There’s been a discussion of the responsibility of athletes to speak out and effect change across the country, in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
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The Panthers are scheduled to face the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m.at Bank of America Stadium, located in downtown Charlotte.
“We are planning to play the game as scheduled on Sunday”, the statement said.
Instead, Carolina Panthers players and coach Ron Rivera detailed their emotions watching the city’s violence Wednesday night.
He said seeing the images on TV the last two nights have caused him great pain.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo were among the businesses that instructed employees to remain at home.
Olsen continued: “As silly as it seems that we play a game, we all recognize that games can bring great peace”. What began as a peaceful protest led to more rioting and looting in the city with one person shot and four police officers injured. Scott’s family said he was unarmed and was reading a book while in his auto waiting to pick up his child from school. Kerr Putney, chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, said Scott was brandishing a gun and threatening officers before he was shot. Kaepernick has refused to stand for the national anthem before games.
Rivera said he has faith that city leaders will get the protests under control soon. Something is going to happen from the top, something that has to be done from a judicial standpoint, from a standpoint of someone stepping in and saying, ‘Hey, we have an issue. And so to ask our opinion on things we don’t really know about, we don’t have all the answers.
“. From a judicial standpoint, a standpoint of someone stepping and saying, ‘Hey we have an issue, we need to come together and address this issue.’ It’s not just going to be the police fixing what’s going on internally”.
“It’s a very hard time right now. We get emotional in our involvement with certain things, and for me as an African-American male to see all this going on is very disheartening”.
“When things happen in the community, it’s not the fact that things are happening”. From when Cam (Newton) rolled his vehicle and had his accident, when my house burned down, when my brother passed, the way the community gave us support, I mean -that’s Charlotte.
“I think we’re moving toward a whole other civil rights war”, he said.
“Coach Gus Malzahn used to tell me: Use your influence in a positive way because people are looking at you regardless of the bad and the good”, Newton said.
The Star Tribune reported that a Vikings source told them the National Football League is weighing options on where and when to play the game.
Newton said so Wednesday in an Instagram message directed toward Kaepernick amid the San Francisco 49ers quarterback’s ongoing protest against violence and oppression of minority communities in the United States.
The decision to move a home game amidst the chaos and calamity seems like an appropriate reaction. “Someone has to be held accountable for what is going on”.
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Check out Cam Newton’s thoughts in the clip above. “In other cases there was a threat to the police officer”.
