When the NFL told players this season that they could dedicate a piece of their uniforms to a cause or charity they wanted to highlight, Bilal Powell knew right away what he wanted to do.
The soft-spoken New York Jets running back used his cleats to send a loud message to the world: It’s time to put an end to the gun violence plaguing American communities.
Gun violence is an issue that hits close to home for Powell, whether that’s in his native Lakeland, Florida; in Louisville, Kentucky, where he went to college and still has a home; or in New Jersey, where he lives during the NFL season.
“I lost a lot of friends and a family member to gun violence,” Powell told The Huffington Post. “My best friend lost a bunch of family members to gun violence in the city of Louisville, and it’s pretty bad up here in New Jersey, too. … You just want to do something about it.”
The NFL has long fined players for using their cleats as a billboard for issues that aren’t league-sanctioned. But after years of criticism, it announced earlier this year that it would relax the policy for Week 13 of the 2016 season. As it happens, the Jets played the Indianapolis Colts during Monday Night Football on Dec. 5, giving Powell’s message against gun violence a national audience.
Once he landed on gun violence prevention as the issue he wanted to highlight, Powell still had to figure out the best way to do it. For that, he turned to Scedric Moss, his former University of Louisville teammate who is now an artist based in the city. Moss was busy with his own projects, but he had also lost friends to gun violence, and he couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
The result was a pair of tricolor cleats impossible to miss under the stadium’s bright lights. Each of the three colors Moss selected — green, neon yellow and red — symbolizes gun violence. The green, Powell said, stands for money, often a source of conflict that leads to fatal gun disputes. The yellow is for police caution tape. And the red speckles represent the blood shed in each of America’s thousands of annual gun deaths.
On the side of each shoe, Moss also painted the outlines of two raised hands. They represent the charity Hands Across Louisville, an anti-gun violence organization in Powell’s adopted hometown. Among other priorities, the organization wants to train local citizens in anger management and social interaction, and bolster job creation and career-training efforts.
Powell chose the Louisville charity because of the time he spent in the city in college. He was a standout running back for the Cardinals, amassing more than 2,600 total yards and 22 touchdowns during his four years at the university. To get there, he’d left behind a past that included, he said, a stint in a gang in Florida.
But even in Kentucky, gun violence remained close to his life. During Powell’s sophomore year in 2008, Louisville wide receiver Trent Guy was injured in a shooting in the city. Two years later, another one of Powell’s teammates — former Cardinals linebacker Daniel Covington — was shot and killed in a dispute downtown.
The city where Powell now lives in the offseason and plans to retire once his career is over is still struggling with gun violence — a double homicide shooting in Louisville’s Shawnee Park on Thanksgiving Day made national news and pushed the city’s total number of homicides for the year to a five-decade high.
“The city of Louisville will always be in my heart,” Powell said. “You have people losing innocent lives in this. This hit home for me. I wanted to choose something that I had a connection to.”
The cleats aren’t Powell’s only form of action on gun violence. After he made it to the NFL, he started The Bilal Powell Foundation to help keep children out of trouble and away from the type of violence he has experienced up close too often. It’s geared toward expanding community and education opportunities for at-risk children in the cities he’s called home.
But for a running back who usually prefers to let his performance on the field speak for him, the pair of cleats offered a chance to broadcast his message publicly.
“Hopefully this is something that will wake a lot of people up,” Powell said. “What I’m trying to do … is get people to open their eyes, man, and try to bring peace.”
