It was 1960 when Harvey Gantt choose to sit at the Kress counter at King and Wentworth Streets downtown Charleston, a place previously off limits to black men and women. This was called the Kress sit-in, part of a nation wide civil rights movement that set off a tsunami across the south.
There is a divisive irony within Colin Kaepernick’s public display of objection. He choose to sit while others stood. Maybe for different reasons than Harvey, maybe hoping for different results? Yet, we find the same act of defiance well within the rights of any American. Or are we really free? Jesse Williams pondered that same thought, “But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free.”