Major League Lacrosse has just four African American players, and they’re taking a stand

Having grown up playing a sport in which the demographics skew heavily white, Ellis, Davis-Allen, Alleyne and Toliver each has endured bigotry, spurring them to take action amid widespread protests following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other unarmed black men and women.

“For us, we came together, and we were like, ‘Hey, let’s just stand by ourselves, be alone or with another black player on the team in the middle of the field, and we’ll make this a point,’” said Ellis, a defensive midfielder for the New York Lizards. “We’re going to stand in solidarity and bring it to the forefront.

“For people who don’t follow the news, they go, ‘Why are these black individuals standing in the middle of the field?’ That was our common thing we wanted to have come across.”

There was some initial conversation about perhaps kneeling during the national anthem, as quarterback Colin Kaepernick did to spark much of the current activism among athletes, but the players agreed standing would be appropriate given the venue.

Although Kaepernick has said his peaceful protest had nothing to do with the military, critics have called his actions disrespectful to the armed forces, and Ellis, Davis-Allen, Alleyne and Toliver wanted to ensure their message would not be misinterpreted.

“We tried to have a session Thursday about it, but it kind of turned into all of us telling stories about our experiences, whether it was in youth, high school or college,” said Davis-Allen, a college standout at Maryland. “But Friday we kind of dug a little bit deeper into it.

“We wanted to make sure it was taken in the correct way.”

MLL players arrived in Annapolis late last week — all are quarantined at the same hotel — for the one-week, pandemic-shortened season in which each of the six teams plays the other once. The four top finishers qualify for the playoffs, with the championship game Sunday.

During their conversation, Davis-Allen, a defensive midfielder for the reigning champion Chesapeake Bayhawks, recounted being called the N word on the field and reporting it to coaches and officials, only to be told they were unable to take punitive action.

The native of Springfield who won three IAC high school lacrosse titles at St. Stephen’s/St. Agnes also mentioned officials not calling him by his name or number, instead referring to him as “the black kid.”

Ellis, meanwhile, detailed several instances of racial profiling from law enforcement simply for carrying a lacrosse stick in a predominantly white Long Island neighborhood in Garden City, N.Y., where he played lacrosse at a majority-white high school.

“As I got older and older, I realized this issue of being black in lacrosse is a bigger issue than I thought it was,” Ellis said. “Even to the point from me walking down the block in Garden City and having a stick and police officers pulling me over and asking, ‘Is that my stick? Where’d I get it from?’

“It’s one of those things where it almost becomes normal because you’re not the majority. I come here to play in MLL, I haven’t faced that heat at that level, but we all have stories that kind of say the same thing.”

On the agenda for the long term, the players said, is to entice and retain African American participation by fostering a more welcoming and inclusive atmosphere throughout lacrosse, starting with players, coaches and league officials at all levels refusing to normalize or overlook racist behavior.

Davis-Allen spoke of a boy he had coached at the youth level coming to him to point out a player from the other team who had called him the N word. That boy wound up giving up the sport after the player he accused of insulting him faced no consequences despite Davis-Allen reporting the incident.

“I’ve been in that same position as a player, and it never seems to go anywhere in my experience,” Davis-Allen said. “Changing the overall culture, a lot of that has to do with education, exposing kids at a young age and teaching them what’s acceptable and what’s not.”