Prominent Black Athletes Speak Out Against “Black Lives Matter” Movement

While has-been celebrities like John Legend are strongly promoting the race-baiting habits of the Black Lives Matter movement, two prominent black former sports stars have spoken out against the movement and criticized its shortcomings.

Former Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis posted a video back in April that has recently resurfaced following the murders of five Dallas police officers. In the video, he passionately blasts Black Lives Matter and calls the movement out on its outright hypocrisy. Lewis asks viewers, “do black lives really matter?” while reciting statistics from March 2016 on black-on-black crime rates. Nearly on the verge of tears, Lewis cited Chicago’s murder rate, saying, “In Chicago alone the murder rate has soared 72 percent in 2016 — 88 percent in the first three months of 2016 compared to the last year. I’m trying to ask the question to an organization of black lives, if they really mattered, then why not riot now?”

Lewis makes an impassioned plea to Black Lives Matter, asking them to stop dividing people based on skin color. He tells viewers, “We keep telling ourselves that black lives matter. If they really matter, let’s do ourselves a favor — let’s stop killing black folks. Let’s take it way back, to when we once was understood what slavery was all about. Slavery was about togetherness, and understanding that we must overcome together, not that we must separate ourselves to highlight our skin color.” Lewis also makes a plea to black musicians to make better decisions when writing lyrics, pleading, “Let’s write something different. Let’s give these lost children something to really envision.”

At the end of his video, Lewis pleads with viewers, “I know black lives matter, because I’m a black man, but stop killing each other. Man, we have to put these guns down in Chicago, Baltimore, Miami. Man, it ain’t that hard. You have to be okay with earning a living. It ain’t supposed to be easy. If we don’t change what we’re doing, not only will our kids not have a future, but we might find ourselves extinct.”

Former NBA star Charles Barkley echoed Ray Lewis’ sentiment this week on ESPN Radio’s The Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz. Barkley, never one to shy away from honesty, started, “We have to sit back and be honest with each other. The cops have made some mistakes. That don’t give us the right to riot and shoot cops. We need the cops, especially in the black community. We as black people, we’ve got to do better.” He continued, “We never get mad when black people kill each other, which that always has bothered me. It’s always bothered me.”

Objecting to Black Lives Matter’s methods of achieving their goals, Barkley stated “I’m not going to get on TV and yell like all these other idiots… If I’m out doing illegal stuff, stupid stuff, I’m part of the problem. If I’m helping young black kids go to college like I’m trying to do, if I’m giving money to causes to help young men, I know I’m part of the solution.”

Barkley doesn’t just talk the talk. He also walks the walk. Just last year, he donated $1M to the Wounded Warriors Foundation and $2M for higher education at Morehouse College and Auburn University, his alma-mater. In 2014, Barkley worked with information technology company CDW to use part of his salary from commercial shoots to help put new computers into poor neighborhoods and schools.

In a comment that won’t be popular with BLM protesters, Barkley stated, “First of all, there’s racism on both sides, let’s get that straight.” While delving into both the Alton Sterling shooting in Louisiana and the Philandro Castile shooting in Minneapolis. On Sterling, Barkley said, “there’s no doubt in my mind that if I’m fighting with a guy and I hear somebody scream “Gun!” and I got a gun, I’m going to shoot the guy.” On Castille, Barkley remembered a conversation with his body guard, a black police officer himself,

‘Do not put your ID where your gun is.’ He says, ‘What I think…’ He says, ‘Whether we think the cop is right or wrong…’ First of all, everything is happening in fast motion. Everybody gets to sit back and see what happens. He says, ‘What I think happened is that guy said, Can I have your ID?’ And then the next thing he said is, ‘I have a gun,’ and he reaches. And I think the cop just panicked.

After defending the police, telling Le Batard, “Let’s work with the cops, because we need the cops, Dan. If it wasn’t for the cops, we would be living in the Wild, Wild West,” Barkley concludes by echoing Ray Lewis. “Dan, I been black my whole life, and most black people I know are killed by other black people. And I never understood why there’s not more outrage about the way we treat each other as black people.”

Ray Lewis and Charles Barkley are just two of a number of prominent African Americans who have spoken up with a tone of logic and broached the real issues at hand, but as star athletes, their words could have a real impact on black youth, and could influence others to join them in their advocacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZs5IN-c0I