Jaylen Brown has never been your typical elite athlete. Wooed by every college basketball factory in the country coming out of Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia, Brown spent his one year of college at California-Berkeley because he felt a special bond with former Tennessee coach Cuonzo Martin.
Now a highly respected NBA player with the Boston Celtics – which means he could easily charter a private jet home to the Big Peach should the need arise – Brown instead drove the 15 hours from Beantown in order to lead a peaceful Saturday night protest regarding the death of George Floyd after violent protests wrecked Atlanta on Friday night.
“I’m a black man and I’m a member of this community,” Brown explained. “We’re raising awareness for some of the injustices that we’ve been seeing. It’s not OK.”
Beneath the surface niceties, nothing much about race has been OK in this country since slaves were brought to our shores against their will more than 400 years ago.
But every now and then – such as when a white Minneapolis police officer murders a black man such as Floyd by kneeling so harshly on his neck that Floyd was killed despite his repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” – all the old wounds and nightmares that have daily, if not hourly, haunted black America, come rushing back.