Last week, a decades-old photo surfaced showing Cowboys owner Jerry Jones attending a protest at North Little Rock High in his native Arkansas. The photo, from Sept. 9, 1957, shows a group of white students blocking the doorway of the school and shouting slurs at six Black students who tried to enter during one of the first attempts at public school integration in the state.
On Wednesday, Lakers star LeBron James questioned the media as to why the Jones story was quick to exit the news cycle and why he was never questioned about it the same way he fielded questions about Kyrie Irving’s recent sharing of antisemitic materials and the lengthy delay in apologizing for them, as well as his consequent suspension from the Nets.
“I was wondering why I haven’t gotten a question from you guys about the Jerry Jones photo, but when the Kyrie thing was going on, you guys were quick to ask us questions about that?” James asked during a postgame press conference Wednesday.
When a member of the media started to respond to James’s question, the Lakers star cut them off, telling them that he had more to say.
“When I watch Kyrie talk and he says, ‘I know who I am,’ but I want to keep the same energy when we’re talking about my people and the things that we’ve been through,” James said. “And the Jerry Jones photo is one of those moments that our people—Black people—have been through in America.
“And I feel like, as a Black man, as a Black athlete, as someone with power and a platform, when we do something wrong or something that people don’t agree with, it’s on every single tabloid, every single news coverage, on the bottom ticker, it’s asked about every single day. But it seems like to me the whole Jerry Jones situation, photo—and I know it was years and years ago and we all make mistakes, I get it—but it seems like it’s just been buried under, like, ‘Oh, it happened, O.K. we just move on.’ And I’m kinda disappointed I haven’t received that question from you guys.”
Jones, who was 14 years old at the time, confirmed that he was in the photo but said he was just attending the protest as what he called a “curious thing” without any intention of harassing the Black students.
“I don’t know that I or anybody anticipated or had a background of knowing … what was involved,” Jones said, per Dave Maraniss and Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post. “It was more a curious thing.”
Jones continued that he did not understand the historical significance of the event at the time, and his primary concern was not getting in trouble with his football coach. He later expressed regret that he did not do more to help his Black classmates.
“I’ll be very candid with you, I’ve often asked: ‘Why didn’t you do more?” Jones said. “’Why didn’t you get up and have them come up on the bus and sit rather than standing back there? Why didn’t you do more?’”
This is not James’s first brush-up with Jerry Jones in recent months. The Lakers star was famously a Cowboys fan until a recent switch in his allegiance to his home-state Browns. In October he confirmed that he gave up his Dallas fandom after Jones took a hard line in 2017 regarding players kneeling for the national anthem in wake of Colin Kaepernick’s protests.
“It’s just a lot of things that were going on when guys were kneeling. … The organization was like ‘If you do that around here, you won’t ever play for this franchise again.’ I just didn’t think that was appropriate.”
