"A man stood up in the stands. And he threatened to hang me and my dad.

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This is why Bruce Maxwell knelt during the national anthem


Jeff Passan
MLB columnist
Yahoo SportsSep 25, 2017, 10:23 AM


The 2000 Census counted 14,128 people living in Cullman, Alabama, a city in the northern part of the state, halfway between Huntsville and Birmingham. Forty-eight of those residents were black. Baseball took Bruce Maxwell an hour down the road to Cullman that year for a tournament. He was just shy of 10 years old, mature enough to understand that almost nobody there looked like him, innocent enough to believe it didn’t matter. His father was African-American. His mother was white. He couldn’t control who he was.

“We won the tournament,” Maxwell said, “and a man stood up in the stands. And he threatened to hang me and my dad.”

He is far from the only black man in America with a story like this, a moment when race is imprinted on his consciousness against his will. It is a rite of passage into a life of indiscriminate threats against his body, his being. It forever bends his worldview. The moment, however, does not resign him to see the world from that perspective solely. Maxwell – now 26 years old, grown, thoughtful, giving, conflicted – sees it like a military man, which his father was, and like an athlete, which he is, and like an American, which matters to him as much as any of those other prisms, because it combines the best and worst of them to offer a reality that is his alone.

And so should anyone try to pigeonhole Bruce Maxwell as he embarks on this new life, after he knelt during the national anthem Saturday before a game with his Oakland A’s, baseball cap in hand, hand over heart, eyes fixed on the flying flag, careful to show respect, dignified, the first active Major League Baseball player to engage in a show of public dissent, let it be said: He is not any one thing. He is many things that make one. He is a black, baseball-playing, son-of-a-soldier American.



https://sports.yahoo.com/bruce-maxwell-knelt-national-anthem-172301672.html

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