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Colin Kaepernick, the controversial quarterback whose protest of police brutality and racism in America have sent shock waves through the NFL, has been named “Citizen of the Year” by GQ magazine.

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Colin Kaepernick, the controversial quarterback whose protest of police brutality and racism in America have sent shock waves through the NFL, has been named "Citizen of the Year" by GQ magazine.

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback is featured on the cover of of the magazine, staring ahead with lips pursed. The GQ story - titled "Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced" - manages to not quote the football star-turned civil rights defender a single time. Kaepernick, the article says, has "grown wise to the power of his silence."

But that silence has become deafening in the past several months, as the once small protest of kneeling during America's national anthem has spread. Fuelled by anti-protest comments from President Donald Trump, players began kneeling during the anthem - or not showing up at all - en mass earlier this football season.

"Colin also made it clear to us that he intended to remain silent," the GQ story reads. "As his public identity has begun to shift from football star to embattled activist, he has grown wise to the power of his silence. It has helped his story go around the world. It has even provoked the ire and ill temper of Donald Trump."

Kaepernick tweeted Monday that he was "honored" by the distinction bestowed upon him by the magazine.

Since beginning his protest last year, Kaepernick has found himself without a NFL position, leading some to wonder if that exclusion was at least in part politically motivated. Even so, he's focused a good portion of his time on the activism that appears likely to become the defining aspect of his career.

Presenting @Kaepernick7's 2017 GQ Men of the Year cover https://t.co/HZE8XctcIA pic.twitter.com/z4aaNhyEVE
- GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) November 13, 2017

Kaepernick's former teammate, Eric Reid, who also protested with Kaepernick last year, has continued to kneel. He says that Kaepernick deserves to be back on the field playing professional football.

"My goal this year has been to get the narrative back on track," Reid said. "We started having communications with the NFL, and they said they're going to help us make progress on these issues. But the next step is to get Colin back in the NFL. Because he's the one that started this. I think we're finally getting where me and Colin envision this going. Now it's time for him to get back in the league."

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Colin Kaepernick has been named 'citizen of the year' by GQ

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Colin Kaepernick, the controversial quarterback whose protest of police brutality and racism in America have sent shock waves through the NFL, has been named "Citizen of the Year" by GQ magazine. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback is featured on the cover of of the magazine, staring ahead with lips pursed.

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Independent (2017) Colin Kaepernick files lawsuit against the NFL accusing owners of colluding against him. Independent. Read on May 22nd 2018, at

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Colin Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing the 32 owners of collusion.

Former San Francisco quarterback Kaepernick has remained unemployed through the first six weeks of the NFL season after leaving the 49ers in the offseason, even when injuries to other starting quarterbacks left teams in need of help at the position.

"We can confirm that this morning we filed a grievance under the CBA on behalf of Colin Kaepernick," his attorney Mark Geragos said in a statement. "This was done only after pursuing every possible avenue with all NFL teams and their executives.

"If the NFL (as well as all professional sports leagues) is to remain a meritocracy, then principled and peaceful political protests -- which the owners themselves made great theater imitating weeks ago -- should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.

"Such a precedent threatens all patriotic Americans and harkens back to our darkest days as a nation. Protecting all athletes from such collusive conduct is what compelled Mr. Kaepernick to file his grievance. Colin Kaepernick's goal has always been, and remains, to simply be treated fairly by the league he performed at the highest level for and to return to the football playing field."

The 29-year-old says his agent reached out to all 32 teams to make sure they were aware of his interest in playing this season.

Kaepernick has been a controversial figure since he first sat and then knelt during the national anthem before games with the 49ers in the 2016 season. The move was the beginning of what turned into league-wide protests earlier this season after U.S. president Donald Trump made critical comments of players who don't stand for the national anthem.

Kaepernick and his legal team are claiming the owners violated terms of the collective bargaining agreement, specifically a clause that prohibits teams from acting together in regards to a player's employments status.

"No club, its employees or agents shall enter into any agreement, express or implied, with the NFL or any other club, its employees or agents to restrict or limit individual club decision-making," the CBA states, adding that the clause applies to "whether to negotiate or not to negotiate with any player" and "whether to offer or not to offer a Player Contract to any player."

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has stated on multiple occasions this season that Kaepernick is not being blackballed.

The Players Association said it will back Kaepernick in his fight against the NFL and is in the process of scheduling a conference call with his advisors for early this week.
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Colin Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing the 32 owners of collusion. Former San Francisco quarterback Kaepernick has remained unemployed through the first six weeks of the NFL season after leaving the 49ers in the offseason, even when injuries to other starting quarterbacks left teams in need of help at the position.

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From Dale  Hansen's speech: "College kids in the 60s had no right to protest an immoral war" (Vietnam war protests:

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Antiwar Movement Begins

In August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. By the time U.S. planes began regular bombings of North Vietnam in February 1965, some critics had begun to question the government's assertion that it was fighting a democratic war to liberate the South Vietnamese people from Communist aggression.

The antiwar movement began mostly on college campuses, as members of the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began organizing "teach-ins" to express their opposition to the way in which it was being conducted.

Though the vast majority of the American population still supported U.S. government policy in the Vietnam War, a small but outspoken minority was making its voice heard by the end of 1965, especially after Johnson began an increasingly aggressive air and ground war in Vietnam.

This vocal minority included many students as well as prominent artists, intellectuals and members of the "hippie" movement, i.e., the growing number of mostly young people who rejected authority and embraced the counterculture.

Did you know? Boxer Muhammad Ali was one prominent American who resisted being drafted into service during the Vietnam War. Ali, then heavyweight champion of the world, declared himself a "conscientious objector," earning a prison sentence (later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court) and a three-year ban from boxing.

Widespread Disillusionment

By November 1967, American troop strength in Vietnam was approaching 500,000 and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. The Vietnam War was costing the United States some $25 billion per year, and disillusionment was beginning to reach greater sections of the taxpaying public.

More casualties were reported in Vietnam every day, even as U.S. commanders demanded more troops. Under the draft system of conscription, as many as 40,000 young men were called into service every month, adding fuel to the fire of the antiwar movement.

On October 21, 1967, one of the most prominent antiwar demonstrations took place as some 100,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial-around 30,000 of them continued in a march on the Pentagon later that night.

After a brutal confrontation with the soldiers and U.S. Marshals protecting the building, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. One of them was the author Norman Mailer, who chronicled the events in his book "The Armies of the Night," published the following year to widespread acclaim.

Also in 1967, the antiwar movement got a big boost when the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. went public with his opposition to the war on moral grounds, condemning the war's diversion of federal funds from domestic programs as well as the disproportionate number of Black casualties in relation to the total number of soldiers killed in the war.

At a march of over 5,000 protestors in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1967, King called the Vietnam War "a blasphemy against all that America stands for."

Vietnam War Protest Songs

The Vietnam War protest inspired many popular songs that became an anthem for that generation. Phil Ochs wrote "What Are You Fighting For?" in 1963 and "I Ain't Marching Anymore" in 1965. Other songs whose very titles were a protest themselves included Pete Seeger's "Bring 'Em Home" (1966) and Joan Baez 's "Saigon Bride" (1967).

Nina Simone's "Backlash Blues" (1967) took a civil rights poem by Langston Hughes and adapted it into a protest of Vietnam: "Raise my taxes/Freeze my wages/Send my son to Vietnam." Marvin Gaye 's "What's Going On?" from 1971 went on to be one of the most popular songs of all time.

John Lennon's first song after leaving the Beatles, "Give Peace a Chance," hit airwaves in 1966. " Imagine," from 1971, has transcended the Vietnam era to be a timeless song of peace and unity.

Political Consequences of Vietnam War Protests

The launch of the Tet Offensive by North Vietnamese communist troops in January 1968, and its success against U.S. and South Vietnamese troops, sent waves of shock and discontent across the home front and sparked a most intense period of antiwar protests. By February 1968, a Gallup poll showed only 35 percent of the population approved of Johnson's handling of the war and a full 50 percent disapproved.

Joining the antiwar demonstrations by this time were members of the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War, many of whom were in wheelchairs and on crutches. The sight of these men on television throwing away the medals they had won during the war did much to win people over to the antiwar cause.

After many 1968 New Hampshire primary voters rallied behind the antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy, President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.

Later that year, Hubert Humphrey accepted the Democratic nomination for president at the 1968 Democratic Convention, held at Chicago's International Amphitheatre. Meanwhile, outside the convention hall, 10,000 antiwar demonstrators showed up, clashing violently with security forces assembled by Mayor Richard Daley.

Humphrey lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard M. Nixon, who promised in his campaign to restore "law and order"-a reference to conflict over antiwar protests as well as the rioting that followed King's assassination in 1968-more effectively than Johnson had.

Silent Majority

The following year, Nixon claimed in a famous speech that antiwar protesters constituted a small-albeit vocal-minority that should not be allowed to drown out the "silent majority" of Americans. Nixon's war policies divided the nation still further, however: In December 1969, the government instituted the first U.S. draft lottery since World War II, inciting a vast amount of controversy and causing many young men to flee to Canada to avoid conscription.

Tensions ran higher than ever, spurred on by mass demonstrations and incidents of violence by officials such those at Kent State in May 1970, when National Guard troops shot into a group of protesters demonstrating against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four students.

At the Mayday Protest in 1971, thousands of antiwar protestors tried to shut down Washington, D.C., completely, all but crippling the U.S. government. Traffic was stopped for a few hours, and CIA director Richard Helms later remarked that Mayday was "one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the [Nixon] administration to try and find some way to get out of the war."

Vietnam War Ends

As antiwar fervor grew, in mid-1971, Daniel Ellsberg brought about the publication of the Pentagon Papers -which revealed previously confidential details about the war's conduct-and misconduct by government and military officials. Ellsberg called the Pentagon Papers "evidence of a quarter-century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder."

These and other revelations caused more and more Americans to doubt the accountability of the U.S. government and the integrity of the U.S. military establishment.

Finally, in response to an almost overwhelming antiwar mandate, Nixon announced the effective end to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in January 1973. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, effectively ending the Vietnam War.

Sources

Vietnam War. Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium: University of Washington.
Anti-War Protests of the 1960s-70s. The White House Historical Association.
Anti-War Movement. PBS.

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Vietnam War Protests: Antiwar & Protest Songs - HISTORY

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Vietnam War protests began among antiwar activists and students, then gained prominence in 1965 when the U.S. military began bombing North Vietnam heavily.

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From Dale Hansen's speech "Young black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter"

He talks about these sit-ins in the 1960s

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The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. Though many of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate and lasting impact, forcing Woolworth's and other establishments to change their segregationist policies.

Greensboro Four

The Greensboro Four were four young Black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro: Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College.

They were influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress for Racial Equality ( CORE) in 1947, in which interracial activists rode across the South in buses to test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate bus travel.

The Greensboro Four, as they became known, had also been spurred to action by the brutal murder in 1955 of a young Black boy, Emmett Till, who had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi store.

Did you know? The former Woolworth's in Greensboro now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which features a restored version of the lunch counter where the Greensboro Four sat. Part of the original counter is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Sit-In Begins

Blair, Richmond, McCain and McNeil planned their protest carefully, and enlisted the help of a local white businessman, Ralph Johns, to put their plan into action.

On February 1, 1960, the four students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro, where the official policy was to refuse service to anyone but whites. Denied service, the four young men refused to give up their seats.

Police arrived on the scene but were unable to take action due to the lack of provocation. By that time, Johns had already alerted the local media, who had arrived in full force to cover the events on television. The Greensboro Four stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with more students from local colleges.

Sit-Ins Spread Nationwide

By February 5, some 300 students had joined the protest at Woolworth's, paralyzing the lunch counter and other local businesses. Heavy television coverage of the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a sit-in movement that quickly spread to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people joined in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, beaches, hotels and other establishments.

Some of the first sit-ins during the civil rights movement were organized by history teacher Clara Luper and the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City in 1958. By the end of March 1960, the movement had spread to 55 cities in 13 states. Though many were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, national media coverage of the sit-ins brought increasing attention to the civil rights movement.

In response to the success of the sit-in movement, dining facilities across the South were being integrated by the summer of 1960. At the end of July, when many local college students were on summer vacation, the Greensboro Woolworth's quietly integrated its lunch counter. Four Black Woolworth's employees-Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones and Charles Best-were the first to be served.

SNCC

To capitalize on the momentum of the sit-in movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960.

Over the next few years, SNCC served as one of the leading forces in the civil rights movement, organizing Freedom Rides through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his seminal " I Have a Dream " speech.

SNCC worked alongside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) to push passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and would later mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War.

As its members faced increased violence, however, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the "Black Power" philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC's chairman from 1966-67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC had lost much of its mainstream support and was effectively disbanded.

Greensboro Sit-In Impact

The Greensboro Sit-In was a critical turning point in Black history and American history, bringing the fight for civil rights to the national stage. Its use of nonviolence inspired the Freedom Riders and others to take up the cause of integration in the South, furthering the cause of equal rights in the United States.

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Greensboro Sit-In - Facts, Date & Definition | HISTORY

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The Greensboro Sit-in was a major civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young Black students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service.

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President Donald Trump slammed the NFL’s rule changes that were implemented to reduce head injuries and called on team owners to fire players who kneel during the national anthem as an act of protest.

Speaking at a rally in Huntsville, Ala., Friday night to campaign for Sen. Luther Strange, Trump said that attendees of NFL games should walk out of the stadium if a player opts to kneel during the anthem. NFL players have been responding to Trump on Twitter.

The NFL has been mired in controversy since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began the kneeling to protest police brutality against black people. Several other athletes, including a number of NFL players, have followed suit. Kaepernick has not been signed to any NFL teams since his contract with the 49ers expired at the end of last season.

Read Trump’s remarks at Friday night’s rally below:

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!” You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, “That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.” And that owner, they don’t know it. They don’t know it. They’ll be the most popular person, for a week. They’ll be the most popular person in this country.

When the NFL ratings are down massively, massively. The NFL ratings are down massively. Now the number one reason happens to be they like watching what’s happening… with yours truly. They like what’s happening. Because you know today if you hit too hard—15 yards! Throw him out of the game! They had that last week. I watched for a couple of minutes. Two guys, just really beautiful tackle. Boom, 15 yards! The referee gets on television, his wife is sitting at home, she’s so proud of him. They’re ruining the game! They’re ruining the game. That’s what they want to do. They want to hit! It is hurting the game.

But you know what’s hurting the game more than that? When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem. The only thing you could do better is if you see it, even if it’s one player, leave the stadium, I guarantee things will stop. Things will stop. Just pick up and leave. Pick up and leave. Not the same game anymore, anyway.

Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Read Everything Donald Trump Said About the NFL

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President Trump slammed the NFL's rule changes to reduce injuries and called on owners to fire players who kneel during the national anthem

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Hansen Unplugged: Anthem protests not about disrespecting the flag