A sophomore basketball player wondered how to show his distress about a pro-Confederate rally on campus last weekend. A call to his family led to a decision that drew in other members of the team.
OXFORD, Miss. — As the news began to percolate that pro-Confederate and white supremacist groups were planning to march at the University of Mississippi last Saturday, Devontae Shuler was becoming increasingly anxious. The violence that had unfolded at similar events in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 had crossed his mind, a menacing video was circulating on social media and Shuler wondered if he and other African-Americans might somehow become targets of physical attacks.
So, last Friday, he did what he often does when something troubles him: He called his mother.
Laura Shuler patched in her oldest son, D. J., and they listened as Devontae, a sophomore guard on the Ole Miss basketball team, relayed the depths of his feelings. Troubled by the mood on campus, he was considering sitting out his team’s game against Georgia. His brother, though, noted an action like that was more likely to punish his team, and himself.
Perhaps, D. J. Shuler suggested, he could take a knee during the national anthem instead. Devontae said he would think it over. The next afternoon, shortly before the game, Laura’s phone rang.
“He said, ‘Momma, I’m going to do it,’” Laura said.
Since Colin Kaepernick first knelt for the national anthem during an N.F.L. exhibition game more than two years ago, his calibrated gesture — meant to call attention to racism, social injustice and police brutality against people of color — has evolved into a broader distress signal. High school teams have used the gesture to show support for their minority peers. Notre Dame students invoked it as an expression of faith. And Jewish students in South Africa even did it during Israel’s national anthem to show support for Palestinians.
At Ole Miss, however, a place steeped in the history of civil rights and racism in the United States, the gesture hewed closer to Kaepernick’s aim, directed at a specific race-related incident on campus that the players wanted to protest.
But in a broader sense, said Brian Foster, an assistant professor of sociology and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, the gesture has become about one word:
“Agency,” said Foster, who studies race, culture, inequality and the rural South. “It signifies the capacity for anyone, but especially black folks, to make a personal claim, to take a stance about an injustice that they think should be different or is unfair.”
In that vein, Shuler — in his first public comments since Saturday’s protest — affirmed in two interviews this week what Breein Tyree, one of the seven teammates who followed him in taking a knee, and his coach, Kermit Davis, had said after Saturday’s game: The gesture was directed only at what was happening on campus last weekend.
“I felt like I needed to stand up for my rights for righteousness sake,” Shuler said. “My emotions were just for the students. I didn’t want anything to happen with us playing that game while the protest was going on. I felt like I couldn’t pass that moment by without making a difference.”
He said he was not planning on taking a knee Wednesday night when the Rebels host seventh-ranked Tennessee.
“It’s definitely a one-time thing,” he said.
