by disrupting the national anthem, it was just to bring to light the ways that, you know, there is this tension between what we say we are and what we are and what we say we do and how things actually play out in reality.

Welcome to the Edge of Sports podcast. I'm Dave Ziron.

This week we talked to the person who was the first athlete to protest for black lives and against police violence during the national anthem. It wasn't Colin Kaepernick.

In fact, happened two years before Kaepernick took that knee. It was Knox College basketball player

Ariana Smith. We catch up with her today. Find out what's been going on with her these last

six years and whether she feels any sense of vindication about what's happening. Also, I've got some

choice words about the state of college football and more. But first, Ariana Smith.

So, Ariana, just first and foremost, walk us through what happened in 2014 when you were playing for Knox College, what you did and why you did it.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, the reason why I did what I did was because I felt the urgency to address some of the just agreed cases of ignoring the tragedy of the killing of Michael

Brown.

So actually, our basketball team went to play in Clayton, Missouri, where the city chose

not to indict the officer who killed Michael Brown.

It's one thing to have a tragedy happen or to have someone go berserk or, or rather,

I should just say, you know, it's one thing to have someone commit an extrajudicial killing.

But then it's an entirely different thing for the city or the people in that city to then say we're okay with this

and we accept this as just a natural consequence that was unacceptable so when I found out that

we were going to Clayton I you know confirmed that that wasn't because I had heard the name

of Clayton Missouri but I I wasn't exactly sure if that I was, I was almost, you know, like, what are the odds that we would be going to this city at this particular time that our roster that was set up weeks, months in advance, would just happen to be at this place at this time.

And so, in a lot of ways, you know, I've never said this before,

but I don't know, some alignment of fate must have put me in that position at that time

to step up and say what needed to be said and do what needed to be done.

So essentially what I did was a on-court demonstration of the way that black people have experienced violence

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