The Question That Was Always There
Who profits from Black athletic labor?
This question runs through every lesson in this unit. In the Negro Leagues, the answer was: largely Black-owned institutions and Black communities. After integration, the answer shifted: white-owned major league teams, white-owned universities, white-owned networks and media companies.
The modern debate about Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rights in college athletics, about athlete activism and league responses, and about Black ownership in professional sports is the same question in contemporary form. It has not been resolved. It has barely been addressed.
The College Athletics Model: Structural Exploitation
For most of the 20th century, college athletics operated under a system that:
- Generated billions of dollars in revenue for universities and the NCAA
- Prohibited athletes from receiving any compensation beyond scholarships
- Disproportionately relied on Black athletic labor — particularly in revenue sports like football and basketball — while those revenues funded facilities, coaching salaries, and non-revenue sports that were disproportionately white
- Defended this arrangement through the concept of "amateurism" — the idea that college athletes were students first and that payment would corrupt the educational mission
The racial dimension was explicit to anyone who looked: the athletes generating the most revenue were disproportionately Black. The coaches collecting seven-figure salaries were disproportionately white. The universities keeping the money were overwhelmingly white institutions. The athletic directors and administrators capturing revenue were overwhelmingly white.
Duke University economist William A. Darity Jr. calculated that if NCAA football and basketball players received compensation proportional to their revenue generation — as professional athletes do — the average Power Five football player would earn approximately $360,000 per year. They earned zero.
NIL: The Partial Opening
In 2021, following a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Alston and subsequent rule changes, the NCAA permitted college athletes to profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness for the first time.
NIL was a genuine change. Athletes can now sign endorsement deals, run their own social media businesses, and receive compensation for appearances. Some college athletes — primarily high-profile football and basketball players — now earn substantial NIL income.
But NIL is not revenue sharing. The universities still keep the television contracts, the ticket revenues, the merchandise income. The athletes get to sell their own image; they do not get a share of the institutional revenue their labor generates.
NIL is the equivalent of allowing enslaved people to sell their own handicrafts on weekends while the plantation keeps the cotton revenue. The analogy is intentionally sharp. The structure it describes is real.
Black Ownership: The Frontier
In professional sports, ownership has been the last barrier. As of 2024:
- The NFL had no Black majority owners among its 32 franchises
- The NBA had one Black majority owner: Michael Jordan, who sold his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets in 2023
- MLB had no Black majority owners
- The NHL had no Black majority owners
The barriers to ownership are partly financial — franchises cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars — but also structural. Ownership groups are self-selecting and tend to recruit from existing networks of wealthy individuals who are disproportionately white.
Jay-Z's partnership with the NFL's social justice initiative and his role as a music producer for the Super Bowl halftime show sparked significant debate: was his collaboration legitimizing an institution that had blacklisted Colin Kaepernick, or was it a strategic move toward eventual ownership? The debate reveals the tension between access and accountability that runs through the entire integration paradox.
Colin Kaepernick: The Integration Paradox in Real Time
In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killings of Black Americans. His protest was peaceful, nonviolent, and explicitly connected to a specific political argument.
After the 2016 season, no NFL team signed him. He has not played in the NFL since.
The NFL's response to Kaepernick is the Jack Johnson story in contemporary form: a Black athlete whose political expression — whose insistence on being a full human being with political views, not just a performer — was punished by the institution that had profited from his labor.
The NFL subsequently launched a $250 million social justice initiative, featured Black Lives Matter messaging in end zones, and played "Lift Every Voice and Sing" before games in the 2020 season. It did not reinstate Kaepernick.
The pattern: institutions can absorb symbolic recognition of racial justice while maintaining the structural arrangements that produce racial injustice. The symbol and the structure are kept separate.
The Through-Line
From the Negro Leagues to NIL, from Jack Johnson to Kaepernick, the question is the same: what are the terms on which Black athletic excellence is permitted, and who sets those terms?
The answer has shifted across a century. Black athletes can now play in integrated leagues, earn professional salaries, and — since NIL — profit from their own images. These are real gains.
What has not fundamentally changed: who owns the institutions, who sets the rules, who captures the majority of the revenue, and what happens to Black athletes who use their platforms to name the political conditions of their own lives.
The athletic arena, in this sense, is a precise microcosm of the broader question this curriculum has been asking since Unit 1: on whose terms does Black excellence exist in America, and what would it mean for those terms to change?
