Out of Bounds: The NAACP's SEC football boycott misunderstands the assignment

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision in the Louisiana v. Callias case that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965's remaining protections safeguarding Black voter enfranchisement. In the wake of the ruling, Southern states like Tennessee and Alabama (as predicted) wasted no time following suit. They mounted aggressive redistricting campaigns to gerrymander their states' voting districts ahead of the 2026 Midterm elections, to dilute Black voting power and secure a partisan advantage for the Republican Party.

In the months since, Black folks have been forced to contemplate whether Callais is truly a matter of "turning back the clock," or is it simply the execution of a chess move 60 years in the making?

For decades, a significant portion of the Black community has viewed the Civil Rights Movement as a finite, sacrificial era, a time when our elders fought and won a war so that we could inherit a brighter, more hopeful and inclusive America. To many, the Callias decision feels like an insult to that legacy, a violent reduction of their sacrifices. Hence the familiar refrain: "They are turning back the clock."

But truth be told, the clock never stopped ticking. Perhaps we just willfully lost track of time.

The generation that secured civil and voting rights changed the game with their own blood so that we wouldn't have to play by the same brutal rules of segregation and disenfranchisement they endured. The tragedy is that, instead of playing more skillfully, we stopped playing seriously. Our complacency after the gains of both the Civil Rights Movement and our minimal concessions from the Black Lives Matter moment shows that we mistook the right to vote and our increased inclusion as diverse representation for the finish line. In reality, the ballot was never the Promised Land; it was merely a tool to keep us in the fight, a mechanism to secure a piece of the American dream our ancestors were denied. The Civil Rights Movement indeed transformed the landscape of American democracy, with the Voting Rights Act as its brilliant opening gambit. And thus far, our movement has mirrored many of the Civil Rights Movement's nonviolent actions, including mobilizing thousands of Black folks, many from the South, to Montgomery, Alabama, and Washington D.C. to protest against the Callais decision and advocate for voting rights protections. Politicians like Tennessee State House Representatives Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) and Justin Jones (D-Nashville), along with their fellow Democratic representatives, were stripped of their committee appointments in the Tennessee legislature for their alignment with the masses that protested their state's gerrymandering scheme. 

But we know that an issue this crucial requires our resistance to outmatch the strategy of our fascist opponents who have continued to study the board while many across Black communities, content with the 20th-century gains, act as if the match were over. On April 29, the Supreme Court delivered a harsh reminder that the game never ended. 

Now, we find ourselves back at the chess table, staring at the board, shaken, and unsure of our next move. And the "solutions" offered by the bourgeois arm of our Black political movement sadly misunderstand the assignment at hand.

Enter the NAACP's proposed "Out of Bounds" campaign, a call for Black college athletes and fans to boycott the Southeastern Conference (SEC) universities' sports programs.

On its face, leveraging the power of Black collegiate athletes to protest Southern redistricting is a logical move. It is also an outdated strategy. If Black America is back at the chessboard, we cannot simply repeat old moves and expect different results. More importantly, an SEC boycott is only a viable move if we refuse to make teenage athletes bear the entire burden of its execution. If we are going to ask young people to make a sacrifice that could alter the trajectory of their professional futures, the community must build an infrastructure to safeguard that trajectory. This means we must also provide them viable alternatives, namely, increased investment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). 

If a four- or five-star recruit decides to bypass the SEC or transfer to another Power Five school in protest, they need absolute assurance that their professional careers will not be penalized. The leadership of both the NFL and NBA players' associations must engage directly with team owners to protect and highlight athletes who choose to boycott. Draft-eligible players who make this stand should be guaranteed automatic invitations to the NFL and NBA draft combines. 

Furthermore, if these athletes choose to pivot to HBCUs, we must demand that Black entrepreneurs and high-net-worth individuals increase their funding and support for these institutions to elevate their facilities, student life infrastructure, and athletic and educational programs.

True leverage requires collective skin in the game. If we ask college athletes to boycott, then we, as the adults who support them, must leverage their own economic power. We must pressure major industries heavily invested in (exploiting) the South—such as automotive manufacturing and banking—by aligning our financial demands with our political and cultural resistance. We must move in lockstep. 

The ultimate objective of this movement cannot just be awareness; it must also yield legislative results. This is precisely where Black leadership has fallen short for decades. We need clear, unyielding policies that not only protect our enfranchisement as citizens but also stabilize our communities, sustain our Black, southern institutions, and build an economic foundation for generational growth.

There is a growing critique that the "adults in the room" should have neutralized this threat long before the Supreme Court intervened. The Congressional Black Caucus and the Democratic Party saw the storm clouds gathering after the 2020 election, particularly when Georgia flipped blue for Joe Biden. In response to Donald Trump's persistent, unsubstantiated claims of a rigged election, election integrity became the central battleground. Given this nation's dark history of systemic voter suppression, protecting the ballot should have been paramount.

The Democrats responded by introducing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the iconic civil rights leader who literally bled on the Edmund Pettus Bridge marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama for the right to vote. The bill would have, among other provisions, reestablished and modernized "preclearance," requiring states and jurisdictions with histories of gerrymandering and voting discrimination to clear any changes to their election laws with the Department of Justice. In 2022, the legislation died in the Senate. It failed because Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refused to alter filibuster rules to allow a vote. Both chose to protect an archaic Senate mechanism over the constitutional right of Black citizens to choose their elected officials.

But while the political establishment failed, young athletes should remember that the very Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals they enjoy today exist because a previous generation refused to back down. In 2009, former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA that cracked the foundation of amateur sports exploitation. When California became the first state to legalize NIL compensation, the historic announcement was made on The Shop, an HBO series produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter's SpringHill Company, pioneers in the player empowerment movement. 

Notably, prominent SEC coaches like Alabama's former coach Nick Saban, Texas A&M's former coach Jimbo Fisher, and Georgia's Kirby Smart openly expressed discomfort with this shift in power. As today's athletes weigh what is best for their futures and their families, they must remember the figures who fought to maximize their leverage.

The ultimate question facing Black America is not whether we understand the assignment. It is whether we possess the collective will to execute it.

The primary flaw in the NAACP's rollout of the "Out of Bounds" campaign was that it felt lazy, reactionary, and structurally hollow. It exposed a deeper, uncomfortable truth: over the last forty years, the political muscle of the Black community has atrophied—especially that of our "establishment" legacy organizations like the NAACP. We are a shadow of the organized force that moved the world in the 1950s and 60s. Structurally, we have expanded our footprint in America—building unprecedented wealth and carving out spaces in a system that once wholly rejected us. But in gaining comfort, we have grown soft.

If we are being honest, we are neither spiritually nor emotionally conditioned for the type of friction this struggle requires. The men and women who marched during the civil rights era were forged in a different fire; their willingness to sacrifice was absolute. For four decades, we have drunk deeply from the fountain of capitalism. Even though those waters have not served us equally, the mere terror of losing our sip frightens most of us into submission.

We became complacent after the triumphs of 1964 and 1965. Now, in 2026, the question is simple: Are we prepared to be uncomfortable again?

Are we prepared to be viewed as ungrateful by non-Black Americans who believe the election of Barack Obama signaled the end of racism? Are we prepared for self-proclaimed allies to question our strategies and dismiss our grievances as misguided? Are we strategically organized enough to prioritize community preservation over individual capitalism?

As long as the United States empowers a judicial and legislative apparatus that views Black political equity as an existential threat to its fabric, democracy will remain a dangerous game. The question is whether we are prepared to play to win or simply lie down and accept the current iteration of America.