Two football players and activists died this week. Here's the story of one: Rice's Rodrigo Barnes

One of Rice's first Black athletes, Rodrigo Barnes, like Jim Brown who also died this...

After starring in football and track at all-Black Waco Carver High School, Barnes signed with Rice the day before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis.“It was normal and natural at that time for a lot of white kids to say something derogatory to you, that’s all they knew,” Barnes said in a 2021 interview. “I’d dealt with a little of that in high school, when schools desegregated my senior year.

“Racial problems were really at the main front, and I felt as though I had to prove something, so there was a little chip there. But it was about standing up and being a part of the change, a part of the development.” Former football great Jim Brown, left, President of the Black Economic Union, confers with Mrs. Anne Faulkner, 74, in her poor neighborhood at Holly Springs, Miss., Feb. 11, 1970. Brown led about 25 black athletes for the firsthand look at conditions his BEU hopes to improve. In background is Leroy Kelly of the Cleveland Browns.

Barnes was prouder of the work he did in education than of anything he did on the football field. He said he had more to give football, but it was beyond his control.

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