Last season, San Francisco 49er Eric Reid joined Colin Kaepernick to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem. At the close of the season, Reid announced that he would stand to honor the anthem and would continue to do so throughout the 2017 season. This week, Reid confirmed that he will stick with his decision to stand and that the recent unrest in Charlottesville would not change his mind.
After the tumultuous weekend when opposing protesters clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia, some NFL players insisted that the unrest was reason enough to continue their national anthem protests into the 2017 NFL season.
The day after the terrible events in Virginia, Reid was asked if he might change his mind and once again take up his protest.
“It doesn’t change my plans,” Reid told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s important to discuss the issues that we have in our country. I think it’s becoming more and more apparent. Maybe people didn’t see what the black community saw when me and Colin were doing our protests, and other players were doing [their] protests last year. I think it’s more apparent now after this past weekend.
“It’s becoming more apparent for people to see the issues that we’re talking about, especially in the way that it happened in Charlottesville. We’re just hoping that if we keep talking about it . . . because a lot of people just want things to blow over. ‘Oh, that’s an isolated incident. It happens every day.’ And if we can keep talking about it, hopefully, we can make this change. And it needs to stop being hopefully. It needs to happen. It needs to happen now.”
Meanwhile, the Seattle Seahawks Michael Bennett and the Raiders Marshawn Lynch have both launched protests. In addition, Bleacher Report’s NFL columnist, Mike Freeman, says at least three other players intend to join the protest this season.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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