The thing is, Jordan Evans had been talking about the idea with his dad a few weeks before the marching in the streets.
And, when you really start getting down to it, Evans, the Bengals' 25-year-old linebacker, has been thinking about it for a lot longer than that. Longer than the four seasons he's been in the league. The idea may even be older than that report he wrote on Malcolm X in the eighth grade. Or the books he has read about Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali.
It just may go all the way back to the little girl on the playground.
"I'm not going to sit here and say I'm a political activist," Evans says. "There are a lot of things I'm trying to educate myself on. This is something I'm passionate about. I feel like with our platform I have an opportunity to help and I feel like if I don't use it then I'm wasting what god gave me."
His idea is education. A course on diversity in middle and high schools. Knowledge always beats ignorance at the line of scrimmage is the way he was raised. Last week during the Bengals' virtual team meeting that sliced open jagged thoughts into raw emotion on the subject of what to do next in the battle for the high ground of social justice, Evans' idea resonated.
Not only that but as the month has churned through events, the idea he has sketched out to the group back in his hometown of Norman, Okla., is getting even more traction. There is a scheduled meeting at the end of this month when Evans gets back from working out in Tampa, Fla.
Dr. Nick Migliorino, Norman's superintendent of schools, is one of his biggest supporters. Some school board members want to hear more. And it helps that his mother, Tenika Evans, knows the terrain as one of Norman North High School's more valued resources as a teacher helping students tracking behind the graduation curve. The best ideas always seem to come close to home.
Evans is cautious because nothing is set in stone and he'll feel better about where the idea is after the meeting. But it is ideas like this one that the Bengals and the NFL hope help.
"Honestly, my dream is for the authentic history be taught," Evans says. "We have certain curriculum that you have to follow in order to graduate high school or pass classes. Why is some of our curriculum (electives) when you can sit there and learn about diversity? People want diversity to work for us, but how can you expect people to know how to handle diversity if they've never been taught it? I think the way you learn about it is through the true history of other people. I feel like that's a step to being able to understand each other, know each other's history, know what people go through. That can help with some of the racism and ignorance we see today."
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