For all his athletic prowess, all the weight he brought to his social activism, Jim Brown’s strength stemmed from his unyielding resistance to the narrow definitions American society imposed on its black citizens and, in his case, black male athletes .
The resounding power of No. That’s what Jim Brown embodied.
Brown, who died Thursday at age 87, led a life that became an ode to self-determination in the face of stinging racism. He refused to be limited by what others said he could become. He demanded to be seen in his fullness, as a complete human being, with all sides of himself recognized. In keeping with that desire, paying tribute to his achievements cannot be done adequately without noticing his profound flaws.
But we start here with Brown’s life in sports, because his career as an athlete was truly unique.
In college at Syracuse, Brown dominated the football field as few ever have. But that’s not all. He lettered in track and field and basketball. And in lacrosse, he became an all-American and was considered one of the greatest to ever play the sport.
As a running back for the Cleveland Browns, he amassed astonishing statistics. In his nine seasons, Brown never missed a game. He won three league MVP awards and an NFL title. His average of 104.3 rushing yards per game is still a record.
Statistics only tell part of his story. His playing style – aggressive, sharp and shrewd – made special demands on the defence. He wouldn’t do the work for them. Instead of going out of bounds when dodging to the sideline, he turned onto the field and challenged defenders to take him down, forcing the opponent to deal with all his strength, speed and 230-pound body.
He made similar demands of America, refusing to be boxed in and resisting society’s impulse to flatten its humanity. Such boldness ended his football career.
In 1966, pursuing a burgeoning career as a Hollywood actor during the off-season, he was filming “The Dirty Dozen” in England when bad weather delayed production.
This was an era when team owners in professional sports regularly tried to exert dominance over players. That such aggression so often fell on black players with additional violence was part of the reason most did not stand up for their rights. But Brown was not like most players. When Cleveland owner Art Modell found out that the film’s delays would make Brown late for training camp, he threatened to fine the star of his team who returned for every day missed.
Brown did not take that threat well. He took it as such a serious insult that he decided to stop allowing Modell to benefit from his services. Still in the prime of his career at age 30, he was coming off an MVP season in which he rushed for 1,544 yards and 17 touchdowns. But he refused to be treated like just another cog in the NFL machinery, which emerged in a new era of popularity in the mid-1960s. He called a press conference and withdrew. He would not be pushed or disrespected.
Brown’s persistence in resisting power went far beyond making demands of himself. He spearheaded the wave of athlete activism that helped define the sport in the 1960s.
There was Brown, in the winter of 1964, the night Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, after the fight he met Malcolm X, the singer Sam Cooke and Clay, who later became known as Muhammad Ali. The four men spent the night discussing the ways they could best fight racism.
There he was, in the summer of 1967, summoning Ali, Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and other prominent black athletes to Cleveland. Ali had lost his heavyweight title and faced jail time for protesting the Vietnam War by refusing to be drafted into the army. Brown and the others listened to Ali explain his intentions, then bathed the boxing champion in support.
Brown became a well-known Black Uplift spokesperson. He founded an organization that promoted black economic mobility, which he saw as a more powerful means of change than street protests. He founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation, which helps people in gangs and prisons get their lives in order.
What a life. And what a statement made with that life. But there are no perfect heroes. For all his refusal to bow to power and for all his athletic conquests, Brown was also a flawed man. From the 1960s to the 1990s, he was arrested several times for violent conduct, some of which included allegations that he assaulted women.
He was never convicted of a major crime, but the allegations pointed to problems that were overshadowing him. “I can definitely get angry, and I’ve expressed that anger inappropriately in the past,” he said Sports illustrated in 2002, before adding to the confession in a way that only underlined his mistakes. “But I’ve done that with both men and women.”
Amidst the hosannas, the disturbing aspects of his life cannot be glossed over. Through his defiance he demanded to be seen as fully human, all parts of himself acknowledged, and that is how we must see him in death.