A New York Daily News columnist says those who despise Colin Kaepernick for staying seated during "The Star-Spangled Banner" must also hate Jackie Robinson, baseball's first African-American player who said years after playing he could no longer stand for the National Anthem.
"Jackie Robinson is the quintessential American hero, not only because he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, but because he was also one of the best to ever play the game," Shaun King wrote in Wednesday's editions.
Yet, in his final days, as he reflected back over his life, he said something terribly inconvenient in his autobiography . . . 'As I write this 20 years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.'''
King says Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback whose bench-sitting stunt sparked outrage last week, is in the same predicament.
"If Colin Kaepernick needs to 'move back to Africa' or 'leave this country,' as some of his harshest critics have argued, then you must also hate Jackie Robinson. I doubt even Donald Trump would admit that though," he wrote.
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