Collegiate Sports

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Ole Miss Players Kneel in Response to Pro-Confederate Rally
Six Mississippi basketball players — eventually eight — took a knee during the national anthem on Saturday in Oxford, Miss.

Feb. 23, 2019

OXFORD, Miss. — Eight University of Mississippi men’s basketball players knelt during the national anthem before their game against Georgia on Saturday, responding to a pro-Confederate rally taking place on campus.

Minutes before tipoff, the teams formed lines for the anthem. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, six players from the Rebels took a knee and bowed. Toward the end of the anthem, two teammates joined them.

With the gesture, the Mississippi players joined an array of athletes who have protested racial injustice by taking a knee during the anthem, following an example set in 2016 by Colin Kaepernick, a former N.F.L. quarterback.

The pro-Confederate demonstration was led by out-of-state protesters a few hundred feet from the arena.

In the aftermath of violence at a similar rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, the Oxford community has been on alert. Various student groups held counterprotests on the Ole Miss campus on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, another began on the city square and ended at the Confederate monument in the heart of campus.

Here are Kermit and Breein Tyree talking about today's #OleMiss and #Oxford marches pic.twitter.com/5ErOAnGrFT

— Nick Suss (@nicksuss) February 23, 2019
Kermit Davis, 59, the Ole Miss coach, has publicly expressed his displeasure with protests staged during the national anthem, and he said after the game that he did not know of his players’ intention to kneel.

In his introductory news conference after his hiring last year, he told reporters: “We’re going to be a team that respects the flag and the national anthem. All of those things from culture is what we’re about. It’s who we’re going to be.”

The statement was unusual not only because the team did not have any recent history of protests during the anthem, but also because nobody had even asked the coach about the issue. On Saturday, he addressed his team’s protest in a different way.

“This was all about the hate groups that came to our community and tried to spread racism and bigotry in our community,” Davis said. “This created a lot of tension for our campus. I think our players made an emotional decision to show these people they’re not welcome on our campus. And we respect our players’ freedom and ability to choose that.”

Guard Breein Tyree said the protest had been largely spontaneous. “The majority of it,” he said, “was we saw one of our teammates doing it, and we just didn’t want him to be alone.”

In the game, Tyree scored 17 points to lead Ole Miss (19-8, 9-5 Southeastern Conference) to a 72-71 victory. Tyree Crump missed a 3-pointer at the buzzer for Georgia (10-17, 1-13).

The N.C.A.A. and the SEC do not stage championship events in Mississippi because the state flag has the Confederate stars and bars in one corner. South Carolina was under a similar ban until the 2015 removal of the Confederate flag that had flown in front of the State Capitol. At that time, the University of Mississippi’s acting chancellor publicly urged the state to change its flag.

Marc Tracy contributed reporting from New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/sports/ole-miss-anthem-protest-kneel.html