The NAACP has launched a campaign called “Out of Bounds” whose aim is to counter the race-based gerrymandered maps being drawn all over the South, that have been fueled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently wiped out key elements of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. It urges Black athletes, families, alumni and fans to boycott athletic programs at major public universities in Republican-led states, which are furiously redrawing congressional maps designed to facilitate the removal of southern Blacks from the U.S. House of Representatives. The boycott targets football and basketball programs over a region that includes scores of schools spread over eleven Division I athletic conferences with well over 100 state-funded schools. The emphasis of the boycott appears to be on those with the most athletic visibility, which are two of the power four athletic conferences: the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) located across eight states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. The implications of the proposed boycott strikes a chord with an inalienable component of life and thought in the South. The obsession with college football in those southern states crosses all boundaries of politics, race, business and social discourse, and is central to the pulse of southern culture. From stadiums filled to capacity, legendary rivalries, generational dedication to a team, spirited workplace conversations, and tailgates that resemble family reunions, football is inseparable from Southern life. As one writer describes it, “fans don’t just watch football - they live it.” It should be noted that southern football culture has always been biracial, and among Blacks, its origins are found in HBCUs, long before the integration of southern intercollegiate sports.

College basketball has also become a fixture in that region. The revenue it produces and the level of excitement it engenders among fans and alumni ranks second only to football. For reasons not clearly articulated, the NAACP’s boycott does not include the low revenue-producing sports such as tennis, lacrosse, gymnastics, wrestling, volleyball, golf, baseball and swimming - most of which have lower concentrations of Black athletes. In fact, track and field is the only non-revenue generating college sport with majority Black student athletes. While financial considerations may be the reasoning for the exemption of Black athletes in those sports from the boycott, the strategy has problems because it creates an artificial divide among Black student athletes that may fracture the solidarity and strength among them needed for the best result.

What the boycott hopes to accomplish is to threaten the competitive and financial anchors Black athletes bring to the schools whose state legislatures are moving with dispatch to eliminate majority black Congressional districts, making it exceedingly difficult for Blacks to win elections. The purpose of the boycott is to inflict economic damage and cause wider public disapproval of the gerrymandering plans that have been awarded the green light by the enabling SCOTUS decision. If Black athletes at those schools are persuaded to transfer in large numbers to schools in states that do not practice racial gerrymandering, the prevailing logic is that the football and basketball programs would be weakened competitively. Immense revenue would be lost, and the ideal domino effect would be that the fans, alumni, families, networks and financial stakeholders in those sports would be compelled to rebel against the unfair practices of the state legislatures. Thus, such a boycott would have the potential to create economic pressure on the targeted athletic programs, serve as a backdrop for social and moral protest, and raise awareness of the issues by generating media coverage and broader public conversation on the mean-spirited actions by the SCOTUS and state legislatures, actions which should be intolerable and unacceptable in a democratic society.

For such a boycott to have any chance of success, it is necessary to appreciate the enormous size, scope, and complexities of the challenge. It helps to appreciate the terrain of the rough side of the mountain the NAACP seeks to climb. A precise headcount of Black athletes in the SEC and ACC is not publicly aggregated as one static number, and because of the portal, the numbers are constantly changing and there is a heavy sport-by-sport variation. The ACC supports more than 12,200 student athletes across its 18 member universities, and the SEC has more than 7,100 student athletes among its 16 member universities. However, demographic data and analyses indicate that roughly 56% of all combined football and basketball players in the SEC and ACC are Black. In other sports, Black representation varies widely, but for the NAACP’s boycott strategy, the focal point is the revenue-generating sports of football and basketball, which account for over 90 percent of collegiate athletic revenue. Those numbers increase exponentially when southern public colleges, outside of those two conferences, are factored in. To be sure, the SEC and the ACC are the bulls-eye of the boycott, but it is a target that is likely to be more elusive and powerful than the NAACP imagines.

The NCAA generates over $15 billion in annual revenue across individual universities, athletic conferences and bowl games. The SEC generated $1.1 billion and the ACC generated $826.5 million in revenue for the 2024-25 fiscal year, both record-breaking numbers and on track to be broken again in 2025-26. The larger amounts of that money come through television, media and marketing rights much more than through gate receipts for stadium and arena events. To be sure, the marquee athletes in football and basketball are disproportionately Black and whose athletic performances are most dominant in the pipeline of college athletic revenue. The goal of the “Out of Bounds” campaign is to disrupt the revenue to the extent that it cannot be ignored by families, alumni, fans, wealthy boosters, networks, corporate sponsors, and college administrators and boards of trustees. Hopefully, the statement by the NAACP that colleges “can’t actively recruit Black athletes without also advocating for their civil rights” gains sufficient traction and support to compel those stakeholders in SEC and ACC sports to weigh-in on the gerrymandering.

No one should argue or deny that the NAACP’s goal is not a noble one, and one well aligned with the moral arch of the universe. The NAACP is also no stranger to boycotts, some of which have had better result than others: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 was supported and organized by the NAACP; the State of South Carolina Boycott (1999-2015) which combined with other incidents changed a state climate, making it easier for the removal of the Confederate flag from the State Capitol; the Mississippi Boycott (1966-72) of white-owned merchants in Natchez and Jackson, demanding fair hiring practices, desegregation, and an end to police brutality; the Florida Travel Advisory (2024) issuing a boycott and travel advisory by discouraging both tourism and “student athletes” from visiting or attending colleges in Florida due to the state’s elimination of DEI policies and restrictions imposed on the teaching of Black history. In the area of sports, what is lesser known is the failed effort of Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, to persuade Jesse Owens and other Black athletes to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, for the purpose of forcing the USA to examine its racial policies against Blacks, as well as to compare and bring wider exposure to the Nazi sanctioned antisemitic practices and outbursts of violence against Jewish people in Germany.

What makes this proposed NAACP protest-boycott different, and is perhaps its weakest link, is that it has been conceived by the NAACP without input from the Black student athletes themselves. Obviously, what has been proposed has no chance of success without large scale buy-in from those whose current school commitments must be disengaged, and whose personal athletic aspirations are more vulnerable to backlash and repercussions. What the boycott asks of them comes with more personal risks and possible adverse consequences than it does for anyone else. No college, state or league of professional sports has ever welcomed or been receptive to Black athlete protest. If it happens, this one will be no different and the penalties will be costly for untold many. “We must not ask Black athletes,” says sports scholar Harry Edwards,” to squander their hard won power resources for lack of thorough analyses and planning.” All athletes are not created equally and one size - in terms of value to an athletic program – one size will not fit all. Those most susceptible to backlash will not be the smaller number of premier athletes, but the much larger number of those who are more expendable and who would likely be replaced by other more compliant Black athletes. Aside from the premier athletes, there is no shortage of Black athletes in the athletic pool who would likely jump at the opportunity to play football or basketball for prestigious southern college athletic programs. There are financial opportunities in college sports today that are lucrative enough for athletes to break generational family poverty cycles or to decidedly move families in that direction.

It is unrealistic to expect these young men and women to become potential martyrs for the cause. What the past has taught us is that successful Black athlete protest movements have one fundamental characteristic, they have been conceived and orchestrated largely by the athletes themselves. For example, the Olympic Project for Human Rights of 1968 was a student movement led by then student activist Harry Edwards of San Jose State. And while it fell short in its call for a Black athlete boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, it resulted in the most iconic and enduring symbol of Black athlete protest with the black gloved, raised arms, and tight fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. A number of student-led protests - all calling for campus centered respect of blackness and social justice - inflamed the late 1960s college football and basketball seasons at Wyoming, Toledo, Oregon State, Indiana and the University of Washington among many others. Results were mixed but with each protest the students determined the extent and parameters of their involvement. The same could be said of the most successful protest by professional Black athletes in 1965 when the Black players selected for the All-Star game of the American Football League decided on short notice to boycott the All-Star game in New Orleans when they were met with hostility in the French Quarter from policemen and business establishment owners who subjected them to racial discrimination by refusing service in several segregated facilities. The boycott resulted in the game being played at a later date in Houston, Texas. Several of the leaders of the boycott angered the team owners and were either traded or demoted the following season.

But the boycott was productive and changed many of the racial discriminatory policies and practices of southern cities with professional sports teams. Again, progress was made with the protest but the price was costly for many of those involved. There is no way to avoid risks and damage to untold numbers of Black student athletes who may leave schools in the gerrymandered states for schools located elsewhere, especially for those who are not destined for professional sports - and those are the overwhelming majority of Black student athletes in all sports. They are the most vulnerable and most expendable in the scheme of the boycott. As much as many would like to think otherwise, there is a strong possibility that those athletes would be replaced by other Black athletes who dream of the exposure and benefits of playing in the prestigious ACC and the SEC and other conferences that are springboards for careers as professional athletes. The soul searching question coming from all of this quagmire is should athletically talented young Black men and women be expected to more or less risk NIL monies, confirmed booster financed stipends, endorsements, team relationships and preferred coaches as their contribution to the NAACP’s boycott whose strategy they had no part in planning or developing, but are expected to implement.

In many ways, what the NAACP is proposing with project “Out of Bounds” is more challenging in terms of producing measurable outcomes, because of the wide range of formidable issues and intractable obstacles that would have to be overcome. The first and foremost, among others, has to do with the practicality and logistics of several thousand Black student athletes transferring from ACC, SEC and other southern conference schools to those located in states where such GOP racially inspired gerrymandering has not occurred. It would be these multiple thousands of athletes in football and basketball alone who would assume the heaviest personal burden of the boycott. In those two conferences, the boycott will also affect the Black head coaches in those sports (7 women and 2 men in the SEC) and (3 women and 9 men in the ACC), and several hundred Black assistant coaches. For that group of employees, whose jobs are to recruit and coach the best athletes for their respective programs, the boycott will expose them to a perplexing professional dilemma, placing them literally between a rock and a hard place. They cannot perform or maintain their employment with loyalties split between the boycott and their assigned duties. Imagine the dilemma this would cause Dawn Staley, basketball coach at South Carolina whose team draws more revenue than does that of Lamont Paris, Black coach of the men’s team at the same school. If she agrees with the NAACP’s current plans then she, too, would have to resign and go elsewhere, because her team is largely Black and so is she.

Looming over all of this is a risky and untested assumption that all Black athletes who would either chose to not attend or to transfer from the schools in those southern conferences would find equitable financial arrangements elsewhere, or that all of the Black athletes in those two sports could be absorbed in the other two power conferences - Big Ten and Big 12 Conferences - and others, without displacing many of their counterparts currently at those schools. Only in the power conferences do the athletes secure NIL deals ranging from the double-digit thousands to the multi-million dollar contracts. Further, outside of those power conferences and at mid-major conferences where their athletic talents would be welcomed, the NIL money for most would be much smaller or non-existent. It has been suggested that HBCU athletic programs could benefit from the boycott, but by that same token it would be a disservice to ask those SEC and ACC athletes to consider HBCUs for several unavoidable reasons: HBCU sports do not generate even a fraction of the revenue of the power conference schools or even the lower financed mid-major ones; they offer no comparable NIL deals, and most offer none; and HBCU athletic programs do not have the infrastructures to support the athletic development of those who hope to become professional athletes. It has been over a decade since an HBCU player was selected in the NBA draft, and the last 3 NFL drafts included only one HBCU player - ironically a White place kicker. The results for HBCU basketball is no different, and in both sports at HBCUs, the very best athletes are encouraged to enter the portal after one year, and move on to PWIs, which offer money and better athletic competition. Bottom line, HBCUs are not safety nets or the best options for Black athletes of SEC and ACC quality.

The NAACP “Out of Bounds” initiative says nothing about developing collaborations with the Presidents, Chancellors, Board of Trustees and prominent boosters of those ACC and SEC schools for the prospects of encouraging them to speak out and take firm positions against the gerrymandering. Further, the NAACP’s efforts must include dialogue with the major media networks that purchase broadcasting rights, and the major corporations and influential wealthy persons who purchase expensive luxury boxes for entertainment at collegiate sports events. But, most of all, there must be an appeal to the boosters who underwrite most of the financial deals offered to the most talented and expensive of the Black athletes. They, too, must be leveraged against the designed scheme for some states to eliminate Black representation in Congress and to reduce it at the state levels.

One thing is clear above all others with the NAACP’s plans, and it may be difficult to accept. There will be no immediate outward migration of super talented Black athletes from the SEC and the ACC, and long term prospects may not be any better. Unfortunately, what is even more disappointing but undeniably real, is that it is implausible that the current SCOTUS will reconsider its castration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Moreover, and regrettably, it is immune from NAACP pressure or that of others who find their decision to be hateful and reprehensible. Along with the proposed boycott, there are other emerging anti-gerrymandering models that should be explored. For example, the NAACP should closely examine what happened in South Carolina when the GOP majority state legislature rejected plans to eliminate the one Democratic seat - held by James Clyburn - it has in the U.S. House of Representatives. The decision to save Clyburn’s seat is not carved in stone and may be temporary, but it is a hopeful sign that democracy in some places can be salvaged. The NAACP might also recognize that what it has listed as its concerns about the racial gerrymandering is shared by others, especially leaders and members of the Democratic Party who understand that for every Black seat in Congress lost to gerrymandering, it is also a seat lost to the Democratic party. The 6 listed goals of the NAACP’s protest are the same of the Democratic Party and others who oppose the race-driven gerrymandering schemes. By way of summary, it is specifically asking those states to:

• Adopt state Voting Rights Act

• Withdraw or repeal maps that dilute Black voting power

• Restore congressional and or judicial districts that reflect the state’s Black population and voting strength

• Commit to transparent community-centered redistricting processes

• Protect districts where Black voters have the opportunity to elect candidates of choice

• Stop using state power to weaken Black representation while public institutions profit from Black talent

The proposed Black athlete boycott will likely be a hard sell to southern Black college athletes, but if the NAACP re-calibrates and reaches out to collaborate with other advocacy organizations, labor unions, ethnic minority and progressive political caucuses, leaders of southern colleges, college coaches, and especially Republicans who are not inclined to support the most egregious of the gerrymandering, it would broaden the base of the protest, increasing the chances for pockets of success such as what happened in the South Carolina state legislature. It is not too late for the NAACP to reassess the proposed boycott and the shortcomings in its planning which must be more inclusive and be more informed about the structure, nuances and complexities of the world of major college sports. Activism removed from strategic planning and analyses is destined to fail, creating confusion, turmoil, and disappointment. For this protest to have any chance of widespread success, the NAACP would do well to go back to the drawing board - even the most noble of plans often require finer tuning.