Colin Kaepernick Became the Face of Sports Protest. What Happened to the Others?

Kneeling has always been seen as a sign of honor, respect, and humility. Back in the 1980s, football players and coaches began kneeling when athletes were injured on the field, as a sign of reverence and concern. But on Sept. 1, 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took the knee alongside teammate Eric Reid during the national anthem, it was not seen as a gesture of respect. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” Kaepernick had told the NFL Network that August. 

Though the backlash was swift, and Kaepernick was forced out of his NFL contact that February, over the past decade, he has become the face of athlete protest around the world. He’s been sponsored by Nike, and launched a social justice organization, Know Your Rights Camp, which teaches citizens how to legally protect themselves against law enforcement. The organization, which launched a free private autopsy initiative in 2022, paid for the independent autopsy of Mississippi teen Nolan Wells. On Sept. 15, Kaepernick will release his first book, The Perilous Fight, a memoir whose name derives from the first stanza in the “Star Spangled Banner.”. 

But despite Kaepernick’s success as an activist, many have forgotten the dozens of athletes who stood with him in solidarity, some even predating his kneel. In July 2016, the first professional team to protest in support of Black lives was the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, led by co-captain Maya Moore. “Black women were leading as whole teams, which hadn’t been seen before,” says Dr. Drew Brown, a sociology and African American studies professor at the University of Florida. “The reason it didn’t get much notoriety is because of misogynoir and the fact that, at the time, women weren’t million-dollar athletes, although they were still risking their salaries and being punished. Professional male athletes were risking millions, which made it more of a spectacle.”

For some professional male athletes — including Miami Dolphins receiver Kenny Stills and Oakland A’s catcher Bruce Maxwell — the end of their careers forced them to forge their own path, with little to no sponsorship to follow. Though there was a brief corporate acceptance of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 — the MLB was forced to acknowledge its segregated past, the NFL committed $250 million to an initiative to end racism within sports, the NBA paused playoff games after the police shooting of Kenosha, Wisconsin native Jacob Blake, who was left paralyzed — the earlier backlash had a chilling effect on the future of activism in sports. 

“It seems like there have been less athletes using their voice,” says Stills, who left the NFL in 2021 due to limited playing time and injuries. Meanwhile, Stills noticed international players becoming more vocal. “I was excited to see Lamine Yamal from Barcelona wave the Palestinian flag in their parade. He’s one of the biggest stars at the moment and that’s inspiring for the next generation. But a lot of guys are afraid because they understand the consequences, whether it be something like Colin, or my situation, slowly being eased out.” 

Ten years later, as the NFL remains the most watched sport in the country, the culture reveres Kaepernick as the lightning rod for sports activism. Yet, like most movements, the cultural reduction to one figurehead has erased the nuance and stories of its other contributors. The stories of athletes like Moore, Stills, and Maxwell, leaders within the movement for their respective teams and leagues, are often forgotten or overlooked. “People remember the NBA work stoppage. People remember Kaepernick,” says Dr. Harry Edwards, an organizer of the 1968 Olympics protest and consultant to the 49ers in 2016 (who Kaepernick critiques in Perilous Fight). “Every now and then, somebody asks me where the next Dr. King is coming from but I’m not looking for that. I’m looking for the next Claudette Colvin,” he says, referring to the too often overlooked civil rights pioneer who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, months before Rosa Parks. “People follow Dr. King’s pattern, because it is the pattern in American society. Sports recapitulates society.”  

For the 10th anniversary of Kaepernick’s protest, Rolling Stone spoke to Moore, Maxwell, and Stills, all in different leagues — all with different experiences — who protested the summer of 2016 and onward.

Maya Moore

The week of July 4, 2016 had began in bloodshed. In the early hours of Tuesday, July 5, a man named Alton Sterling had been killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. On Wednesday, as the Lynx traveled to New England, Philando Castile was pulled over by cops, part of a routine traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, 20 minutes away from the Lynx’s arena. He, too, had been fatally shot.

“Because the WNBA is made up of majority Black women, it wasn’t a shock to us,” says Moore. “But as a community in Minneapolis, when Philando Castile happened in our backyard, that triggered our collective past as Black folks, or just humanity. You don’t have to be Black to feel the devastation of violence.” Moore remembers head coach Cheryl Reeve approaching the team. “She said, ‘I know y’all are probably hurting, and if you want to do something, do it,” Moore recalls. That evening, as the Lynx and the Connecticut Sun went into overtime, five Dallas police officers, patrolling a Black Lives Matter protest in the city, were gunned down by a sniper. 

That Saturday, before playing the Dallas Wings, Lynx leadership came up with a plan. During warm-ups, Moore and her fellow co-captains led the team in a peaceful protest, wearing black t-shirts, which read “Change Starts With Us — Justice & Accountability.” On the back were the names of Sterling and Castile above the Dallas police shield, with Black Lives Matter printed on the bottom. “If we take this time to see that this is a human issue…we can greatly decrease fear and create change,” Moore said during the pre-game press conference. “Tonight we will be wearing shirts to honor and mourn the losses of precious American citizens and to plead for change in all of us.” 

Activism was nothing new for Moore. In 1998, when Moore was nine, 18 year-old Jonathan Irons was sentenced to 50 years for a burglary and assault that he didn’t commit. (His conviction was overturned in 2020.) Two years into his sentence, Irons began taking music classes with Moore’s great uncle. “My great uncle has a passion for music, with a big heart for prison ministry. He did a choir program for the men,” says Moore. “He saw something in [Jonathan] and challenged him to be a leader.”

When talking with her family, Irons often came up. “My godparents visited Jonathan every weekend for 15 years,” says Moore. By proximity, Irons and her “became family.” The summer of 2007, before Moore left for University of Connecticut, she accompanied her godparents to visit Irons for the first time. “My life wasn’t the same [after that],” she says. “We just developed a friendship.” 

Inspired by Irons, Moore became an activist. She studied the legal system and his case. In 2012, Moore’s rookie year in the WNBA, 17-year old Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. In 2014, 18-year old Michael Brown was killed in Missouri, a couple of hours east from where she and Irons grew up. By Sterling and Castile’s murders, Moore had enough. 

“As women basketball players, we innately have an activism strand in our DNA, because of how hard we’ve worked to have a place in this industry,” says Moore. In 2014, Ariyana Smith, a Black player for the Knox College women’s basketball team, became the first athlete to protest during a game on behalf of Black Lives Matter. Her team was playing a school from Clayton, Missouri, 20 minutes away from where officer Darren Wilson had just been acquitted for the killing of Michael Brown. Smith knelt during the national anthem; on the last verse, she collapsed to the ground, laying there for four and a half minutes, an allusion to Brown’s corpse being exposed to the public for four hours. (She was suspended indefinitely from her team, and was reinstated after the story gained media attention. However, she did not return.)

In 2019, at the peak of her career, Moore left the WNBA by her own accord, opting to focus her efforts on advocacy and freeing Irons. In September 2020, Irons was freed, and the two married. They now focus on criminal justice reform advocacy full-time and have recently published a book Love and Justice: A Story of Triumph on Two Different Courts. “This is what my life’s journey was calling for and I was sensing my purpose needed to shift,” says Moore. “The grind of what we do is no joke and I wanted to be more present for this hard battle, fighting for Jonathan’s freedom and starting our life, while still publicly advocating for these issues.”

Bruce Maxwell

Bruce Maxwell’s dad introduced him to baseball. A Black Army veteran, Bruce Maxwell Jr. started teaching his son at three years old. “It was my primary sport my whole life,” says Maxwell. “My training was different. It wasn’t a game to me.” 

Growing up biracial in Huntsville, Alabama was challenging, Maxwell says. Despite the city of 250,000 and its thriving Black community, its citizens maintained the beliefs of its past. When Maxwell was born in 1990, it was only 28 years since the state abolished Jim Crow laws, holding the cultural memory of prejudice intact. “My neighbors were racist as shit,” says Maxwell. “One of them used to call my dad ‘darky.” He’d also hear prejudice from both sides of his family. “My dad’s side called my mom a white devil. My mom’s side called her a fucking “n-gger lover,’” he says. Maxwell first personally experienced racism on the field. “I was eight or nine when I was called a n-gger,” he says. “I had heard my dad be called it multiple times. I’ve heard it as long as I’ve been able to hear.” Trips with his traveling team to other towns in the Deep South often ended in racist threats, but Maxwell maintained his passion for baseball.

After graduating from college, Maxwell was recruited to play for the Nashville Sounds, a minor league affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers. On July 22, 2016, his life changed. “My manager called me and was like, ‘You’re going to Oakland tomorrow,” Maxwell says.  He went on to have a successful rookie year, becoming the first Black catcher in the MLB in nearly 20 years and labeled one of the hottest hitters in the league that September. “I thought I belonged, and I played with the notion of I can make a difference. Unfortunately, my career got cut short.”  

On Friday, Sept. 22, 2017, Trump visited Huntsville for a rally in support of Senator Luther Strange. During his speech, Trump went after kneeling NFL players. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of the NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, say ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now?” Trump said to a cheering crowd. “Some owner… is going to say, ‘That guy who disrespects our flag, he’s fired.” With only a year in the league, Maxwell was angry. “I watched these people in the town I was raised, stand up, and support that shit,” says Maxwell. “It sent me over the edge, I was pissed. I was a nobody still, but this was bigger than my paycheck. Bigger than baseball.” 

Before his next game, Maxwell sought advice from his father. “He didn’t try to talk me out of it, but he educated me on what was coming,” says Maxwell. When he returned to the locker room, he called a meeting with his team managers. “I was like, ‘If you guys don’t want me to do this, I’ll find another way. Both of them looked at me and said, ‘You have our full support. We’ll stand behind you.’” That night, as the team prepared to take on the Texas Rangers, he called another meeting in the locker room, giving his teammates the same talk. Only one player spoke up, Trevor Plouffe. “He said, if I were you, I wouldn’t do it, but I’m not you’,” recalls Maxwell. “He goes, ‘Whatever you do, I’ll sit right here and support you.’” 

On Sept. 23, as Serene Smith Wheelwright walked to the microphone at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Maxwell went down on his left leg, his green and gold A’s hat covering his heart. His teammate, Matt Canha’s, put his hand on Maxwell’s right shoulder. “I got a whole lot of boos, a whole lot of cheering and [had] a whole lot of shit coming my way,” he says. “It was kind of the end all be all after that.” 

Soon after, Maxwell felt the impact. He received some support from former players in the league, but, he says, none from his team after the backlash began. “I didn’t do it to get notoriety,” says Maxwell. “But I had no support system. It was a pretty rough time.” By Sept. 25, the Monday after his kneel, the death threats came. Some threatened to bomb his family’s houses, others threatened to hang him from a tree, or to blow up the college gym where his sister worked as a basketball coach. 

By the time the season wrapped on Oct.1, Maxwell had fallen into depression, and wouldn’t leave his house. “I lost a lot of [people] who I thought were friends in the game,” he says. “They stopped talking to me because I was too hot to touch. To this day, I haven’t talked to a lot of my teammates.” His parents came for a wellness check, as friends tried to get him out of his rut. By the end of the month, he would leave the house, but things quickly went wrong. 

According to an account Maxwell gave to the podcast With Authority, he was arrested after going for drinks with a friend. His friend ordered food to Maxwell’s place but decided to go home instead. Maxwell — still on edge from the threats — was alarmed when he heard a knock at his door, causing him to grab his gun from its safe. It was the delivery driver. “I startled, [the driver] startled. I apologized numerous times,”  Maxwell told the podcast in 2020. The driver called the police and in minutes, officers surrounded Maxwell’s apartment, rifles pointed at his door, ordering him out. (Maxwell declined to comment on his arrest for Rolling Stone.) 

In April of 2018, Maxwell was projected to start as catcher. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, and was sentenced to probation and community service. But his spring camp was unsuccessful. By June, the A’s demoted him to the minors. When the season ended, they released him. Despite multiple attempts, Maxwell was never re-signed. “I went to Mexico in 2019 and [won] two championships,” he says. “I got back to the states to play for the Mets and got passed over during Covid. It was politics.” In 2020, following the publicized deaths of Breonna Taylor and Floyd, players showed remorse for their silence regarding Maxwell. “I felt like a sell out,” Cleveland outfielder Delino DeShields told a news station. “I should’ve been out there with him.” Still, it was too late for Maxell’s baseball career. These days, he runs a private security team. “I just lost the love for everything,” he says. 

Kenny Stills

In August 2016, Kenny Stills’ eyes were opening. For the first time, he’d been watching the news more attentively, observing how his demographic of Black men were being killed by police at higher rates than any other racial group in the country. Barack Obama’s presidency was coming to an end; there were five months left until the election, and for the first time, Stills was voting. 

On the outskirts of Miami, Trump flags were raised next to Confederate ones. “You’d be parked at a stop light and all of a sudden it’s trucks with flags waving at  7 a.m.,” says Stills. “Just felt ass backwards.” 

Born in 1992, in Edina, Minnesota to Kenneth Stills Sr. — a former NFL player — and Annette Delao, Stills grew up in Oceanside, California, 40 minutes from San Diego’s Naval and Marine hubs. His paternal grandfather had been a Marine and the military influence remained strong. Most of Stills’ coaches were affiliated with the military. The coach with the most influence was retired Marine Joe Mascarenaz Sr., the father of Stills’ childhood best friend and the head coach of his little-league team. 

“Playing for Coach Joe instilled a strong work ethic,” Stills wrote in his recent memoir Still Growing, Still Learning, Still Me. “He emphasized toughness…discipline and ran us just like the Marines.” That persistence paid off, earning him a full scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. In 2013, his senior year, he was drafted to the New Orleans Saints. 

By 2016, then playing for the Miami Dolphins, Stills was at the peak of his career and starting to think about his place in the world. “I grew up in a family that didn’t talk about politics,” Stills tells Rolling Stone. “In order for me to vote, I started paying attention, watching the news. I saw Colin [Kaepernick] and Eric [Reid] and people were upset. I also saw the continuous deaths of Black and brown people.” 

On Sept. 11, the NFL’s official opening week, the Dolphins were playing the Seattle Seahawks. Stills was planning to kneel, for the first time, alongside teammates Arian Foster, Jelani Jenkins, and Michael Thomas. But he felt anxious about being so politically vocal in Seattle, a town with such a rich military history. 

Stills called his former coach Joe Mascarenaz, the man he respected most. “I asked him not to take a knee,” Mascarenaz told Sports Illustrated in 2019. “I told him, ‘Remember, your grandfather wore that uniform. I wore that uniform. People are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. Don’t disrespect them.’” Yet Stills went ahead with his silent protest. As team captain, he held a players meeting, informing the team of his position. “Guys were screaming and shouting over each other. Some said they couldn’t support the protest because of their military families,” wrote Stills in his book. “Others were concerned how it could affect their paycheck…a few just wanted to play… and stay out of the drama. And then, there were those who didn’t give a fuck.”  

As the anthem boomed throughout CenturyLink Field, an American flag nearly covered all 100-yards of the football field as Stills, along with four other teammates, knelt during the national anthem. The Mascarenaz family stopped speaking to him. “It felt minuscule to the actual problems we were dealing with but it was frustrating,” Stills tells Rolling Stone. “I was trying to do the right thing, and it was being misconstrued.”

When Stills dropped a pass during the game, and the Dolphins lost, the backlash got worse. “They tried to use the outcome of the game as the reason to not support what we were doing,” he says. “My teammates, the coaching staff, and ownership was making us feel like the reason was because we were involved in the protest.” However, Stills kept kneeling and playing, helping the Dolphins enter the playoffs for the first time in eight years. 

During the offseason, Stills read James Baldwin and watched documentaries on Angela Davis. He’d soon receive an invitation to attend an Israeli government-sponsored trip with nearly a dozen other NFL players. But the week of the trip, he received a letter signed by Davis and 1968 Olympian activist, John Carlos, urging him and the other players to reconsider. Stills backed out of the trip. 

During the summer of 2019, as Trump was running for re-election, Stills kept kneeling. On Aug. 9, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross held a Trump fundraiser at his estate in the Hamptons, raising nearly $13 million. Reposting a tweet from Ross’ RISE initiative — a nonprofit with the aim of eliminating racial discrimination in sports — Stills responded, “You can’t have a nonprofit with this mission statement then open your doors to Trump.” 

By Aug. 31, he was traded to the Houston Texans. “[Ross] was playing the good guy in public, but behind closed doors was pressuring us to not be a part of the protest,” says Stills. Ross never publicly commented. “Then he decided to have the Trump thing at his private estate, so I just sent the tweet. I did not care.” Stills knelt in Texas and was released from his contract in a mutual parting the next year. He’d join Buffalo’s practice squad, before returning to the New Orleans Saints, in 2021 but his momentum was dwindling. By December, Stills was out of the league. 

“When I got to Texas, it was like, ‘You can’t protest here. Nobody’s ever taken a knee in the Texan stadium.’ That’s when it hit. Miami sent me to Texas as a way of putting a stranglehold on me,” he says. The year after his trade, Floyd was murder in Minnesota. But despite the league “switching their tune,” Stills had been stifled to the point of no return. “That started the decline of my career. Not getting on the field anymore and having the statistics. I didn’t feel connected to the league. But after George Floyd was killed, they switched their tune.”

These days, each of these athletes have started over. Maxwell has started his own business in private security and lives in southern Alabama. Moore is enjoying raising her son with Irons, who she stills does advocacy work with. Stills has started an initiative in Colorado, teaching Black folks how to ski and snowboard, a sport that has an underwhelming amount of Black and marginalized people. “ I played football, I was involved in activism. I’ve written a book,” says Stills.”I had to get more comfortable with my identity. I was very lucky I found snowboarding and was really passionate about surfing, attacking, one of my fears.”

Unfortunately, the nation at large hasn’t conquered its fear of racism. “I do some private training here and there with kids,” says Maxwell. Unfortunately, during this past World Cup, hosted in America, Maxwell saw all-too familiar dynamics play out in the game of soccer. “I’ve been seeing reports on these racist ass fucking teams saying shit to the black and brown players,” says Maxwell. “I’ve been seeing players complaining on racist remarks coming from teams and their fans. They’re chanting monkey and shit to Black players.I tell people all the time, bro, racism is everywhere.”