Russell Wilson takes his ‘responsibility to love and help people’ to his BLM cleats
Russell Wilson has been saying it for years. He’s recently been renewed in his advocacy for it.
Now he’s wearing it.
The Seahawks’ quarterback proudly displayed his message that Black Lives Matter on his specially designed shoes he will wear in Sunday’s game against the New York Giants.
This week is the NFL’s annual My Cause My Cleats initiative for players and coaches to showcase a cause important to them.
Wilson enlisted Seattle native, artist and dancer Takiyah Ward to design his neon-green, high-top cleats. They include prominent images of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Charleena Lyles and Herbert Hightower.
“No matter where we live, no matter where we are, people’s lives matter. Black Lives Matter,” Wilson said while describing his cleats for 2020.
Taylor was killed by gunshots from Louisville police officers in her home in March. Floyd’s death under the knee of a white police officer while being videotaped and detained on a Minneapolis street on Memorial Day touched off a summer of protests across the U.S.
Lyles, a mother of four, was shot and killed by two white police officers in her Seattle home in 2017. Hightower was fatally shot by Seattle police in 2004 during what was reported to be a mental-health crisis.
All those killed and depicted on Wilson’s cleats were Black.
Ward, the artist who designed Wilson’s shoes, is also owner of T-Dub Customs, an online outlet that “turns new and used clothing into wearable art.”
Ward’s work caught Wilson’s attention this summer. She painted the colorful, creative Black Lives Matter mural onto Pine Street on Capitol Hill that drew international acclaim during this summer’s protests for social justice.
The quarterback showed off his cleats from a table in front of him as he spoke Thursday during his weekly press conference via an online Zoom call.
“It’s been pretty cool,” Wilson said. “I had this amazing artist, Takiyah Ward, she kind of helped put these together with me. ...
“I just told her that, for me, it was really just honoring people that we’ve lost — obviously, George Floyd ... we really wanted to show their faces, too, as well. Because I think it’s important that their names matter and their faces matter.
“Who they are matters.”
Wilson has said, and said again Thursday, when he thinks of Taylor’s death he thinks of his 3-1/2-year-old daughter Sienna growing up in America.
“You know, we need justice for (these killings),” Wilson said.
“We want to bring the world together and make it a better place. That’s what’s represented on my cleats today.”
The Seahawks under coach Pete Carroll have been one of the NFL teams leaning most into the social issues of the last decade in the U.S.
They’ve canceled team meetings on football to have deep discussions on race. They’ve canceled a practice to ensure all players were registered to vote in last month’s general election.
In June, Carroll and general manager John Schneider joined Kam Chancellor, K.J. Wright and other players in a team wives’ march across Lake Washington to protest for change.
A half-dozen Seahawks players continue to sit during the national anthem before each game, and another dozen usually don’t take the field until after the anthem ends, in protest of racial issues in our country.
Wilson was inspired by a recent visit the Seahawks had from members of King County Equity Now, a coalition of Black-led, community-based organizations who describe themselves as “working to design and realize a new normal rooted in equity.”
“They actually came to talk to us and I got to know them a little bit,” Wilson said. “And (I learned of) some of their conversations and just really working in education reform, prison reform, the inner city, community and just trying to build Black communities and wealth in the Black community.
“That’s who I have on my cleats.”
Wilson grew up in Richmond, Virginia. He attended The Collegiate School. He says he was one of its few minority students.
“I went to private schools primarily, you know, Caucasian individuals, white people,” Wilson said. “And just to be honest with you, it was — I had some amazing friends, amazing people — it was also challenging at the same time, to know that you’re the only one sometimes.
“That can be challenging in life, too, as well.”
Of race in everyday American life, Wilson says: “It’s about the condition of people’s hearts.”
“Sometimes we go through so many things in life, we lose people, and we forget about the condition of people’s hearts,” he said. “I think what God intends is for us to love everyone, to love people.”
Wilson sees his place as one of 32 NFL quarterbacks, particularly one of its several Black quarterbacks, as a platform from which to forge change. Through cleats. Through words and actions off the field.
Wilson says that platform comes with a responsibility.
“A responsibility to lead, and to love and to help people,” he said.
“It’s been a year that it’s necessary to speak about change and necessary to speak about love, necessary to bring people together and necessary to try to do whatever I can to help make change happen.
“It’s a journey. It’s a journey that takes time. It’s a journey that that you know racism has been going on for so many years. And the reality is is that something needs to change.
“If I can just be a small small small part of that change ...”
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 4:32 PM.
