NEW YORK (AP) — In 2016, responding to the fatal police shootings of two Black men just a day apart, Serena Williams joined a small chorus of top Black athletes in speaking out. “I won’t be silent!” she vowed.
“Have we not gone through enough, opened so many doors, impacted billions of lives?” Williams asked in a Facebook post in the wake of the back-to-back killings of Philando Castile just outside St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
“I realized we must stride on — for it’s not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go,” she wrote.
That wasn’t the only time Williams would wade into the politically thorny topic. It’s an outspokenness for which other Black athletes, from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, have paid a steep professional price.