Jones takes stand with remarks

Adam Jones has inserted himself into a difficult and necessary conversation about race, politics and protest in sports. Let’s begin with that last part. Of course, players should be able to make a gesture aimed at focusing on injustices in this country. Protest is one of the pillars on which this country was built.

“Here’s my biggest thing,” the Orioles center fielder told reporters on Monday, “society doesn’t mind us helping out the hood and the inner cities, but they have a problem when we speak about the hood and the inner cities. I don’t understand it.”

Protest is supposed to be disruptive and uncomfortable. Otherwise, it does nothing. Jones was speaking generally of NFL players offering visible gestures like kneeling or holding a fist in the air during the playing of the national anthem.

Whether kneeling during the national anthem, especially on Sept. 11, a sacred day, is the right thing to do, well, that’s for each to decide. From Rosa Parks in Birmingham to Martin Luther King Jr., in Selma, from the sanitation workers of Memphis to the lunch counters of Greensboro, change isn’t possible without people using whatever voice they have to make a statement.

When Jones was asked by USA Today if he could imagine baseball players offering protests during the national anthem, he said that they probably wouldn’t out of fear of putting their jobs at risk. Then he added this: “Baseball is a white man’s sport.”

That one is complicated. Baseball’s history in this area is a proud one. Jones should never forget this part of the story. It, too, was once a disruptor. Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947 a year before President Harry Truman integrated the Army, seven years before the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and nearly a decade before King began leading the fight for racial fairness.

King said often that Robinson …

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