Bluefield College president suspends men’s basketball team for kneeling during national anthem in response to Capitol insurrection

Basketball players at Bluefield College knelt for the national anthem during three games in January 2021 to protest racial injustice and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.  After the players’ actions attracted attention from local media, the school’s president ordered the them to halt their protest. The team disregarded this order and continued to kneel before games. In response, the college issued a one-game suspension to the players, forcing the team to forfeit a matchup and prompting backlash from students, alumni, and advocacy groups.

Key Players

Bluefield College is a private Baptist school in southwestern Virginia. The Bluefield College men’s basketball team competes in the Appalachian Athletic Conference of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. 

David Olive is president of Bluefield College. 

Further Details

Members of the team knelt for the national anthem during games on Jan. 23, Jan. 26, and Jan. 30, 2021. Forward Stanley Christian told WVVA he had been considering forms of peaceful protest since the previous season, but the Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 6 spurred him and his teammates to act. One video shows the team kneeling with their heads bowed while wearing black t-shirts that say “UNITY” on the back. 

The demonstration was featured on a local news broadcast on Jan. 30, 2021, according to The Washington Post. In response, online critics urged college administrators to punish team members and “take away their scholarships” or “don’t let them play,” according to Inside Higher Ed.

According to a statement released Feb. 11, 2021, Olive, the president, told coach Richard Morgan two days after the broadcast that “kneeling during the anthem would not be allowed going forward.” Olive also asked the school’s vice president for intercollegiate athletics, Tonia Walker, to transmit the same message to all other head coaches so “similar incidents would not occur with other teams.”

Olive explained that he decided to prohibit players from kneeling because he thought it was politically divisive and would be viewed negatively by the college’s “alumni, friends and donors.”

“As I conveyed this to VP Walker and Coach Morgan, I denoted that anytime a student athlete puts on a jersey that says ‘Bluefield College’ on it, the message is no longer just the student athlete’s message but that it becomes the message of Bluefield College,” Olive wrote. “Pointing to the already fractured and divided nature of our country, I did not want Bluefield College contributing to the further divide; rather, I wanted the College to bring people together in a united effort to address issues of racial injustice.”

The team took a knee at an away game against Truett McConnell University on Feb. 2, 2021, despite the edict. During a matchup two days later, Morgan kept the team in the locker room for the anthem. Olive spoke with players at a meeting on Feb. 5, arguing that their choice to kneel was diluting their message because it “immediately shuts down” people from listening. He suggested instead that a player read a statement about racial injustice over the intercom before each home game or that athletes take a knee during their introductions or at tipoff. Christian told ESPN that speaking with Olive was like “talking to a wall.”

“He wasn’t really hearing us out at all,” Christian said. “He showed us he didn’t care in the meeting, so we were going to stand up for what we believed in.”

Players knelt again before a home game against Tennessee Wesleyan University on Feb. 9, prompting Olive to issue a one-game suspension to each player on the team. The suspension forced the team to forfeit its next game against Reinhardt University on Feb. 11, according to the official Bluefield athletics Twitter account. 

After the suspensions were announced, athletes from the men’s and women’s basketball team, football team, and women’s soccer team joined a video call to discuss their options and vent frustrations over the sense that their First Amendment rights had been violated, according to ESPN. 

In response, Olive defended the school’s decision to punish the players. “We are a private entity, not a governmental entity,” Olive wrote. “We have policies and guidelines throughout the student handbook and the academic catalog that limit certain rights you otherwise might have elsewhere, such as in your home or in a public venue.” 

Christian told ESPN he was frustrated by Olive’s stance, arguing that the players’ affiliation with the college should not limit their ability to speak out against racism.

“Dr. Olive told us our rights are limited when we put Bluefield across our chests,” Christian said. “Well, that jersey is basically shackles to us. Now we feel like we’re chained up now, and that’s not right. And when that jersey comes off us, we’re still Black in America, and I have to face that reality.”

Outcome 

Students, alumni, advocacy organizations decry players’ suspension

Jewels Gray, a Bluefield College football player, staged a walkout during practice on Feb. 10 to show solidarity with the basketball team. A group of students, including several student-athletes, knelt during the national anthem before a Bluefield football game on Feb. 13, according to WOAY. 

Megan Westra, a 2010 graduate of the college, wrote an open letter to Olive and other administrators requesting an immediate public apology for the basketball team’s “wrongful suspension,” a public statement expressing support for student-athletes who exercise their right to protest peacefully, a formal policy protecting the rights of students to protest peacefully, and an opportunity for members of the team to issue their own public statement. On Feb. 17, a group of students, alumni, faculty, and staff gathered on campus to read the open letter and share individual statements, according to WVVA. As of May 8, 2021, 217 people had signed on to the statement.

The Virginia NAACP released a statement Feb. 11, 2021, saying it was “extremely concerned” about Bluefield College’s decision to punish the athletes for their peaceful protest, which the organization called “an attempt to silence their valid concerns.” PEN America issued a statement on Feb. 12, calling the decision to suspend the players a “wrongheaded response to an act of peaceful protest” and imploring Bluefield to reverse the “decision, apologize to the students, and affirm the school’s commitment to upholding students’ right to free expression.”

“Students do not forfeit their rights to freedom of expression when they don school jerseys,” said Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s director of free expression and education. “Against a backdrop of attacks on protest rights across the country, and coming in the wake of national events that have spotlighted how unevenly free speech rights can be upheld when it comes to protests over racial injustice, this punitive response looks even more disturbing.”

Players choose to stay in locker room to avoid forfeiting future games

Christian told ESPN the team decided to stay in the locker room while the national anthem played before games for the rest of the season, rather than risk the potential penalty of forfeiting additional games.

“It’s bigger than us, and we don’t want to have the season taken away from us,” Christian said. “We feel like we’re in a great position to bring this school a title. So we’ll stay in the locker room during the national anthem. They don’t want any more backlash, and we would definitely take a knee during the anthem.”

 Team receives award for courage in sports

On March 8, 2021, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association (USBWA) awarded the Bluefield men’s basketball team its Perry Wallace Most Courageous Award “for speaking its truth to power.” USBWA president Seth Davis told WVVA that courage doesn’t mean being unafraid — “it means being afraid and going ahead and doing the right thing anyway.” According to Davis, “that is what the basketball team at Bluefield College did.”

“They did the right thing as they saw it,” Davis said. “In the case of these players, there’s no doubt that their decision to exercise their right to express how they felt had a consequence, had a blowback, and they did it without really knowing how far it would go, how far the blowback would be. … That to me is what defines courage.”