The ESPY Awards, a televised event that normally aims to recognize stellar athletic achievements around the nation, sidestepped its sports focus for a bit to tackle some hot political buttons – most notably, gun control.
Basketball great LeBron James, along with three fellow NBA stars, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade, stood in mostly dark dress in a line across the Microsoft Theater stage in Los Angeles and addressed the recent shootings of blacks by police officers.
"The urgency to create change is at an all-time high," Anthony said, the Charlotte Observer reported.
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Paul, whose uncle is a police officer, then said the names of several of the men who've been killed by law enforcement agents in recent times, while Wade called for a halt to racial profiling and a failure to "[see] the value of black and brown bodies," the news outlet reported.
The officer who shot Philando Castile in Minnesota was a man of Hispanic heritage named Jeronimo Yanez; the officer who shot Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was a white man named Blane Salamoni. Meanwhile, the gunman who shot and killed five police officers in Dallas, Texas, and injured seven more, as well as two civilians, was a black man named Micah X. Johnson.
"Enough is enough," Wade said.
James said similarly, telling the ABC television audience: "We all feel helpless and frustrated by the violence" and calling on colleagues to use their time to help rebuild communities, the Charlotte Observer said.
"We all have to do better," James said.
Gun control took front and center during the awarding of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, as well.
Zenobia Dobson, the mother of a 15-year-old high school football player from Knoxville, Tennessee, Zaevion, who killed by gunfire when he shielded two women from the assailant, accepted the award for her son.
She said, alongside her other two sons who joined her on stage, that four months after her son was killed, his 12-year-old cousin was also killed in a drive-by shooting.
"I'm here to fight back," Dobson said, the Charlotte Observer reported. "We as a country need to take a stand to consider the effects of gun violence on the families throughout America. ... We need to rewrite laws to make it harder for people to get guns. All the athletes in this room, you have a lot of power. People look up to you. I know Zaevion did. I urge you to think tonight about why he died and what you can do tomorrow to prevent the next innocent man or woman from being lost."
President Obama, via video comments, piggy-backed on her story.
"It's up to all of us," he said, "to build a country that's worthy of Zaevion's promise. That's what we owe him. That's what we owe all our kids."