Davidson basketball star launches program for social justice and racial equality

Kellan Grady has seen enough. Now he hopes to make a difference.

Grady said he was deeply moved in 2018 when he and his Davidson basketball teammates visited the Auschwitz/Berkineau concentration camp in Poland. Two years later, the murders of two black Americans — Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd — enraged him.

Monday, Grady, the Wildcats’ all-Atlantic 10 senior guard, launched College Athletes for Respect and Equality (CARE), a program he hopes will allow college athletes to raise awareness about social injustice and racial inequality.

“I wanted to somehow empower and help us have an influence about racial injustice,” Grady told The Observer from his home in Boston on Monday. “We’ve got to create change and promote the concept of human dignity and equality. That’s our mission behind it.”

Grady is working with Stacy Gallin, founding director of the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust. The two met in Poland in 2018, a trip organized by Gallin’s institute.

“Two summers ago, the gruesome nature of that whole experience at Auschwitz was a serious reality check and privilege assessment for me,” Grady said. “It was a time to assess my core to see how I might be complicit and it humbled me.

“Then the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery infuriated me, along with seemingly everybody else.”

Grady expressed his frustration on social media, and soon heard from Gallin.

“She inspired me to help me use my platform as an NCAA Division I college athlete to attempt to influence and change what’s going on right now,” Grady said.

Grady planned a Zoom video conference July 13 that he hopes will bring in other athletes from around the country.

“I’d like this to be about the collective efforts of college athletes, to have a platform given our level of notoriety,” Grady said. “Not just as athletes, but as people of a younger generation who are going to be part of change for the next 50 years.”

Grady is the second Davidson athlete to speak out and organize against social injustice and racial inequality. Earlier this month, football player ChiChi Odo held a video call with more than 200 Davidson athletes, students, coaches, faculty members and administrators.

Some 20 athletes talked about being accountable to each other and making a difference locally and on campus, about working with the under-privileged in the town of Davidson, involving professors in the conversation and talking with campus and local police.

Grady said he hopes to talk to Odo about their initiatives.

As a start for CARE and a challenge for other college athletes, Grady said he’d like the Davidson basketball team to visit local elementary and middle schools to “read and talk to students about racial injustice and the promotion of human dignity.”

This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM.