Following the lead of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and Denver Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall, a few members of a New Jersey high school football team knelt while the national anthem played.
Like Kaepernick and Marshall, coaches and students combined as the predominantly non-white Woodrow Wilson school performed the controversial move to raise awareness of social and economic injustice, NBC News reports.
Initially, Tigers coach Preston Brown said he was going to kneel alone in protest.
“I am well aware of the third verse of the national anthem which is not usually sung, and I know that the words of the song were not originally meant to include people like me,” he explained.
The silent third verse he’s referring to reads: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
“[Because] of recent events that happened the last couple years, things I experienced in college being an African-American student athlete in the south, I felt it was an appropriate time to do that,” explained Brown, NJ.com reports.
