By Nate Abraham Jr.
EDITORIAL
The NAACP’s recent call for Black student-athletes to boycott Southeastern Conference football and basketball programs will garner a lot of media attention, but it will fail. It will only harm the very young people it claims to protect.
The SEC, like much of the South, has a long and complicated relationship with race. No one denies that fact. But we should also be honest about how much has changed—and who stands to lose if we pretend otherwise.
For many Black athletes, SEC programs are not just pipelines to professional sports; they are pathways to education, economic mobility, and long-term opportunity. Scholarships, national exposure, alumni networks, and institutional resources provide tangible benefits that extend well beyond the playing field. A boycott would not punish institutions in the abstract—it would close doors for thousands of young men and women working to build better futures for themselves and their families.
This isn’t the first time the NAACP has called for a sports boycott. In 1989, the Conway SC NAACP branch demanded that Black football players at Conway High School sit out the season because their coach replaced a Black quarterback with a white one. That talented team had many players who had a chance to earn college scholarships.
The star of the team was Lawrence Mitchell, one of the top-ranked defensive linemen in the nation. The NAACP put tremendous pressure on his grandmother to keep Mitchell from breaking the boycott and returning to the team. Fortunately for Mitchell, he had already signed a letter of intent to play for the University of South Carolina. But many of his teammates were not as fortunate. They didn’t get to showcase their talents and earn scholarships.
What was the result of this boycott? Conway NAACP leader H.H. Singleton got national attention, the chapter was named Chapter of the Year and Singleton eventually got a seat on the NAACP National Board. The football players lost a chance to earn college scholarships. Was their sacrifice worth it?
Boycotts can be powerful tools, but only when they are precise, unified, and paired with achievable demands. This proposal feels broad and blunt. It targets entire programs rather than specific policies, and it offers little clarity on what success would look like. Without that clarity, the risk is not reform, but confusion. You can’t have a boycott without a clear, achievable goal.
Boycotting Asian Businesses
Locally, there has been calls for Black folks to boycott Asian businesses in the wake of the not guilty verdict in the trial of Rick Chow. Chow chased 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton out of his convenience store and shoot him in the back, killing him.
There is a long history of activists demanding Black boycotts of local businesses. Over the past few years, Black folks were supposed to boycott Asian-owned gas stations on North Main and Farrow Roads for not allowing Black patrons to use the bathrooms, boycott a beauty supply store on Beltline for mistreating Black customers, boycott another gas station on Harden Street because the owner verbally assaulted a Black woman – the list goes on and on. These calls for boycotts generate headlines, but that’s all they do. It does not improve the lives of African-Americans.
And it never will because our strategy as a people has completely wrong for decades. Nothing illustrates this misguided strategy better than another “protest” during the 1980s. Local Black folks were encouraged to go to Victory Savings Bank, exchange their cash for $2 bills and Susan B. Anthony dollar coins and make all their purchases using these forms of payment. The stated goal of the protest was to showcase Black spending power and prove to white business owners that the success of their businesses was dependent on the “Black dollar.”
I remember writing back then about how stupid this was. Every business owner knows who his or her customers are. This protest only gave them something to laugh about on the way to the bank. They were still making them rich.
These geniuses never understood that the goal for Black folks should always be to build and financially support OUR OWN businesses – just like every other ethnic group in America. It is damn stupid for Black folks to spend 95 cents out of every dollar outside of our community. We are boycotting ourselves.
America runs on capitalism. Why are African-Americans the only people who do not understand that? We are at the bottom of every category because we don’t own and control the businesses in our own community. Do you think that Asians or Hispanics would line up to patronize a Black-owned business in their neighborhoods? No, they would set up a business to COMPETE with it so they can keep their money in their own community. Their goal is to own and control economic assets. Our goal is to make them rich while demanding respect. But respect comes from ownership.
Winners want to compete and own things. Winners do not call for boycotts because they own the businesses in their community.
If we controlled the businesses in our community, Rick Chow would have never been in a position to shoot Belton – and get away with it.
If you want to boycott something, knock yourself out. But don’t fool yourself. The only way to really make a difference is to build and grow businesses in our community.