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Dr. Harry Edwards on the NAACP’s Call to Boycott Gerrymandering States

The 83-year-old sociologist and activists reflects on what is missing in the current effort to organize athletes politically.

Dr. Harry Edwards is inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame in San Francisco on May 15, 2025.

After the Supreme Court gutted the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, states such as Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana immediately moved to redraw and eliminate majority-Black districts, muting their political voices. What those states have in common—aside from revanchist politicians pining for a return to Jim Crow—is a social, political, and economic addiction to college football, an institution dominated by Black athletes. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, these are states that deify Black talent, love Black entertainment, and depend upon Black labor, but demean and politically silence Black people.

In response, the NAACP dropped a political bomb last week, calling upon Black high school athletes to boycott universities in states that are gutting the voting rights of Black residents. Their call immediately sparked a series of debates: Can threatening the South’s obsession with college football produce positive political change? Will teenagers and their families being offered NIL (name, image, likeness) money accede to this? Is it even fair to ask 16-year-old Black kids to sacrifice these kinds of opportunities? Why should they have to deal with the failures of older generations, to protect what so many sacrificed to achieve? And shouldn’t this call extend to white athletes as well, in the name of solidarity, if nothing else?

The NAACP’s new campaign has launched a thousand opinions—but there is one we should care about hearing above all others: that of Dr. Harry Edwards. Now 83 years old, the sociologist and activist has spent his career organizing Black athletes to see themselves as a community that can exercise power, make demands, and speak their minds. Dr. Edwards is perhaps best known as the lead organizer of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which led the attempted boycott by Black athletes and their supporters of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. For the past three decades, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he played an essential role in establishing sports sociology as an academic discipline. His studies of sports through the prism of race changed how all culture—music, film, dance—has been interrogated. Unlike so many offering opinions on the NAACP’s boycott proposal, he is someone who has not only been in the trenches—he dug the trenches.

When I reached out to Edwards about the NAACP decision, he replied with a long and thoughtful answer. Here is what he said.

The NAACP needs some historical insight regarding their proposed Black athlete boycott and to consider their own potential contradictions as well as counterproductive outcomes. I want to make it clear from the outset that I am not averse to their proposal. I’m just pulling their coattails on the complexities of their proposed effort—not to speak of the fact that the athletes haven’t been heard from yet. There is better than just a possible chance that, as things now stand, many Black athletes will ignore or be outright opposed to the NAACP regarding a Black athlete boycott strategy, especially under........

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