Shut up and play footballĮli Harold, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid kneel in protest. After a long chill from the 1980s through the 2000s, a number of factors, including Black Lives Matter and the protest movement authored by Colin Kaepernick, have brought that attitude roaring back. Now, just over 50 years after the meeting, which came to be known as the “Muhammad Ali summit”, it’s hard to ignore the parallels with the sudden resurgence of solidarity over social issues among black athletes. “I felt with Ali taking the position he was taking, and with him losing the crown, and with the government coming at him with everything they had, that we as a body of prominent athletes could get the truth and stand behind Ali and give him the necessary support,” Brown told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2012. Also invited, and pictured, was the Cleveland attorney Carl Stokes, who later that year would become mayor of the city – the first black man to be elected to that office any major US city. After the meeting, which included a number of prominent athletes – such as the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell, the UCLA center Lewis Alcindor (who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and the Washington running back Bobby Mitchell – a celebrated picture (at top) was snapped by journalists, as the stars put their weight behind Ali. The meeting was held at the offices of the Negro Industrial Economic Union, a black empowerment organization that Brown himself had founded and had branches in other major US black hubs. The meeting was there to support his position,” Beach said. “None of us had any idea of trying to change Ali’s mind. Beach, who had become close with Brown during their time together on the Browns, was invited to attend. In the midst of that uproar, the Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, who had just retired as the NFL’s leading rusher, decided to call Ali and other prominent, vocal black athletes to a meeting. Photograph: Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images Muhammad Ali, flanked by basketball players Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

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