Redskins games brought them together, until the name kept them apart. Now, a promise to change.

It’s impossible to know precisely when or how this happened, but with neither announcement nor formality, the movement engulfed other issues and has become about overall solidarity, the righting of mass wrongs and forcing results at a time when the criminal justice system can do no such thing.

The movement, at least at its heart, is about curbing racism and ending police brutality against African Americans. But at some point it also came to include the removal of Confederate symbols and Native American iconography in city parks, football stadiums and racetracks.

“That’s when it clicked for me: This is a real moment,” Higgs Wise, a social worker and activist who is African American, says now.

A few moments after the drums stopped, the crowd in Byrd Park looped three ropes around the neck of the 93-year-old Columbus statue before pulling it down, setting it on fire and pushing it into a lake. It was, Higgs Wise says, one of the most exhilarating moments of her life. Before the rush subsided, she reached for her phone to call friends and relatives. One of the people she always calls in moments like this is her dad.

As usual, David Higgs was relieved when he heard his eldest daughter’s voice. Even though she’s 35 and a parent herself, he can’t help but worry when she’s off raising hell at another protest. Usually he keeps that to himself. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t admire her courage or respect her opinions. That’s why, when she took a stand a few years ago and stopped cheering for their beloved Washington Redskins, another symbol being dismantled amid a nationwide reckoning, David listened.

“She’s doing the right thing,” says David, 58. “Chelsea is a fighter.”

Together

David has known his daughter was a fighter since she was a little girl, when she would scream at the television alongside him as their favorite football team was playing. They would howl at the officials, moan about the team’s bad luck, complain about the meddling and decision-making of owner Daniel Snyder. David fixed her hair and took her to the mall, but Sundays were their favorite activity, just a father and daughter on the sofa together.

In 1988, David took his little girl to San Diego to watch the team and Doug Williams, the first African American quarterback to start in the Super Bowl, beat the Denver Broncos and hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy. She would later wear her burgundy T-shirt on Sundays, and he would pull on one of his many Washington jerseys: Williams, Dexter Manley, Chris Cooley, Robert Griffin III — names and symbols of the franchise and its changing times.

“I’d see her jumping up: ‘Yes! Yes!’ ” David recalls. “I just sat back and watched her. I got the biggest joy off that.”

When Chelsea and David disagreed or got angry or pouted, one of them would call and use Washington’s latest trade or draft pick as an icebreaker. David and Chelsea’s mother divorced when Chelsea was younger, and the separation cost them a few years of Sundays. But in 2008, Chelsea offered peace by decorating her car with Redskins flags before surprising her dad with tickets to a game against the Dallas Cowboys. It was freezing, and David was ready to leave by the end of the first quarter. But he kept that to himself, too.

“That’s something that really brought us together,” David says.

They screamed with excitement during Griffin’s dazzling run in 2012, yelled with frustration during the disappointments that followed. They cooked big dinners, lamented the team’s revolving door of coaches and quarterbacks, ended frustrating seasons by agreeing there was always next year.

Then four years ago, she watched as Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, took a knee during the national anthem as a form of silent protest of police violence against African Americans. Kaepernick’s actions divided the nation, and after he opted out of his contract following the 2016 season, he went unsigned for months and eventually years.

She began thinking more about her favorite team’s logo and how Snyder had defiantly insisted in 2013 that he would never change the franchise’s name. For a long time she had convinced herself it was just a name, just a football team. She listened to friends who challenged her on it and asked how she could support a team that caricatured Native Americans. It weighed on her.

So in 2017, Chelsea decided she could no longer support the NFL, nor could she cheer for Washington’s team. She stopped wearing her burgundy T-shirt in public, eventually stuffing it and the rest of her Washington gear into a box before stashing it alongside an old photo album. Occasionally she would check NFL scores on Sundays, in part because she had done it for so long, but she made herself stop looking, reacting, caring. This was, she says, part of a long grieving process of distancing herself from something she had once loved — but which she could no longer justify.

She kept her decision to herself, at least for a while, though David wondered why Chelsea never came over anymore on Sundays, why she didn’t respond to his texts — “Did you see that?” — about the team.

One Sunday he invited Chelsea over, and this time she agreed. But she said she wanted to talk. Chelsea explained she could no longer participate in the father-daughter tradition, wouldn’t be talking or texting about it anymore. And though David still saw their — his — team as just a football franchise, an escape from the all-encompassing blanket of politics, he again kept silent and let Chelsea be Chelsea.

“I was thinking about the time I’m going to miss with her,” he confesses later. “I thought selfishly, ‘I’m going to miss calling her and talking about football,’ the dinners and the talks and having somebody who rooted with me.”

David, who has three daughters, thinks about it before continuing.

“But I raised them to be like that,” he says. “We wanted them to go out and change the world. I was being a hypocrite, and all her life I’ve said: ‘You can change this. You have the power to do this.’ I couldn’t tell her I was disappointed.”

Time to change

Last month, three days after the Columbus statue came down in Richmond and as monuments were falling throughout the United States, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said during a radio appearance that it was “past time” for Washington’s team to change its name. EventsDC, the organization that oversees RFK Stadium, alerted the team and the league office that on Juneteenth it would remove a monument to George Preston Marshall, the team’s founding owner and a staunch segregationist, from outside the stadium. (The monument was defaced by red paint hours before its removal.) The team announced a day later it was removing Marshall’s name from FedEx Field.

Sponsors FedEx, Nike and PepsiCo called on Washington to change its name, and the franchise announced July 3 it was initiating a review of the team’s branding. After reading about that, Chelsea called her dad. The times were again changing, and David told her the time was right for a new name. Chelsea said she was hopeful that maybe one day she would pull out that old photo album, just a little girl and her father together in San Diego for the Super Bowl, and show her own daughter a few images of the way things used to look.

They kept chatting, and though neither of them realized it at the time, the father and daughter were, in an unusual way, talking about their team again.

“This is the first time,” she says later, “that it’s brought us back to the table. I won’t necessarily go back there, but I think it shows that it gets people who have pushed a lot to keep pushing.”

David listened, taking in the enthusiasm and passion in his daughter’s voice once more, trying to enjoy the moment for however long it lasted. He told Chelsea that he couldn’t promise to avoid slipping up and calling the team by its old name, but he did promise to try.

“I have to change. I have to. We all do,” he would say. “The Redskins — it’s a name. I have to adapt, too. I have to change, too.”

David hasn’t told his daughter this, but he hopes she’ll come back to the sofa someday and sit with her dad. Maybe they would cheer. Maybe they would get mad and turn the TV off in a huff. But at least they would be together.

Source:WP