At her age, race activist Alveda King wasn’t the least bit surprised by the Caitlin Clark opinion piece penned this week by USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour.
“I’ve seen every kind of race-baiting that you can imagine. I’m 75 years old,” the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told OutKick on Friday. Armour’s column relating the murder of Emmett Till to Caitlin Clark putting black and lesbian WNBA players in physical danger didn’t come as a shock to a woman who has seen so much over her lifetime.
King, a Fox News contributor, says this playbook by the left-wing media is all too predictable.
“What people have learned to do, is to throw out inflammatory, emotional phrases that will make people emotional and forget how to think. There was no reason to throw Emmett Till’s name out there. And so, that’s called race-baiting,” she continued.
King’s advice to Americans is simple: Don’t be “misled by emotional turmoil without examining the facts.”
What are the facts here?
As OutKick’s Dan Zaksheske has written this week, Armour has used Clark as a race-baiting target in the past. In 2024, the USA Today columnist wrote that Clark needed to “call out the toxic segment of her fan base” after an incident with DiJonai Carrington that left the Indiana Fever guard with a black eye. For some reason, Armour made Clark the villain in the situation.
This season, Armour alleges, Clark is egging on her supporters to send nasty messages to WNBA players by flopping and berating refs over no-calls. Armour’s narrative is clear as day: Clark is a problem because she’s white, straight, and a huge swath of America believes she’s the best player in the WNBA.
Surely, Nancy has reached out to civil rights pundits and race historians, right?
“No, I have not,” King said when asked if she’s ever heard from Armour.
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What about anyone from the USA Today Sports department? “I have not,” King responded.
Have any editors ever called to add substance, or even alternative viewpoints to what Armour is pushing? “I don’t know if they want to call me. You know, they’ve not called me, and I imagine if I tried to call them, I hope they would answer. I have no problem with having the same discussion,” she continued.
OutKick reached out to the NAACP national office for this story on Thursday to add its own perspective. We have not heard back.
As for Armour, on Thursday, she released a statement on her column that was painted by USA Today as some sort of apology. “In my recent column, I made an inartful comparison with the murder of Emmett Till. I intended to connect the issues the WNBA is currently facing with its All-Star Game being hosted in Till’s hometown of Chicago,” Armour wrote. “I obviously did not provide enough context for that.”
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Then, in what shouldn’t be a shock, Armour pretty much doubled down by saying her “point stands.”
“There is a history in this country of perceived threats to white women being weaponized against African-Americans, and the danger that poses to Black players in the league,” she added.
USA Today’s sports department has drawn a line in the sand. The race-baiting, especially within its WNBA coverage, is here to stay.
