Sporting KC trio helps lead movement for change in how Black people are viewed, treated
Erik Hurtado walked up to the entryway of his Vancouver, British Columbia apartment building and felt around in his pockets for an entry fob. Not in the left one. Or right. No problem — he’ll just text his roommate, Tommy, to come down and let him in.
Standing outside the door, waiting in the cool Canadian air, the Sporting KC forward then watched as a man approached and used his own fob to enter the building. Hurtado walked in behind him, grateful to escape the cold and save his roommate a trip to the lobby.
The man ahead of him turned abruptly with a confused look on his face.
“What are you doing?” the man asked, confronting the 29-year-old soccer player as he made his way to the elevator.
“Oh, I’m just waiting for my roommate to come down and let me in,” Hurtado replied, expecting nothing more from the interaction.
“No, you don’t live here,” the man said. “You don’t look like somebody that would live here.”
“There was no reason for that,” Hurtado told The Star Monday. “He doesn’t know me; he doesn’t know that I don’t live there, but he assumed that I didn’t live there because of the way that I looked and the color of my skin.”
The confrontation didn’t stop there. When Hurtado asked the man politely to leave him alone, the man replied with a threat to call security and the police.
“’I told you that you don’t live here. You need to leave right now,’” Hurtado recalled of the situation. “’You leave right now before I make you.’”
Before the situation escalated, Hurtado’s roommate arrived in the elevator — proof enough that Hurtado truly did live in the apartment building.
The whole confrontation lasted about two minutes, Hurtado said.
“You hear stories like that, and you see videos like that happening, but you don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” he said. “But it did, unfortunately.”
And that’s one of the milder examples of racial discrimination and intimidation Hurtado says he has experienced. Those sorts of experiences are why he wants to take action — why he joined Black Players for Change, an organization consisting of more than 170 black players in Major League Soccer.
Standing as one
One by one, each member of Black Players for Change raised a black-gloved fist into the air. They wore face masks proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” and black shirts bearing various messages: “Silence is Violence” ... “Black and Proud” ... “Black all the Time.”
Last week, after four months with no games, MLS was on the cusp of becoming the first U.S. men’s pro sports league, after NASCAR and the PGA, to return to action. Orlando City and Inter Miami were primed for the league’s first “Florida Derby” match since 2001.
But there were more important matters to attend to first.
Last Wednesday night in Orlando, wearing their messaged masks and T-shirts, MLS and Black Players for Change sent a message that reverberated across the nation.
“This is what we need; this is what the world needs: to see and be a part of and have conversations,” Sporting KC winger Khiry Shelton, 27, said. “And it’s important that we let the world know, ‘Hey, there are problems here and this is what’s going on and we need help.’”
Surrounding the field at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports complex, where the MLS is Back Tournament is taking place, about 100 players stood in unison with raised fists for eight minutes and 46 seconds: the amount of time a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd before Floyd died.
At first, Hurtado couldn’t bring himself to watch the video of Floyd’s final moments. It took him several days to build up the courage to do so.
When he finally did, all he could do was cry.
“When I finally did, I started hearing, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and calling the officer off, and I started crying,” Hurtado said. “I was tearing up in my apartment because he was just so helpless and he was scared and there was a point where he knew what was going to happen.
“But there was nothing he could do. They were going to kill him, and there was nothing he could do about it.”
Hurtado paused to compose himself.
“And people just watched. People just recorded and watched and they didn’t do anything. The (other) police officers watched; they didn’t do anything about it. It was messed up. I didn’t know what to do, so I just cried for a couple of minutes.”
Finding their voice
Black Players for Change was founded shortly after Floyd’s death, on Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the date that Black people in Texas learned slavery had been abolished.
As racial-injustice protests roiled around the world, some of MLS’ veteran Black players, including former Sporting KC stalwarts Ike Opara and Kei Kamara, launched the organization and began planning a demonstration for the return to competition in Orlando.
The organization was created to give Black MLS players a voice and assist in making systemic changes. The group’s goals include further diversity in league coaching staffs, collaborating on league-wide implicit bias training and advancing attention paid to human-rights inequalities.
They wanted at least one Black player from each team in the league to be a representative. For Kansas City, that player was Amadou Dia.
“I think it gives us a voice and we get to speak up on issues that we do not agree with,” Dia said. “And we have a lot of very good leaders in our Black Players Coalition, and they’ve been doing a great job passing information.”
Like Hurtado, Dia, 27, can recount personal stories of racial prejudice. When he was 15, he found himself in some trouble with the police alongside a group of friends. Dia was the only one in his group to be handcuffed. He was also the only Black person in the group.
Not until the mother of one of his friends arrived on the scene and persuaded the police officers to release him did the cuffs came off.
“That’s when I really started to think about that I’ve got to be careful,” Dia said. “My father had always told me, ‘You need to be careful,’ because I grew up in a white neighborhood and he always told me that people do things and your friends do things that you’ve got to be careful.”
All welcome, and supported
Since its recent inception, Black Players for Change has swelled to more that 170 members. Nine play for Sporting KC.
In their late 20s, Dia, Shelton and Hurtado lead the way, but many younger players are also on board now, too. All voices are valued by the organization.
“Even the youngsters, they need to tell us their opinions so they learn to start speaking up on these matters,” Dia said. “So when they’re older, they feel comfortable about things like this.”
“The organization has been amazing,” Hurtado said. “From the players up to the coaches and up to the trainers and medical staff, they’ve been supportive in us since day one. Anything that we needed, they’ve done for us.”
Sporting KC coach Peter Vermes said he has made clear to his players that, whether through allowing a demonstration at practice or permitting a speech, he is 100% behind them.
“I would not want to speak on behalf of our guys, because it would maybe not be a place for me to do, but I think we have guys that have been the leaders in that area and that space,” Vermes said. “So I’ve kind of taken their lead and listened to them.”
A pivotal moment for both coach and team arrived shortly after Floyd’s May 25 death. Vermes gathered his men in a large circle and let the Black players among them tell stories of times they’d been racially targeted.
“It was really emotional,” Dia said. “You can tell it really hit the group hard.”
And thanks to the creation and growing membership of groups like Black Players for Change, the fight for racial equality is not going to stop anytime soon.
“I will continue to fight for my rights and for change,” Shelton said. “It’s been very emotional but also very positive. We just want to be heard, to be seen — just have an effect and make a change.”
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 11:19 AM with the headline "Sporting KC trio helps lead movement for change in how Black people are viewed, treated."