'There are no final victories': Harry Edwards is still fighting the good fight

THE LETTER WAS a venomous tirade, dripping with racist vitriol.

The greeting started with a slur, "Harry 'Liver-Lips' Edwards," and labeled Black students as "stupid sub-human scum." The one-page missive predicted that the Black Power movement would lead the country into a race war. Signed by National Front, a white supremacist group, the letter came to Harry Edwards in the late 1960s, just as his demands for equal rights for Black athletes were gaining widespread attention.

As a professor at what was then called San Jose State College, Edwards spearheaded the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which called for Black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics. Although the boycott never materialized, the group's efforts culminated in the iconic moment when American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists in protest on the Olympic medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

The death threats, hate mail and intimidation attempts have failed to dwarf Edwards' meaningful impact over the past 60 years, making him arguably the strongest advocate for Black athletes in history.

He has inspired protests and counseled countless athletes, including former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose 2016 demonstrations against police brutality rocked the sports world and polarized the nation. He also has been a valued consultant to team owners and sports league executives, including NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, working to craft programs to diversify their management ranks and provide off-field support to players.

Now age 82 and stricken by cancer in his bone marrow, thyroid and prostate, Edwards still sounds robust but is resigned to what's ahead.

"My bone marrow is not producing enough red blood cells, and eventually it will cease to produce enough to supply my major organs," he said. "At that point, it's over. And that's assuming that the prostate cancer doesn't get to me beforehand. But you know what? This is part of the deal on this planet. Nobody gets out of life alive."

A towering presence both physically and intellectually, Edwards helped shatter the once pervasive myth that sports are somehow exempt from society's ills. "It became clear to me that sports was so intertwined with society that institutionally it was a reiteration of the structure and dynamics of human and institutional relationships in society," he said. "And therefore, there was the potential of leveraging sports to generate change."

He's pledging to fight for justice as long as he can.

EDWARDS MOVED GINGERLY, leaning on a black cane as he stepped into a room at the 49ers offices next to Levi's Stadium. His 6-foot-8 frame still commanded attention, even as time had etched itself into his gait. On this February day, he was dressed head-to-toe in his signature black, he exuded a focused intensity. But beneath the armor was a teacher's warmth, accessible and patient, eager to illuminate forgotten stories from the past that help explain the present.

Cancer has caused episodes of stabbing pain in his right shin, hips and pelvis, slowing his stride. He also had just wrenched a knee, the kind of injury that comes with the years. "I don't know what happened," he said, his deep voice softened by a small smile. Age, he joked, has a way of catching up with even the fiercest of fighters. He settled at a light-colored table and unfurled history both personal and collective. He talked about athletes who dared to speak out and the price they paid for their defiance.

For generations, society had celebrated sports as a refuge, a place to cheer and forget. He also knew that sports figures started protesting long before his own rise as an activist and member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. And, he understood, the backlash they triggered was often swift and brutal. He spoke of Octavius Catto, who saw baseball as a bridge across the nation's racial divide but was denied in his attempt to have his all-Black team play in a forerunner to the Major Leagues in the years after the Civil War. Catto was shot dead by a white rioter in 1871 while organizing Black voters in Philadelphia.

Edwards invoked Eroseanna "Rose" Robinson, a high jumper who, incensed by Jim Crow, refused to stand for the national anthem at the 1959 Pan American Games, only to find herself arrested on tax-evasion charges six months later.

Wilma Rudolph, the star sprinter who returned from the 1960 Olympics with three gold medals, demanded that officials in her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee desegregate a parade to be held in her honor. They agreed, but Rudolph paid a steep price for her audacity. "As a consequence, in her own country, she was canceled, constricted, restricted," Edwards said. "It was the price that she paid for having the commitment to say we as Americans are better than this."

Many things have changed over time, he said, but activism always comes with a price and a surcharge. When Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to protest ongoing racism, Edwards said he never counseled him on what to do. But he did warn Kaepernick that critics would distort his protest and denounce him as un-American, regardless of whether it was true or not.

"People who hate this country so much that they would disrespect the flag, would not go out on a limb and make themselves vulnerable in that regard," Edwards said. "I said, 'Kap, don't worry about what these people are saying. They would have the same reaction to you if you were in street clothes and took a knee on the sidewalk to the playing of chopsticks and said, this is in protest.'"

Edwards has felt similar repercussions. Proof is contained in many of the documents in his archives, which span 18 boxes at San Jose State University's main library. The collection includes unhinged hate mail, and a copy of a FBI poster featuring Edwards wearing black shades and a black Kangol cap, headlined "Armed and Dangerous."

There is a letter written in the months following the renowned Smith-Carlos protest by Avery Brundage, International Olympic Committee president, to Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, chairman of the Mexico City organizing committee. The note excoriated Ramírez Vázquez for including images of the protest in the film documenting the Games.

"It was very disturbing to have you confirm the rumors that have reached my ears about the use of pictures of the nasty demonstration against the United States flag by negroes," read the letter, dated Aug. 19, 1969. "As you know, the reaction was immediate and the culprits were sent home at once."

It was clear Brundage saw the true offense as the act of protest, not the injustice that provoked it. But Edwards has long since made peace with such hostility. He sees it as the first step on the road to his goal, which is to transform opponents into allies. "Unless our strategic change efforts involve converting critics and adversaries into collaborators and advocates, then what are we struggling for?" he asked.

Edwards' determination was forged amid hardship in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois. He was raised in the all-Black Southend neighborhood still haunted by a 1917 massacre during which roving white mobs killed hundreds of Black residents and forced thousands of others from their homes. Edwards grew up hearing the stories, whispered reminders of the homes torched, families slaughtered.

"Old folks would still be talking about, 'Yeah, that vacant lot over there is where Mr. Howard's house was,'" he said. "And 'that's where the Johnson girls were burned alive because they ran in there to hide from the people who were killing Black folks in the street'." Edwards was the second of eight children, and his family's financial struggles grew dire when his mother, fed up with her husband, left home when he was 8. His father worked two jobs but that was not enough to prevent Edwards and his siblings from slipping into what he called the community's chaotic "underfooting." They sometimes went hungry, and often were forced to survive by their own wits.

In his 1980 memoir, "The Struggle That Must Be," Edwards wrote that in grade school he once was asked by a teacher to write an essay about the importance of newspapers. He said they helped keep him warm. "Newspapers are important because we used them to start fires in the front room heater and the kitchen stove, and because in the winter we wrapped them around our legs, stuffed them in the linings and sleeves of our coats, put them between the blankets on our beds, and placed them folded, layer upon layer, in our shoes when the soles had worn too thin," he wrote.

His parents tried unsuccessfully to reconcile at one point, and when Edwards was 13, his mother returned to get her children. But Edwards stayed behind with his father, a one-time aspiring prize fighter who worked various low-wage jobs, including as a laborer at a local chemical plant. Edwards was already a star high school athlete, and his father pushed him to use sports as a ticket out. A family friend had always regaled him with stories about the possibilities of college and of California, where Edwards' grandmother lived.

So, when he graduated from high school, the family friend bought him a train ticket to California, where he moved in with his grandmother and enrolled at Fresno City College. There, he joined the track team and was an immediate star. More important to his life's journey, he became interested in reading and learning.

"The more I read, the more excited I became. I soon found that there was a message, a story, somebody's point of view implicit in every book I had been assigned," he wrote in his memoir. "I had learned to read critically. And unless one is reading critically, one is not reading at all."

An athletic scholarship brought him to San Jose State, where he set a school record in the discus and captained the basketball team. But the blatant racism Black athletes faced on campus quickly soured him. White students hurled racial epithets at Black students if they happened upon fraternity row. Black students were discouraged from attending some of the school dances. And the school's housing office gave white students the option of choosing not to live with Black roommates in dormitories. Black students were never offered a choice.

In his early days on campus, Edwards overheard two white guys in the locker room denigrating Black athletes, saying they always choke under pressure. Only later did he learn they were assistant coaches. His breaking point came during a heated confrontation with his track coach, which ended with Edwards leaving the team before the end of his sophomore year. He said he never picked up a discus again but was able to keep his scholarship because he continued as a basketball player.

When Edwards graduated in 1964, he drew interest from the Minnesota Vikings and San Diego Chargers, as well as the Los Angeles Lakers. But he decided to accept a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to attend Cornell University. There, he earned a master's degree and, eventually, a doctorate in an entirely new discipline: the sociology of sport. Edwards recalled that when he presented his thesis idea to the three faculty members on his doctoral committee, they were dismissive.

"To a man, they said there is no such thing as the sociology of sport. I said, that's why I want to do it, because I think that we're missing something in terms of our analyses of social structure and social change," Edwards said. The committee members were reluctant but eventually relented. Still, Edwards said, they warned him, "You're going to be laughed out of the discipline."

Despite that, Edwards thrived at Cornell and enjoyed the academic camaraderie among graduate students there. On several weekends, he took the four-hour bus ride to New York City to attend meetings of Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity. "More than merely stimulating new ideas for me, Malcolm X incited, inflamed and legitimized a passion to act upon deeply felt convictions," Edwards wrote. While working on his dissertation, he returned to San Jose State to work as a part-time instructor and immerse himself in the growing Black Power movement.

In the fall of 1967, the atmosphere at San Jose State simmered with tension and before long he emerged as a voice for Black students who had long endured the indignities of racism on campus. Edwards and a coalition of student activists presented a list of grievances to university officials, demanding among other things: an increase in Black faculty, the recruitment of more Black students, and the desegregation of social life on campus. When their concerns were met with indifference, they issued a bold ultimatum: Unless action was taken, they would disrupt the upcoming football game. The threat worked. The game was canceled, and the demands were addressed, proving that sports could be a powerful lever for social change.

"When you look back on what he was saying in the '60s, it was really not anything more than common sense," said Richard Lapchick, founder of the Institute for Sport & Social Justice at the University of Central Florida. "If you're going to have a society that has racial justice, you needed to do what Harry was talking about. It made sense to use the sports platform as a vehicle to get people's attention who might not otherwise pay attention to these issues."

The effort thrust Edwards into the spotlight, which only intensified with his role in the Olympic protest. His defiance made him a target, but it also catapulted him into a kind of celebrity status. Dozens of news stories chronicled his rise and his insights on the intersection of sports and society. He received letters from soldiers stationed overseas, from athletes, and from ordinary citizens, each one a testament to the growing reach of his message.

After earning his doctorate in 1973, he began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where his sociology classes packed large lecture halls with hundreds of students. For all his budding fame, Edwards always remained grounded and determined to separate his personal life from his activist work. He married his wife, Sandra, nearly 55 years ago, and he raised his three children in a home in Fremont, California, where he and his wife still live. Early on, he said, he and his wife agreed to keep his work separate from their personal life, a pledge he said he is proud to have always fulfilled.

Through the years, Edwards said he was careful to ensure that his activism be more than symbolic. He wanted it to force tangible change. That meant working with sports leagues, coaches and team owners, the types of people who were once targets of his protests.

In the mid-1980s, he became a player liaison and mentor with the Golden State Warriors. Around the same time, he began a long association as a consultant with the 49ers, a role that developed after he and then-coach Bill Walsh struck up a relationship. It was the start of a close friendship the two men shared until Walsh's death in 2007.

"Everything and anything that is said or discussed between us -- including the fact of even having had a discussion -- for my part will stay between us," Edwards wrote to Walsh in May 1986. "I believe that you will find that my loyalty to friends tends toward the absolute even as I am scrupulously honest and straightforward in my private conversations and relations with them."

Edwards helped Walsh establish a development pipeline for Black coaches that later morphed into the NFL's Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship. The program allows aspiring coaches to observe NFL training camps and offseason workouts to hone their craft. Through the years, the program has turned out a slew of future Black head coaches, including Lovie Smith, Marvin Lewis, Leslie Frazier, Anthony Lynn, Mike Tomlin and Raheem Morris.

The two also persuaded the 49ers to develop programs to help players manage off-field issues and prepare for their lives after football. It proved to be a significant step toward moving teams closer to valuing the humanity of players, Edwards said, and over time, those kinds of efforts have become standard across the NFL.

"Harry dealt with anything that came to light in the organization that was dealing with race, or things off the field," said Eric Wright, a former defensive back who played for the 49ers from 1981 through 1990. "He helped the organization implement certain programs. Financial literacy and encouraging players to go back and get their degrees. Harry implemented all of that." Wright said that because Edwards was working for the team, some players wrongly suspected that he was a management spy or apologist.

"They kind of felt he was positioned to be a mouthpiece for the organization," Wright said. "He went through that with some of the players. But Harry's focal point was trying to uplift, to get the athlete on a successful path to be able to navigate life."

MLB hired Edwards in 1987 to help develop a plan to increase the number of Black managers and front office executives. At the time, MLB was scrambling to escape the fallout from the infamous comments then-Dodgers VP and General Manager Al Campanis made several weeks earlier on the ABC News "Nightline" program. Asked why there were no Black managers in baseball at the time, Campanis responded: "I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager, or, perhaps a general manager."

It was a disaster that then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth asked Edwards to help mitigate. "Peter called me and said, 'Harry, I need some help on this. I want you to figure out a way to get us back on track from this Al Campanis fiasco,'" Edwards recalled. He noted that he had gotten to know Ueberroth, a fellow San Jose State alum, through the years.

Edwards reached out to, of all people, the disgraced Campanis. Edwards hired him as a consultant and asked Campanis to name the best Black managerial candidate he knew. Campanis immediately recommended Dusty Baker, who had recently retired after a 19-year playing career, including eight with the Dodgers. Edwards said he did not want Baker to work with the Dodgers, for fear that the hire would look like a publicity stunt. Instead, they set up an interview for Baker with the San Francisco Giants, who ended up hiring Baker as a first-base coach in 1988. Baker became manager of the Giants for the 1993 season, when he was named National League Manager of the Year.

Edwards also helped MLB develop a broader program to find minority candidates for managerial and front office jobs. It was a kind of quiet diplomacy made possible by the protests he led in the 1960s. "The average American probably would see Harry as menacing or a threat, by the way he looks and dresses," Baker said. "He's not intimidated by anybody, but he knows how to play the game without bowing down."

Over the years, Edwards has developed a special bond with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. The two men met for the first time in 2006 during Goodell's early days as commissioner, sitting together in the owner's box at a 49ers game. They talked the entire game, Edwards said, and came to an understanding that he would be Goodell's "eyes, ears, voice and analytical mind" dealing with issues that might impact the NFL. Since then, Edwards has been an informal adviser to the commissioner, sending him regular notes and emails about the league's potential role in addressing societal concerns.

In a recent ESPN interview, Goodell said that Edwards' insights were particularly helpful in shaping the league's personal conduct policy and addressing player protests that surged during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Earlier in my time as commissioner, we took a stronger approach on discipline and player behavior. He was very helpful on that. The term he used to use with me all the time was the ladder approach," Goodell said. If a player or coach violated the league's personal conduct rules, he said, "You gave [him] an opportunity to take that ladder and climb out of it. But you had to climb out of it and earn your way back."

During the wave of player protests, Goodell said many players were direct with him about the issues affecting their communities and what the NFL could do to address them. He said Edwards helped him better understand the life experiences players brought to the protests.

"He's an incredible observer of people," Goodell said. "He's had a huge impact on me. He was very helpful to me in understanding a lot of deep issues that I previously may not have fully understood."

Edwards said he has always appreciated the difficult role that Goodell plays as commissioner. He is the embodiment of the NFL establishment, and must answer to the owners who employ him. Edwards credits Goodell for establishing initiatives such as social justice awards for each team. He also calls the commissioner the driving force behind the league's Inspire Change initiative that has raised over $375 million for an array of community organizations over the past seven years.

At the same time, he knows critics often dismiss those efforts as performative and inconsequential for a sports league that generates more than $20 billion a year in annual revenue. In addition, Goodell was unable to persuade a team to sign Kaepernick after he became a free agent in 2017. Edwards said the commissioner helped arrange several potential tryouts for Kaepernick, but those efforts always broke down. At one point, Edwards said he suggested that Goodell hire Kaepernick as a league consultant. He said the commissioner quickly let him know that would not work. "His first thing was, 'Then who is going to hire me?'" Edwards recalled.

As Edwards has confronted the reality of his cancer diagnosis, he has written to a select group of people to express to them his admiration and respect. He said the letters start, "In case I'm not here when your tomorrow begins ..." Goodell was among the recipients.

"It is a letter I will keep forever," Goodell said. Edwards is clear-eyed about his illness, as well as the challenges that he will one day leave behind. After all of his work to promote diversity, he is witnessing the federal government vilify and undermine those types of efforts. Yet, he is not discouraged. He says he believes setbacks are inevitable and can be rendered temporary by continued activism.

"There are no final victories," Edwards said. "There's just struggle. The only two things that survive are the struggle and the people, and they are perpetual."

Edwards said he does not know who will lead that fight in the future. But that has always been the case, he noted. Few people could have predicted that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would rise to prominence when he was a 26-year-old minister leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nor did many people anticipate the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the nation when it took shape more than a decade ago.

Edwards said his own life on the front lines of modern sports activism would have been unthinkable when he was a young man growing up amid violent segregation and poverty in East St. Louis. Yet, his work was able to transform how much of the world sees sports. "[It] changed the way, not just this society, but much of the world looked at sports," Edwards said. "It changed the world's perceptions on the importance, influence and impact of sports in modern societies. I think that's a contribution."