Congressional Black Caucus shuts down bill affecting Black student athletes as calls for boycotts regarding GOP gerrymandering expand
TheGrio...
One week after joining the NAACP in its call for Black student athletes to boycott Southern states participating in gerrymandering and redrawing of districts, the CBC is pressing the issue even further.
The Congressional Black Caucus has torpedoed a bill that NCAA leaders sought to help stabilize the rapid expansion of paying college athletes, while simultaneously calling on businesses nationwide to oppose a massive redistricting push enacted by the GOP.
Members of the CBC stated they would not vote for any legislation that “benefits major athletic institutions that continue to remain silent while Black voting rights and Black political power are being systematically dismantled across the South.”
It’s a major reversal from the caucus’s previous stance, in which select members said they favored the SCORE Act. Several Black lawmakers across both parties vocalized their displeasure with the act, including Republican Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, who argued that the bill would give the NCAA too much power over student-athletes and was concerned that Congress “shouldn’t move Heaven and Earth for the NCAA.”
“For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in American life,” the caucus said in a statement. “Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”
“This is not politics as usual. This is a defining moral moment for our country.”
The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act or SCORE Act, aims to grant the NCAA a limited antitrust provision that would have kept it out of potential lawsuits regarding players’ name, image and likeness rights, endorsements, transfer portal limitations and eligibility requirements. President Donald Trump, a vocal supporter of the bill, recently called several notable figures in college sports, including former Alabama head football coach Nick Saban, to push for its passage. Without the CBC’s vote, the bill was pulled from the House floor.
The move comes on the heels of the NAACP calling for a boycott of Black student athletes from attending schools in southern states that are involved in stripping voting rights from Black-led voting districts in the wake of April’s Supreme Court ruling that further gutted the Voting Rights Act.
The Caucus’s outreach continued with letters to over 250 businesses nationwide, urging company leaders to take a strong and measured stance against GOP efforts to redraw maps in what the Caucus believes are “coordinated efforts to silence Black voices at the ballot box.” Of the companies that received letters, several had pledged to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
That 2021 Coalition, Business for Voting Rights, included businesses such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Salesforce, Target, PayPal, Intel and Starbucks and the urging by the CBC comes nearly six years to the day of the death of George Floyd, which signaled radical change in DEI practices at those companies.
“Many companies that previously issued statements after the murder of George Floyd, pledged billions toward racial equity initiatives, and spoke forcefully in defense of democracy following January 6 now face a defining test of whether those commitments were rooted in principle or convenience,” the caucus’ letter states.
Some of those corporations have rolled back their DEI practices, such as Target, which became the subject of a nationwide boycott that began in Minneapolis and spread elsewhere.
“Corporations that have profited from Black consumers, relied on Black workers, and amassed wealth in part from Black communities cannot look away while Black political power is dismantled in plain sight,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, chair of the Black Caucus, said.