For Mynk Richardson-Clerk, a member of the lacrosse team at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, it was the murder of Trayvon Martin that brought police brutality to the forefront of her mind.
Then it was the relentless buildup of cases as she went through high school: Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. All of this pushed her to act.
In the summer of 2016, when Mynk was entering college, the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling changed her irrevocably. She decided to study political science, saying that it helped her “get a better understanding of the systems that have been oppressing groups of people from all these different periods in history.”
“That really influenced my whole college career,” she added.
College was isolating for a young Black woman coming into consciousness in Naperville, at a predominantly white institution in a predominantly white area. Mynk described the school’s athletic community as “culty, to be honest. If you’re on a sports team, that’s all you can do. Your teammates are supposed to be your best friends. You have to eat with them, hang out with them, go to their parties, all this mandatory team bonding.”
But Mynk didn’t want to be part of all that. “I was very involved in activism. I was involved in our Black Student Association. I was part of our diversity club. My team just wasn’t a safe place to be able to talk about those issues. I would try to bring things up and they would ignore it or I could see them visibly get uncomfortable, so it wasn’t an environment that was conducive to supporting activism, or supporting people of color. [T]hey expect you to spend all of your time with the team but do not take the time to understand you as a whole or the social issues that impact you.”
As her sophomore year was about to start, activism and athletics unexpectedly converged for the first time in Mynk’s life. “There were rumors going around that players on the football team and student leaders on campus were going to take a knee at one of the games. I was also doing marching band then, and when the day came around, I was in my marching band uniform, and I told the band director, ‘Hey, I’m going to take a knee and I’m not playing the anthem for this game.’ He said, ‘OK, that’s fine.’
“But then, just one by one, everybody bailed. The whole entire team bailed. The student leaders said, ‘No, we can’t do it.’ I remember being so disappointed and so frustrated at the administration as well as the football coaches for discouraging all of them from taking part in the protest. It wasn’t until later that I learned that the administration and the coaches discouraged the football players from taking a knee and persuaded them to link arms on the field instead.”
Mynk said she was “angered at the boldness of the administration to persuade a team that had so many players that were willing to protest away from doing this. They were talked into linking arms for the BLM cause, but when it came time to actually do it on the field, an announcement was made that they were linking arms for the Vegas shootings that had occurred around the same time. The original message to protest police brutality was co-opted through the efforts of the administration.”
Mynk was determined to take a knee as a lacrosse player “even if I had to do it alone.”
And that’s exactly how it happened.
“I was alone,” Mynk recalls. “There were no other Black players on my team. I was by myself doing it, with no support. It was hard; it was scary. The athletic director tried to talk me out of it, similar [to] what happened on the football team. I had teammates come up to me, trying to talk me out of it. It was rough.”
In the aftermath of Mynk’s protest, “the school really tried to keep it quiet. They tried not to tell anyone, tried not to let it get out. But it got all the way to the president of the university and he did not respond well at all. I had to have meetings with the Title IX coordinator. I had to have meetings with the president and with the athletic director, because of how my team reacted to me.”
“Let your voice be heard. Let your story be heard. Reach out for support. Don’t let them gaslight you. What you’re experiencing is real. What you’re going through is valid.”
At one point in the conversation, the president “brought up the fact that he couldn’t possibly be racist because his daughter is dating a Black man. I pushed on through that and told him how my team attacked me. He was like, ‘Well, that’s just how the world is. You have to learn to defend yourself.’ And I said, ‘Well, first of all, I know how to defend myself, but I should not be put into an environment where I would have to. My team should not be allowed to react that way.’ ”
During her sophomore season, in 2018, Mynk began taking a knee and did so for every single game for the rest of her lacrosse career at North Central. When we spoke, Mynk told me that she does not see herself standing for the anthem ever again: “Not [when I see] the way this country treats Black people, people of color, and marginalized groups. I refuse to stand for the anthem until this country stands for everyone.”
Mynk is still aghast when she remembers some of the arguments that her teammates would throw at her. “They would say things like, ‘I can’t look my family in the eye and tell them that you’re doing this, that you’re taking a knee. My brother is in the military, and he looks up to you.’ ” Mynk would respond, “ ‘I don’t know your family and I’ve never had a conversation with your brother before in my life. What are you talking about?’ ”
It was galling for her to have these teammates play the victim, as if this were something she was doing to them. “We had a team meeting,” she recalled, still flabbergasted at the fragility on display. “This is probably one of the most ridiculous parts. The athletic directors were there. My coaches were there. The whole meeting was about them trying to get me to not take a knee.”
One player said of a teammate, “She’s been crying all week because of what you’re trying to do. Please don’t take a knee. We’ll go with you to BSA meetings. You’re hurting our team. Your peaceful protest is hurting our team. You’re not being a good leader. Can we link arms instead?”
As Mynk remembered, “They ganged up to get me not to do it, and the coaches just stood there and let it happen! The athletic directors sat there and let them attack me for this hour-long team meeting. This one teammate had written me an open letter about her pain. It was ridiculous.”
In fact, Mynk wasn’t entirely alone. Her mother and grandmother went to every game, home and away, and without fail took a knee with her.
“There was this one game when this one dad was cursing at my mom,” she said. “He was also yelling at me from the stands, calling me lazy, telling me to run faster. And it got to the point where he had to get kicked out of the stadium. The North Central parents were so bad that parents from other schools would cheer for me out of sympathy because of how awful they were.”
I ask Mynk what lessons she would want to pass on. Her response: “Let your voice be heard. Let your story be heard. Reach out for support. I waited too late to reach out to people. There were days where I would leave practice in tears because of how they were treating me. I would try to talk to them and they would ignore me or roll their eyes at me. Don’t let them gaslight you. What you’re experiencing is real. What you’re going through is valid. Reach out for help and continue fighting the good fight.”