Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar highlight San Jose State University panel on athletes and activism

SAN JOSE - A few years ago, a mining company pushed Senegalese villagers off their land and turned the local economy upside down. Representatives of Oxfam America contacted U.S. Congress members, seeking intervention, but for two years were unable to line up so much as a meeting.

Then the athletes got involved. NFL wide receivers Anquan Boldin, Larry Fitzgerald and Roddy White toured the region with Oxfam officials in 2013.

“We got in contact with senators and congressmen, and within a two-week period we were in their offices meeting with them,” Boldin said Tuesday during a panel discussion at the Hammer Theatre Center, just across the street from San Jose State University. “That just goes to show the power that we have. And I don't think a lot of guys in the locker room understand that.”

That power was promoted, celebrated and debated at a four-hour event called “From Words to Action” that served as a launch for the SJSU Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change. It included two roundtables, an NFL Films short about Dr. Harry Edwards' relationship with former 49ers coach Bill Walsh and a wrap-up press conference.

The second panel, under the banner “From Protest to Progress,” offered a lineup of sporting heavyweights from various eras: Boldin, former NFL players Jim Brown and Takeo Spikes, retired NBA stars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Chris Webber, and track-and-field legend Tommie Smith, a San Jose State alum best known for raising the Black Power salute along with fellow American John Carlos after they finished first and third, respectively, in the 200 meters at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

“In 1968, on that victory stand, that wasn't the price,” Smith said of the backlash to his silent protest. “The price was getting there. Standing up there was about as frightening as you could ever imagine. The national anthem was playing. I had to show solidarity with those who do not have a voice.”

Any athlete, coach or sportswriter who has ever made a political statement on Twitter has no doubt heard a familiar command from a miffed follower: “Stick to sports.” These socially minded athletes refuse. They feel compelled, as they always have, to go beyond the playing field.

Boldin, for example, was voted 2015 Walter Payton Man of the Year for his work with underprivileged children, capping the last of his three seasons with the 49ers. Abdul-Jabbar has written opinion pieces and book reviews on social issues, including one for the Washington Post called “What it means to be black during a Trump administration.” Brown founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union (it was later renamed the Black Economic Union), facilitating the formation of African-American-owned enterprises while he was still playing for the Cleveland Browns in the late 1950s, though he has been criticized more recently for embracing President Donald Trump.

The panelists veered across a range of hot-button issues, such as:

The NCAA and amateurism: “I think where you're going to recruit these kids, the most desolate places of America, where there's no hope, and you go in and you tell the mother, ‘I'll take care of your son for four years on a four-year scholarship,' it's not a four-year scholarship, it's a one-year scholarship,” Webber said. “What is the value of education? … Let's separate business, education, all of these things.”

Webber suggested the NCAA maintain scholarships for athletes who get injured and can't play anymore, and offer basic provisions such as escrow funds for health care.

Concussions in the NFL: Boldin and Spikes both admitted they were conflicted by their love for football and the vast body of scientific evidence that links the sport to CTE and other brain disorders.

“Because my son looks at me like a superhero,” Boldin said. “… I have to be to work at six o'clock. He's ready to go because he loves being around the atmosphere. He loves everything that his dad does. He works out with me. He looks up to me. So how can I tell him, ‘You can't be like me'?”

Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protest: No discussion of sports and politics in the Bay Area could avoid the subject of Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the anthem, a gesture adopted by teammates Eric Reid and Eli Harold, as well as a handful of other NFL players.

Boldin, who spent the 2016 season with the Detroit Lions, said he was in touch with many of his former 49ers teammates, though he did not speak to Kaepernick last fall. Asked after the press conference if the quarterback's decision to kneel in support of the Black Lives Matter movement divided the San Francisco locker room as sharply as some had reported, he rebuffed the notion.

“Nah. And it's usually that way,” he told the Press Democrat. “People speculate a lot when they don't know exactly what's going on. But from me talking to guys, guys who were on the team, guys who were in the locker room, it wasn't divisive at all.”

Forty-Niners CEO Jed York attended Tuesday's event.

Smith drew a straight line from his and Carlos' actions on the podium in Mexico City to Kaepernick's emerging activism, though he said the political issues of 2017 are much more defined than in his day, when a simple declaration of “human rights” was enough to draw demonstrators.

“Mine was on a lower trajectory,” Smith said. “Because I was shooting from an area that had never been defined before. First time in the history of track and field that athletes banded together to make a change. I could say that Colin is that change later on.”

After a vicious and sometimes bizarre presidential campaign, America seems as polarized as it has ever been. Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology at UC Berkeley and a longtime consultant to the 49ers, acknowledged as much when he spoke of Americans living in the separate “silos” of their favorite sports teams, just as they know tend to exist in political silos, too.

“There's a natural Balkanization that takes place in sports that limits the capacity of an athlete to really speak to a tremendously broad audience,” Edwards said.

But speak they must continue to do, the panelists argued. And more than that.

Brown talked about a meeting of top black athletes that the Black Economic Union organized in 1968, sparked by boxer Muhammad Ali's refusal to submit to the military draft. Abdul-Jabbar was there, though he was known as Lew Alcindor at the time, and so was NBA icon Bill Russell.

“And we were not dealing with just having a voice,” Brown said. “We were dealing with action. And so I come from an era of action. So when we talk about having a voice - it's like Serena Williams saying she's finally now gonna speak up. The speaking up is not gonna do it.”

Tuesday, it seemed like a suitable a place to start.

You can reach staff writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.