Joan Baez

Colin Kaepernick , 2019

 
36 x 24 in

Nothing got more applause during Joan’s farewell tour than when she and her band would end each concert by taking a knee in honor of athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick.

“We loved doing it because the audience would already be applauding, bursting at the seams over the show, and then we’d kneel and they couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “That was the high point of the concert.”

At the start of NFL games, Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, famously knelt during the National Anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality, launching the era of activism among professional athletes.

Although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would eventually apologize for not listening sooner to the concerns of African American players, Kaepernick’s protest cost him his career as an NFL player when no team would hire him. You will notice that Joan painted the NFL logo on Kaepernick’s jersey upside down.

“Talk about being willing to give it all up for a cause,” she says. “It was brilliant. We didn’t get more applause for anything than when we took a knee.”

SOLD