Taking a Knee: New book tells the stories of dozens of people who joined Colin Kae per nick's protest Here is one of them.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

For Mynk Richardson-Clerk, a member of the lacrosse team at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, it was the murder of Trayvon Martin that brought police brutality to the forefront of her mind.

Then it was the relentless buildup of cases as she went through high school: Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. All of this pushed her to act.

In the summer of 2016, when Mynk was entering college, the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling changed her irrevocably. She decided to study political science, saying that it helped her "get a better understanding of the systems that have been oppressing groups of people from all these different periods in history."

"That really influenced my whole college career," she added.

College was isolating for a young Black woman coming into consciousness in Naperville, at a predominantly white institution in a predominantly white area. Mynk described the school's athletic community as "culty, to be honest. If you're on a sports team, that's all you can do. Your teammates are supposed to be your best friends. You have to eat with them, hang out with them, go to their parties, all this mandatory team bonding."

But Mynk didn't want to be part of all that. "I was very involved in activism. I was involved in our Black Student Association. I was part of our diversity club. My team just wasn't a safe place to be able to talk about those issues. I would try to bring things up and they would ignore it or I could see them visibly get uncomfortable, so it wasn't an environment that was conducive to supporting activism, or supporting people of color. [T]hey expect you to spend all of your time with the team but do not take the time to understand you as a whole or the social issues that impact you."

As her sophomore year was about to start, activism and athletics unexpectedly converged for the first time in Mynk's life. "There were rumors going around that players on the football team and student leaders on campus were going to take a knee at one of the games. I was also doing marching band then, and when the day came around, I was in my marching band uniform, and I told the band director, 'Hey, I'm going to take a knee and I'm not playing the anthem for this game.' He said, 'OK, that's fine.'

"But then, just one by one, everybody bailed. The whole entire team bailed. The student leaders said, 'No, we can't do it.' I remember being so disappointed and so frustrated at the administration as...