D4 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11 , 2020
up,” Snyder said. “Got the biggest
conference room they had in the
building, with a big table on it,
and had his staff tear it up.”
He paused.
“With scissors.”
“My dad went to Miami,”
DuBois said. “My mom went to
Miami. I went to Miami. My
sister went to Miami.... I h ave
mixed feelings. I graduated as a
‘Redskin.’ I get the idea [of
changing]. My class ring — not
that I wear it — still has ‘Red-
skins’ on it.... I think that it is
now looked upon in a much
harsher light than it was back
when I was in school or thereaf-
ter. I think it’s considered kind of
in the same direction as the
n-word.”
By July 1, 1997, the incremen-
tal change finished, 25 years
after the tribe agreed to a resolu-
tion stating the name would stay
“as long as the wind shall blow,”
one year after it decided it
couldn’t stomach it anymore.
“I got calls and mail and
threats and all that. It wasn’t
pretty,” Embry said. “After a few
years, it all went away, and we
were Miami RedHawks.”
“It died a fairly quick death,”
said Hyman, who also said: “If
you were living it 24 hours a d ay,
seven days a week, it was a long
time. But looking back, it went by
pretty quickly” — especially at a
school not given to foaming at
the mouth about sports.
By now, DuBois’ giant store
has all imaginable RedHawks
gear — with some reminding
how Miami was a university
before Florida was a s tate — but
only two “Redskins” relics, a sign
and a trash can, near the counter,
looking like museum pieces. For
“Miami Redskins” gear, the ag-
grieved can try raffish websites
that, DuBois said, “keep popping
up all over the place.”
By now, 48 years after the
University of Utah jettisoned
“Redskins” and 24 years after
Miami did likewise, here came
Washington. The Miami Tribe of
Oklahoma did not respond to
interview requests but issued a
statement in July saying it
“stands firmly against misrepre-
sentation through stereotypical
images and names which only
serve to demean and misrepre-
sent First Nations peoples.”
Where some 13 Miami Tribe
students studied and graduated
from Miami in 1991-97, some 95
have since. “That just continues
to grow year after year,” Strass
said, as does the cross-cultural,
mutual learning.
And then, whoa: “I don’t think
we ever saw our donations to
intercollegiate athletics, I d on’t
think they ever went down that
much, if th ey went down at all,”
Snyder said. Donations don’t
hinge on nicknames after all, he
said. “It acknowledges the ex-
perience you had going to Mi-
ami, how much it meant to you.”
And so: “You kind of look back
and say, ‘Why was th at such a big
deal?’ ”
“We know ‘Swoop’ very well,”
Kamara, the student body presi-
dent, said of the RedHawks mas-
cot. “We love ‘Swoop.’ ”
“It’s hi story now,” Embry said.
“It’s good.” Around the Washing-
ton Football Team, he said, “It
will [simmer down]. People will
reflect back on it and realize that
Native American people want
respect and dignity.”
[email protected]The great sportswriter Tom
Archdeacon of the Dayton Daily
News interviewed Holmes when
the nickname changed, and she
said, “I’m sick and tired of people
saying this didn’t hurt anybody.
Obviously, it did.”
Elsewhere, a wariness
reigned. Hyman, the former ath-
letic director, said of that time:
“You don’t know the long-term
impact [with donors]. And you’re
very nervous about it.” Over at
the bookstore, they had them-
selves a p ickle, what with univer-
sities having amassed power
over their apparel through for-
midable licensing agreements.
“It’s my alma mater,” DuBois
said, “but they also either sued
me or they tried to sue me two or
three times.”
“They sent us a letter: As of
this date, you can no longer order
‘Redskins’ merchandise,” he said.
“Me being a gambler, I ordered a
lot because I t hought that would
be a draw for alumni.” It was. “It
was, like, through the roof when
they announced it.”
Then one day in 1997, the man
came. The man worked in the
university administration. The
man was nice. The man was
Snyder. The man had called
ahead — a planned and agreed-
upon burglary! “It wasn’t funny
at the time,” Snyder laughed.
He steered a van to the back of
the store. He entered, swooped
up everything “Redskins,” de-
parted. “Very nice guy,” DuBois
said. “I wouldn’t say he was as
apologetic, but he did it as
smoothly as it could be done.”
Next came fear the clothes
might start popping up second-
hand, such as from the thrift
shop down the road. “The pur-
chasing director took it to his
office and had his staff cut it allbecause it was another example
of not being an individual and
being part of a group that wasn’t
able to control their own identi-
ty,” she said. A Black leader, vice
president for student affairs
Myrtis Powell, championed the
name change.
Meanwhile, Black students
had their own familiar agonies.
Holmes loves the school now
but didn’t then. Her undergradu-
ate years included three times
when police stopped cars carry-
ing her friends and herself and
said, “You guys fit the description
of someone who robbed the pizza
delivery guy.” Then: “Just being
detained for an hour, an hour
and a half, just sitting in the car,
wondering,” she said. “And this
was before most people had
cellphones.”
A rumor swirled about a
Black campus rapist, during
which two Black male friends
visited Holmes’s dorm to study.
“Within 10 minutes, police sur-
rounded the dorm because they
were told ‘some strange Black
men’ were roaming around the
dorm,” she said. “That wasn’t
even possible, because I had
escorted them in.”
Eventually, she said: “They put
us in the gym and they apolo-
gized, but they didn’t do it pub-
licly. No one ever admitted that
there was no serial Black rapist.
It was a bad situation. It was bad.
We actually ended up shutting
down the administration office.
We did a sit-in.” Her parents had
been civil rights activists in
Cleveland in the 1960s, so she
called her mother, Wanda, and
said, “ ‘Today, we’re going to do a
sit-in.’ She just got really quiet.
Then she said, ‘We did all of our
work so you wouldn’t have to do
it.’ And she just cried.”tribe as just an entity. They were
people that they knew. I think
that the experience for Native
Americans, to a larger extent in
the past, the average American’s
view of Native Americans is
wrapped up in something that is
not real. It’s all about westerns
and cowboys and Indians and
things you see in advertising.
Most people have never met a
Native American and have never
asked them what the experience
is like.” The mascot, the horse,
the drum, the “powwow danc-
ing,” she said, “didn’t create an
authentic educational experi-
ence.”
So there came a moment. It
involved Richard T. Farmer, the
trustee, alumnus and magnate
who built business-supply giant
Cintas and for whom Miami’s
business school is named. Said
Embry, “When he heard several
Native American kids, heard
them testi fy, he nudged me on
the shoulder and he said:
‘Wayne, I didn’t realize this hurt
people. We’ve got to change the
name.’ ”
The board voted 7-1 to do so.A necessary reckoning
A generation later, the killing
of George Floyd in May 2020
would spur protests that spurred
corporate reckoning that
spurred the Washington NFL
team to scrap “Redskins” sud-
denly after refusing protractedly.
Black Lives Matter “helped open
up a lot of these issues because
they’re all tied, because it’s about
otherness,” said Holmes, a hu-
man resources consultant and
adjunct management professor
who can review the 1990s and
spot the parallels.
“As a person of color on that
campus, it was salient for mechange,” Vinel said, “I just kind
of went back and read up on
Miami’s change a little bit. Back
in the day, they were apparently
very mad about it.”
Back in the day, they were very
mad about it.
“People were so adamantly
against the name change,” Emb-
ry said.
“Resistance was enormous,”
said Peter Rose, a classics profes-
sor emeritus who helped forge
the change. “One frustrated
woman wrote to me that I’d
robbed her of all her happy
memories.”
“We went through a very, very
tumultuous time,” including a
fear donations might crater, said
Eric Hyman, then Miami’s athlet-
ic director.
Back then, you might hear
people “yelling at each other in
bars,” 1997 graduate Jeanne
Johnson Holmes said from North
Carolina. “I know teachers were
trying to have thoughtful, pro-
ductive conversations, but a lot
of them didn’t have cultural
competence themselves. So it
ended up going south really fast.
I don’t even remember a produc-
tive conversation. Ever.”
So as everyone approached the
key forum in September 1996,
university president James C.
Garland warned the 6-foot-8 Em-
bry, as Embry recalls: “‘This
could be a pretty bad meeting,
could be very raucous, so we’re
going to have security, for you
guys, to and from the meeting.’ ”
He recalls a p acked room with
10 speakers each way, and that it
“got pretty emotional, both
ways.”
Said Myaamia Center’s Strass:
“I think that when the Miami
Tribe asked for the change, Mi-
ami University didn’t see thisthink the alumni are adorable.”
“We’ve gotten over it,” said
alumnus Steve Snyder, an Oxford
fixture and former mayor whose
39 years at the university
brimmed with a range of jobs
from the president’s office to
interim athletic director (twice).
“Most people have gotten over it.
A vast majority of people have
gotten over it. There is still one
guy. One guy, you can hear him at
basketball games, football
games, hockey games, and every
once in a while, you can hear
him, ‘Go Redskins.’ He’s got this
loud voice.”
“Nope, never comes up,” said
Wayne Embry, the Naismith Bas-
ketball Hall of Fame member
who played at Miami from 1955
to 1958 and for three NBA teams
before general managing three
more and chairing Miami’s
Board of Trustees at the heavy
moment of nickname change. “I
went down there a couple of
times in the past year, the games,
and it never came up.”
Chris Vinel, born in 1999, a
senior and the editor in chief of
the Miami Student, imagines he
can count the “Redskins” discus-
sions he has heard on his two
hands with maybe even fingers
left over. Said senior Bennett
Webb from Warrenton, Va., born
in 1999, “The only time you will
is if some random guy throws on
a crew neck that has it on it.”
Maybe 40 or 50 percent of stu-
dents “would probably think it
was RedHawks all along.”
Oh, wait, there was that one
frat brother.
He proudly wore the throw-
backs.
“It was more looked at as ‘old
school’ rather than hateful or
revered,” Webb said.
For a considerable while, a
Miami logo with a Native Ameri-
can head lingered high upon a
football stadium wall, amid oth-
er Mid-American Conference lo-
gos. Webb had to avoid any
depiction of it while producing
video for the athletic department
but said anyway, “I don’t think
anybody really ever noticed it.”
It, too, succumbed, in Novem-
ber 2019.
The old word dwells mainly in
the verbal tumbleweed of odd
conversations.
“We still get people occasion-
ally asking for ‘Redskins’ logos or
the Indian head,” said John
DuBois, whose family has run
the institution DuBois Bookstore
since 1945, “and we just kind of
have to inform them the univer-
sity doesn’t allow that anymore.”
Nor may they buy the trash can
on the shelf.
“It’s not uncommon for people
to post [on social media] about
it, especially those who are an-
gry,” said Kara Strass, director of
Miami Tribe Relations at the
campus Myaamia Center, which
fosters unity between the school
and the Miami Tribe of Okla-
homa, which migrated in 1846
after removal from Ohio and
Michigan and whose long rela-
tionship with the school tight-
ened after 1996 when the tribe
requested the name change. “I
think the anger comes primarily
from alumni who were at Miami
during that time.”
Then came news in July, send-
ing an editor in chief to old news.
“When the Washington Foot-
ball Team announced that name
MIAMI FROM D1
A generation later, Miami’s name change is firmly in the past
MARK FOLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Miami University was known as the “Redskins” when it played in the Tangerine Bowl in 1973. It wouldn’t scrap the name until 1996.athletes using their platform and
voice. Coe this past weekend hon-
ored Smith, Carlos and Australian
Peter Norman — the top three
finishers in the 200-meter race at
the 1968 Olympics — with the
organization’s President’s Award.
“I want our athletes to feel that
they are engaged and are part of
the world, that they reflect the
world that we live in,” said Coe, a
four-time Olympic medalist him-
self.
The USOPC’s task force
stopped short of calling on the
IOC to allow athletes to stage
political protests, focusing on
demonstr ations related to hu-
man rights and social justice. In
urging the IOC to amend its char-
ter, the group called on the IOC to
“recognize that protests focused
on human rights and social jus-
tice initiatives do not qualify as
‘divisive disruptions’ of the
Games and should not be met
with the same consequences as
hate speech, the promotion of
racist ideology, or expressions of
discriminatory propaganda.”
“We want to make unmistak-
ably clear that human rights are
not political,” the group wrote.
“Yet, they have been politicized
both in the U.S. and globally to
perpetuate the wrongful and de-
humanizing myth of sport as an
inherently neutral domain.”
[email protected]In a c onference call with U.S.
reporters Thursday, Sebastian
Coe, president of World Athletics,
the global governing body for
track and field, said he supportednational governing bodies and
other stakeholders around the
world, and it is expected to share
the athletes’ commission findings
early next year.chains and the whip have just
been taken away,” she wrote on
Twitter.
The IOC has been soliciting
feedback on Rule 50 from athletes,strate at an Olympics.
The USOPC has been heavily
criticized over the years for its
application and adherence to the
rule. Sprinters Tommie Smith and
John Carlos were famously kicked
out of the Olympic Village at the
1968 Summer Games after they
raised gloved fists on the medals
podium. More recently, the
U SOPC placed fencer Race Im-
boden and hammer thrower
Gwen Berry on probation after
they staged separate demonstra-
tions at the 2019 Pan Am Games.
“It is clear now that this organi-
zation should have supported in-
stead of condemned, and advocat-
ed for understanding instead of
relying on previous precedent,”
Hirshland said in a letter to U.S.
athletes Thursday. “For that, I
apologize, and look forward to a
future where rules are clear, inten-
tions are better understood, and
voices are empowered.”
Berry said her 2019 podium
demonstration and the ensuing
controversy cost her sponsorship
money and threatened to hinder
her quest to compete at the Tokyo
Games next summer. On social
media Thursday afternoon, Berry
said to IOC President Thomas
Bach, “the ball is in your court.”
“Black athletes have been sup-
pressed and living in fear since
Tommie and John’s protest.. no
different to the last 400 years. The[athletes’ commission] is to be
creative in finding solutions and
to ensure that its recommenda-
tions are fully informed,” she said.
Athlete protests have been
fiercely debated throughout the
Olympic world this year, facing
resistance from some IOC leaders.
While the IOC has repeatedly said
protests don’t belong inside Olym-
pic venues, on the playing field or
on a medals podium, the organiza-
tion has begun to explore other
ways athletes can use their plat-
forms to voice their opinions.
The USOPC’s new s tance stands
as the biggest call to date for a
change to the rule.
“The USOPC values the voices
of Team USA athletes and believes
that their right to advocate for
racial and social justice, and be a
positive force for change, abso-
lutely aligns with the fundamen-
tal values of equality that define
Team USA and the Olympic and
Paralympic movements,” Sarah
Hirshland, the USOPC’s chief ex-
ecutive, said in a statement.
Typically, the IOC has turned to
national Olympic committees
such as the USOPC to issue any
punishments over a Rule 50 viola-
tion. With the USOPC now refus-
ing to do so, it’s not clear how the
IOC might handle an American
athlete who chooses to demon-
OLYMPICS FROM D1
USOPC no longer will punish athletes for social justice protests during events
OLIVIER MORIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Ethiopian runner Feyisa Lilesa crossed his arms in a sign of political dissent during the 2016 Olympics.