know, second chances. There’s the need for space, for evolution.
And I think that’s really the biggest issue that I have when it comes to our criminal justice system, is that we are on a path that is based around being punitive and not restorative. So as people go into the criminal justice system, they inevitably will come back into society. And the way that we’ve done it so far is that we’ve stripped them of their humanity, we’ve stripped them of their ability to educate themselves, we’ve stripped them from the ability to come back into society and get jobs, get food, get shelter, and then expect them somehow to pull themselves up from their bootstraps and be a model citizen. It’s a–it’s a rigged system. And when you see it as such, you know, you begin to see a lot of these cogs kind of constantly feed off the Black and brown bodies.
MR. BREWER: You’ve really articulated that balance that you tried to search for between an athlete and an activist. And you landed on this word “convener,” that that’s a very influential role that you have as a convener of people. Tell me about the work that you’ve done with the Players Coalition, how it was established.
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, so it really was established
by an idea that Anquan Boldin started. He’d been to D.C. and done some lobbying before, and he invited–you know, put a simple invitation out for guys to join him to take a trip to D.C. and talk to policymakers about what’s going on in the country. That trip to D.C. would be the first kind of seed that was planted that created the Players Coalition. But we also realized that our effort was kind of wasted on D.C., that the majority of the things we wanted to see happen were on the local politics level, so state and local. And that’s great, because athletes have great social cachet in their particular markets.
So that’s our model, right? It’s how do we activate athletes in the markets that they are most popular and get them to be conveners. We’re not activists. I don’t really even like to call myself an activist because there are activists that dedicate their entire lives to this work. What I find myself being able to do is take those voices and bring them directly to those who make the decisions. Because, you know, that’s what–that’s what football does, that’s what sports does, no matter where you are on the aisle, no matter where you are socially, economically, people love sports, and athletes have the ability to bridge those kind of conversations.
And we also bring a lot of spotlights on us. So there–when we talk about local politicians, we realized a lot of people didn’t understand the role of city council, the role of the mayor, or the role of the district attorney. So, we draw attention to those races when they’re–you know, when they’re up and they’re important. We do a lot of public education. That’s really good, a really good role for athletes because we have such influence and such social cachet.
And so through the coalition, we’re able to activate players in any level of engagement that they want to be. We’ve done everything from going straight to legislators and lobbying, like any other 501(c)(4), or you can just, you know, tweet something, you can write op-eds, you can meet with leaders, you can have community forums. All of these things we’ve done and set up all across the country. And again, our focus is mainly on local and state politics.
MR. BREWER: What is the Players Coalition doing today?
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, right now, I think, you know, we started as, you know, a group of us activating. But as we get older, we move out of the league, and there are new names, we realize our main focus or our main purpose is to be that vehicle. And so we are a support vehicle for athletes that want political engagement. So, we support 12 different sports leagues. That’s with expertise. It’s with manpower to, you know, create events, whether it be in a major city or in an athlete’s local market. We serve as athletes from all types of sports, from professionals all the way down to collegiate. And we advise on organizations that are athlete driven. And we cut grants. That’s the biggest thing we do. We’ll take money that we get from donors and put those right in the hands of those organizations that we know are most effective.
MR. BREWER: Malcolm, you wrote a lot about the lack of communication between Colin Kaepernick and the Players Coalition, and specifically when he filed a lawsuit, the coalition didn’t know about it. And then there was the meeting and the big hubbub about whether he knew to attend or not. How did that affect the work you were doing, and how did that strain the relationship with Colin?
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, I don’t think it affected the work we were doing. That was really–that wasn’t contingent on anything. We had started the work long before, you know, we even started, you know, negotiating with the league or even joining with Kaepernick.
But it did, you know, create some difficulties with–I understood that we both needed each other. At least that was my feeling. I understood his stance is what started all of this, right? It was the spark that literally started this fire.
But to keep it a fire with him no longer in the league, with him no longer having the platform that he had, somebody needed to move that along and somebody needed to do that. And it wasn’t just me; it was a collective of us. And so, you know, the hardest part of balancing that is how do you–how do you present a collective front, knowing that all of these eyes on us, there’s the opposition that wants to see us fracture, want to see us bicker and argue. There are other athletes that are waiting to see if we’ll have success to see if they’ll join or not. There was obviously the people that we’re supporting that are counting on us to hold the–kind of hold up the mantle.
And all those things, you know, are difficult when there’s–when there’s bickering and there’s fighting. But I don’t–I don’t think it’s uncommon, right? There are different ideologies of how to get this done. But I don’t think anybody questioned the devotion or work of anybody involved. I think there was just a difference in philosophy. And it got to a point where, you know, both parties just kind of decided to part ways.
MR. BREWER: What was the fundamental disagreement, and do you have a relationship with Colin Kaepernick at all now?
MR. JENKINS: No, I don’t have a relationship at all. I don’t have a gripe either. So, it’s one of those things where, you know, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I needed to squash it. And I’m like, whoa, I’ve never said a bad thing about Colin. I’m always praising what he did. I think it was extremely brave. I think he sacrificed more than anybody. I think, you know, what we were able to accomplish does not happen without him.
But I also understand the importance of roles. And I understand the work that I’ve done was super important. The work that we’ve done as a collective is super important. And you know, I think I leave it there. You know, there’s an opportunity for everybody to do something. Like I said, I don’t think that what we did is gets accomplished without him and vice versa. I don’t think that the movement goes as far if it’s only on his back.
And I think once we got to the point where if the narrative became more about athletes’ right to protest and whether Colin should have a job or not, that was–that became more of a conversation when the original point that all of us got involved with this for was about police brutality. It was about the social and racial inequities that we see across the country. It was the lack of education. It’s the mass incarceration. These are the things that were supposed to be at top of mind. But by the time we got in the midst of it, it had changed to whether players have the right to protest, whether the president is putting too much pressure on the NFL, or if Colin Kaepernick should have a job.
And you know, and for me, that’s when you saw me raise the cards, because I realized that playing this game in the media and answering all of these arguments are just distractions. People aren’t listening. It’s only about our communities that are on fire. It’s only about the people. It’s not about us as athletes that need to be defended because we’re getting backlash. We knew we were going to get backlash. We need everyone to stay focused on these issues, because the issues haven’t gone away. We still see police brutality. We still see the wealth gap growing with every year. We still see these inequities perpetuating. And we’re arguing over if someone should have a job or not. And I think that’s really where you start to see that fracture, because I’ve always tried to stay focused on the main thing, and the main thing is the people.
MR. BREWER: Is there anything, Malcolm, that you regret going back to those times? And I’m not necessarily talking about between you and Colin or you and Eric Reid, or whoever. It could be the messaging that led to people thinking about it in such binary terms. Is there anything looking back where you say, if I could have changed this, it could have just enriched people’s understanding of what we were trying to do?
MR. JENKINS: I’ve done that a lot and gone back and forth and tried to dissect everything, every move and decision I made. But realistically, we’re imperfect people. I didn’t do everything right that I was supposed to do. But all things considered, I think we all did a pretty damn good job considering, right? None of us have a huge background or understanding in politics or economics, yet we took the time to educate ourselves. We took the time to meet more than–we’re talking about meeting multiple times a week during the NFL season where guys on the West Coast and the East Coast, we’ve organized something that’s never been done before. And so, no, I don’t–I don’t have any really big regrets.
The one thing I would say I cringe when I look back on it is just that I gave the media the ability to pin myself and Eric Reid against each other. When we had our words before the game, that inability just to control my impulse in that moment gave the media the image that I was trying so hard not to give them, and that’s two Black men who want to fight for their community arguing against each other. But you know, that’s not a new–it’s not a new thing. We’ve seen that in history as well. And so I was kind of disappointed in myself for falling for that same trick. But in hindsight, looking at the entire big picture, I think we did the best of what we had.
MR. BREWER: The deal with the NFL, I mean, $89 million for seven years is what the owners committed to social justice initiatives to essentially stop the heaviest wave of protesting. How do you feel about that negotiation now? Do you think that it was enough to stop some of the–I guess you might consider it the more radical aspects of the movement?
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, well, I think there’s a misconception about the deal and its contingency on the movement. The deal didn’t require anybody to stop protesting, which was one of the things we insisted on. I stopped because I thought that the protests at that point in time had started to get misconstrued and were actually working against us as the heat died down from what the protests were doing. And again, the whole purpose was for the people.
I realized, and we realized quickly, that the NFL, while they have their issues, are not–they’re not the ones who cause racism in America, nor are they the solution. They can–they have their work to do, whether it be hiring, you know, Black coaches, Black ownership. Of course, they have those things, and we’ll work through that. But the main purpose for them, at least for us, was to secure the funds that we need to do the work that we want to do.
So, we’re able to secure those brands, give them out to organizations, but then create our own player-ran organization in which we controlled the money so that we can activate the way that we wanted to, we can push the money out to the organizations that we decide. That to me was the most important part that we needed. That’s what was missing. Because quite frankly, players weren’t putting up a lot of their own money. So, we–if we want to create the change that we want to see, that takes funds and that takes organization, that takes us seeding resources to those organizations that do the work on a local level. And I think that that’s our role as athletes. Really, I think that’s where we’re most effective.
MR. BREWER: As it relates right now, Malcolm, how do you feel about the NFL’s level of sincerity, and maybe more than that just their resilience in sticking with this issue? Has the NFL stayed true to its words on some of the things that you all talked about?
MR. JENKINS: Well, I think the NFL is a corporation. They’re going to move on their own pace, and they’re going to do things that are good for business. I think when you look at their stance in 2016 and you compare it to what we’re seeing today, it’s night and day. You can’t deny the growth and the symbolisms and messaging that are–you know, we were getting shunned for in 2016 and 2017 and now they’re painted all on the end zones. You get commercials. You got, you know, a lot of branding and messaging around it.
But the climate socially has changed as well. So, I think there’s been the resources, there’s been the messaging that’s changed. Roger Goodell coming out and acknowledging Black Lives Matter and saying that they made a mistake with Colin Kaepernick, all of those things I think have taken the heat off of them a little bit. There are more Black coaches than we’ve ever seen this year. But they are no way, you know, the gold standard for equality or equity. I think they, like anyone else, are kind of getting it together.
But I also think that we have to stop looking at organizations like the NFL, as powerful as they are, as the target of what we should be trying to change. It’s society really that we’re trying to get at. That’s where we’re trying to change the minds of. And I think we have to be clear that the NFL can be used as a vehicle to change the mind of the masses, to educate the masses. And with that in mind, that purpose in mind, I think the league has definitely at least moved and shifted in the right direction. Regardless if it’s genuine or not, it is–it is definitely a shift in narrative.
MR. BREWER: One last question before we go, Malcolm. You mentioned coaches and all the different things in terms of Black leadership that the NFL is grappling with. They’re still–the head coaching jobs are still so few and far between. And I want to ask you, number one, are you interested in coaching at some point in your career? And then how do you think that the NFL is dealing with all that encompasses more diversity in coaching?
MR. JENKINS: Yeah, I think, you know, there’s a bigger kind of narrative to it. At least that’s–it’s where I’m coming from. I would love to coach, not right now at this moment in my life having just retired, but I do have a wealth of knowledge that I know can be expressed through coaching.
But one of the things that I think is the issue is that a lot of the times we don’t talk about the brilliance of the Black mind in sports. And so we only talk about the quarterbacks or specifically the White quarterbacks and White coordinators about how brilliant they are and how cerebral they are. And we don’t really respect the minds of a lot of these Black coaches, these Black play callers.
And it’s also a barrier. So, it creates a narrative where if you’re a former player, and you’re Black, you’ll get an opportunity. But rarely do you see Black coaches from the college ranks get pulled up and get those, go right into a head coaching job or right into a coordinator job, right? Somebody who’s not a former player, where you only have to respect their minds and their ability to break down the game and teach the game from a cerebral standpoint, that entryway is so hard to break down. And I think that’s because there’s this ideology, or at least this narrative where we don’t talk enough about the brilliance of the Black mind in football.
MR. BREWER: Unfortunately, we’re out of time, Malcolm, but thank you for sharing a little bit about “What Winners Won’t Tell You.” I respect your mind, and I look forward to covering you one day when you’re coaching. I don’t know if it’s going be in college or in the pros, but I could see it going either way. But thank you very much for joining.
MR. JENKINS: No problem. Thanks for having me.
MR. BREWER: And thanks to all of you for watching. To find out what shows we have coming up, please visit WashingtonPostLive.com. I’m Jerry Brewer and thank you for joining Washington Post Live.
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