‘Call to action’: Star players, team bosses join Seahawks wives Bridge to the Future march
With an N95 mask covering half his face and making him more incognito than he already was trying to be, Kam Chancellor stepped back.
“The Enforcer” yielded entirely on this day.
The preeminent strong safety of his time, the former soul of the Seahawks who retired after a neck injury in 2017, politely refused a couple of people who were seeking his autograph. He let his wife take over.
“We have to make sure that when this walk is done, our fight for justice isn’t,” Tiffany Chancellor said into a microphone in front of a couple hundred Seahawks’ players and wives, plus coach Pete Carroll, general manager John Schneider, team vice chair Bert Kolde and families at Aubrey Davis Park on Mercer Island Saturday.
They were there for their Bridge to the Future march. Tiffany Chancellor and Nathalie Wright, wife of Seahawks Pro Bowl veteran linebacker K.J. Wright, led the organizing of it.
Their cause: to call for racial equality, and to further the movement sweeping the nation, among Blacks plus more and more whites, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
Black Lives Matter.
“We have to keep fighting for equality, fighting for justice,” Tiffany Chancellor said.
She was not shouting. She spoke in a firm, purposeful voice.
“This march is so much more than a march. It is a call to action,” she said. “So today I am asking all of you to make a few vows with me.
“We must vow to teach our children that differences in people are beautiful and something to be celebrated.”
Chancellor, Wright and the crowd socially-distanced across the park amid the coronavirus pandemic all cheered.
“This is awesome,” K.J. Wright said through his black mask, nodding at the scene.
“This is (Nathalie’s) and Tiffany’s work.”
Tiffany Chancellor led the crowd in a prayer, for equality, for peace and for love in our country.
Then they began walking about a mile and a half, across Lake Washington on the I-90 floating bridge. They used the pedestrian and bike path astride the freeway. Drivers of cars and trucks honked their horns as they drove past the stretched-out line of moms, dads, kids, signs—and messages.
They carried signs that stated “No to Racism!”; “Nurses for Black Lives”; “When we KNOW better we can DO better”.
Another sign said “The Revolution will Mobilize!” written over a raised, black fist.
Seahawks linebackers Cody Barton and Emmanuel Ellerbee were there. So were defensive line coach Clint Hurtt and Lofa Tatupu, Seattle’s former three-time Pro Bowl linebacker. He is now an assistant linebackers coach for the team.
Once the marchers reached the Seattle side of the bridge, they observed a moment of silence.
“For lives lost,” Tiffany Chancellor said.
Carroll had said this week how much he was looking forward to this march.
The coach has been opening up the players’ daily online Zoom calls that were supposed to be about football for intense discussions about race in America instead.
Now, with the nation seemingly more ripe for social change amid he most racial turmoil since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Seattle’s 68-year-old white coach has been calling on his mostly black players.
Seventy of the 90 players on the Seahawks’ current roster are black. They have taken Carroll and his team into new territory talking about racial inequality in the aftermath of Floyd’s death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer and the nation’s protests of it, plus the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
Carroll and Seattle’s players have been talking about this issue for years. That is, since the time Colin Kaepernick was first getting vilified for taking a knee in protest of these same problems during national anthems at NFL games in 2016.
But right now, right this moment in America, Carroll sees an unprecedented opportunity for real, lasting change.
If all Americans, particularly white Americans, in and out of the NFL act.
“Just being on it isn’t good enough. Just being on board ain’t good enough,” Carroll said on an online Zoom call Thursday, 17 days after a white Minneapolis police offer pressed his knee into black man Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes before he died.
“We’ve seen that before. We’ve got to GO.”
Saturday, they went—across Lake Washington for the cause.
Back at the park on Mercer Island before they left, a young man who looked to be in his 20s was wearing a red, number-7 San Francisco 49ers jersey, Kaepernick’s old jersey. The former Super Bowl quarterback has been blackballed from the league the last three seasons, since he began kneeling in 2016 during national anthems at games to protest the causes the Seahawks and their families marched for on Saturday.
The Seahawks twice considered signing Kaepernick, in 2017 and ‘18. They remain the only team to have him in for a free-agent visit, in the spring of 2017. Carroll said then and again this week that Kaepernick is worthy of being a starter in the NFL and that the Seahawks had a starting quarterback in franchise cornerstone Russell Wilson.
“When I look back, I felt like we missed the opportunity,” Carroll said Thursday. “So, as I look back at it, I wish we could have figured it out, knowing what we know now, and given him the chance. Because I would love to see him play football those years.”
This story was originally published June 13, 2020 at 4:14 PM.
