Historica Wiki
Advertisement
Colin Kaepernick

Colin Rand Kaepernick (3 November 1987-) was an American football player and civil rights activist.

Biography[]

Colin Rand Kaepernick was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1987 to an African-American absentee father and a white mother, and he was adopted by a white couple which had lost two other sons to heart defects. He lived in Fond du Lac until age four, when his family moved to Turlock, Stanislaus County in central California. Kaepernick was baptized a Methodist, confirmed Lutheran, and went on to attend a Baptist church. Kaepernick attained a 4.0 GPA while playing football, basketball, and baseball, and he excelled at all three sports. He played college football for the University of Nevada before being drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2011. In August 2016, to protest police brutality against African-Americans, Kaepernick began to sit during the national anthem rather than stand up and "show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color." On 1 September 2016, he famously knelt during the national anthem to show more respect to the military while continuing his protest, causing a wave of backlash, mostly from conservative NFL viewers who accused him of disrespecting the American flag and the US military. His actions resulted in a wider protest movement, which intensified in September 2017 after Donald Trump said that NFL owners should fire players who protested the national anthem. He became a free agent after the season, but he went unsigned and, in November 2017, he filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing them of colluding to keep him out of the league. Kaepernick withdrew the grievance in February 2019 after a confidential settlement with the NFL,but his civil rights activism continued. On 5 June 2020, amid a wave of nationwide racial justice protests, the NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized for not listening to the concerns of African-American players and acknowledged, on behalf of the NFL, that African-Americans suffered from systematic racism and that "Black Lives Matter".

Advertisement