As an example of just how much the left hates Donald J. Trump, after becoming enraged because football great Jim Brown expressed kind words for Trump, a writer for SportingNews.com decided that Brown’s decades of work for civil rights was erased merely because the Hall of Famer was nice to Trump.
SportingNews writer David Steele began his January 18 piece noting that the Cleveland Browns star has been a candidate for the “Mount Rushmore of social, political and civil-rights activism.”
“If Jim Brown is not on the Mount Rushmore of social, political and civil-rights activism by athletes in our time (up there with, at least, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos), he’s on the short list waiting for a vacancy,” Steele wrote.
But that adulation came to an abrupt end. “He was, that is,” Steele continued. “Jim Brown himself is now the vacancy.”
How could a man who spent nearly 50 years at the forefront of the civil rights movement be toppled from that place with just one action?
He said nice things about Donald Trump.
“Those are the consequences when you insert yourself into a feud between John Lewis and Donald Trump — and take the side of Trump while insulting Lewis,” Steele proclaimed.
Steele, who once wrote for the Baltimore Sun, went on to “explain” his “reasons” for erasing 50 years of civil rights advocacy work, “There is simply no way to reconcile Brown’s words, and all the others he has spouted in defense of the man who has spent the week insulting an icon of the movement, and this image, of the meeting Brown himself adjourned on behalf of Ali 50 years ago, when the same forces Lewis was fighting were coming after Ali’s resistance to the draft.”
So, because Jim Brown said a few nice things about Donald Trump and opposed the hateful attacks Congressman John Lewis launched against Trump, including the outright lie that he never missed a past inaugural when he in fact skipped George W. Bush’s for the same “he’s illegitimate” reason, Brown’s decades of good work has become meaningless.
Brown has done a lot for his community, and was universally praised by civil rights activists for organizing sports figures to come to the aide of boxing great Muhammad Ali when his title was stripped from him for refusing service in the Vietnam War in 1967. The NFL great also founded the Black Economic Union to help promote black-owned business in the nation’s inner cities.
But his founding of the Amer-I-Can Foundation has done the most good, after he spent years trying to mitigate the inner-city gang culture.
“I was doing economic development for minorities. I was getting black folks to use their dollars to help each other. I looked up and saw black men killing each other over red and blue. Until we did something about that, there was no use for economic development,” Brown recently told the New York Daily News.
Since its founding nearly 25 years ago, Amer-I-Can has improved the lives of gang members, prison inmates, ex-cons, at-risk kids and thousands of other people in more than a dozen states across the nation.
The heart of Amer-I-Can is a 15-lesson course Brown created which helps train young blacks to gain control of their emotions in order to lead useful, productive lives. The program he developed helps inner-city youth learn to keep a job, raise a family, and go back to school.
But to David Steele, all that is meaningless.
“That Jim Brown is dead,” Steele says at the tail of his hyperventilating and biased attack on Brown.
In the end, though, one might doubt that a man who has 60 years of fame and achievement under his belt will be much bothered by the words of a man with a failed newspaper career and who now writes for a sports website.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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