Jim Brown's legs, ever-churning and sturdy as tree trunks, helped propel him to fame on the football field. His voice once he left the gridiron — every bit as powerful.
In many ways, Brown, who died Thursday night at 87, used his platform as one of the greatest football players of all time to fight for people very much like him: unsatisfied with the status quo, tired of the withering degradation of racial inequality and, ultimately, never easy to shoehorn into one single, tidy category.
Brown was an activist who sat alongside Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali and was on par with Olympic fist-raisers Tommie Smith and John Carlos.