. . . And Now What?

When Colin Kaepernick took a knee this fall, he kicked offa movement. Seahawks receiver Doug Baldwin and other athletes are writing the playbook for what comes next

- Greg Bishop

DOUG BALDWIN clutches a black tablet-sized notebook as he slides into a booth at a restaurant near the Seahawks’ headquarters in Renton, Wash., and begins to scan the pages. It’s all in there, laid out in impeccable handwriting, his personal steps toward social activism, complete with research, dates, contacts and diagrams.

It’s early October, almost a month after the 28-year-old wideout and his teammates first locked arms during the national anthem at their season opener against the Dolphins in Seattle. That was before the death threats, before the emails that called Baldwin a n--- and told him to return to Africa (he’s actually from Florida, and is one-quarter Filipino), before they wished he would tear an ACL.

He lingers over one page filled with thought bubbles: the points he wants to make, how each claim could be countered, how he could respond. Flip. His examination of the Constitution. Flip. The speech he delivered at a September press conference, when he asked that state attorneys general review their training policies for law enforcement. Flip. Research on the civil rights movement.

Flip. More notes, from his early conversations with 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick, the face of athlete social activism in 2016, a player who turned a routine staple of pregame festivities, “The Star Spangled Banner,” into a topic of heated debate. A mutual friend had put the two players in touch; Baldwin wanted to discuss the next steps. “If you want to lay down [during the national anthem], I’m down to lay down,” he’d told Kaepernick.