Colin Kaepernick is still fighting – for justice and for his football career

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.

Ten years ago, quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem before a San Francisco 49ers game, protesting police brutality against black people. He said he wouldn't stand to show pride in a flag for a country that oppressed people of color. Within days, he was the most talked about athlete in America, and after that season he never played another NFL game. Kaepernick later filed a grievance accusing NFL owners of colluding to keep him out of the league, and later reached a settlement. He went on to found the Know Your Rights Camp and a publishing company, and co created a Netflix series with Ava Duvernay about his childhood.

He became a father, and through all of it he kept training for another shot at the NFL, a shot that still hasn't come. Over the last decade, Colin has given very few interviews. Now he's written a memoir called The Perilous Fight, and it begins not with the protest against the anthem, but with Colin as a black child, adopted by white parents and growing up in a predominantly white town, learning about race in ways that would shape the rest of his life. Colin Kaepernick, welcome to Fresh Air.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (49 minutes, 6,917 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.