Players from the Orlando City SC and Inter Miami CF raised their right fists and took a knee before the league’s first match in four months on Wednesday in a show of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter social justice movement.
Some players wore T-shirts over their jerseys with the words “Black and Proud” and “Silence is Violence” before the match, and both team’s starting players as well as the referees took a knee just before kickoff of the first game of the ‘MLS is Back’ tournament in Orland. . .
The kneeling protest was popularized by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, and the gesture has again gained steam after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis in May.