The NAACP called for Black collegiate athletes to boycott playing for the flagship public institutions in eight southern states this week, giving a boost of legitimacy to a problematic idea that had been circulating on social media for weeks. The proposed boycott is the civil rights organization’s response to Republican-controlled state legislatures in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia redrawing or threatening to redraw congressional maps to eliminate some or all of their majority-Black voting districts.
Those states, whose economies have long benefited from the toil of Black athletes at the public institutions funded by those legislatures, began rushing to change those maps after the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The NAACP will not watch the same institutions that depend on Black athletic prowess to fill their stadiums remain silent while their states strip Black communities of their voice.
NAACP PRESIDENT AND CEO DERRICK JACKSON
“The NAACP will not watch the same institutions that depend on Black athletic prowess to fill their stadiums and their bank accounts remain silent while their states strip Black communities of their voice,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in the statement announcing the initiative it’s calling “Out of Bounds.”
Boycotts have always sought to break the machinery of oppression by choking off the funding that lubricates it, and the money these states make on sports dominated by Black athletes is hefty. Louisiana State University, which produced athletes including WNBA star Angel Reese, Olympian Sha’Carri Richardson and NFL wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase, released a study that claimed its sports programs generated nearly a half-billion dollars in economic impact and supported 6,000 jobs in the 2021-2022 academic year alone.
But while the NAACP’s desire to make those states pay is understandable, the organization’s boycott proposal is asking too much of Black college athletes and not enough of the rest of society: Black, white and otherwise.
Sure, athletes would be morally justified in boycotting the institutions in question, and because Black athletes make up the majority of rosters on almost every major college football and basketball program, starving states such as Alabama or Louisiana of the players who make those universities money would make an emphatic point at a moment of dire political importance for Black people in the South. But in addition to wrongly expecting teenagers to take the lead in counteracting the assaults on voting rights, the NAACP’s proposal doesn’t appear to consider that asking Black college athletes to boycott these schools would leave them without an infrastructure to support themselves.
On3, a digital media company that tracks name-image-likeness deals, currently has five Black players at schools covered by the NAACP’s proposed boycott among its top 12 player NIL valuations, with the total of their NIL values estimated at $13.5 million between the five of them. In the SWAC, a Black college athletic conference with schools in the states the NAACP wants Black athletes to boycott, each school spent less than $13.5 million altogether on its athletic programs in 2024, according to a USA Today database on college athletic finances. The only one that came close was Southern University, located in Louisiana, at $13.1 million.
After the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in O’Bannon vs. NCAA, which paved the way for college athletes to eventually be paid for their labor, I argued in essays and interviews that historically Black colleges and universities would be most affected by the change. I thought those institutions, which were unable to compete for the best talent under a system in which scholarship money and sparkling facilities paid for by boosters were the only currency, might find their legs if they could dangle compensation.
I was wrong. The NIL system, along with the NCAA’s transfer portal allows large, mostly white, institutions to use their wealth to attract talent with up to seven-figure deals to either stay put at the schools they originally committed to or bounce to a school offering more cash. College athletes can now earn enough to set themselves up, if not for life, then at least for a long time.
This is what the NAACP would be asking Black athletes to give up. The head football coach at Prairie View A&M University, a Texas HBCU, told ESPN’s Andscape in 2024 that the school had already lost several of its best players to bigger universities with NIL money to offer. Prairie View is one of two Texas HBCUs that the NAACP recommends to Black athletes play for in lieu of accepting scholarship offers from the University of Texas at Austin or Texas A&M University.
Put short, the boycott idea has an infrastructure problem.
Black college NIL is murky, in part because the schools just aren’t major players in the space. On the other hand, six out of On3’s top 15 NIL collectives, the organizations set up by schools and boosters to facilitate endorsement deals for students, are schools the NAACP wants athletes to boycott.
Put short, the boycott idea that the NAACP has signed onto has an infrastructure problem. It is well-intentioned and morally sound, but it asks Black athletes, those who are teenagers or in their early 20s, to sacrifice their livelihood to attend institutions that can’t offer them anywhere near as much.
Athletes who do want to boycott these schools ought to be supported, but there needs to be a bigger, more comprehensive plan in place before we ask teenagers to pay such a heavy price on our behalf.
Keith Reed
Keith Reed is an award-winning journalist and a past senior editor at ESPN. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Root, Vibe, Essence and elsewhere.