Gabe Kapler’s decision to kneel during the national anthem last week was not made overnight; it was set in motion before he was born. To understand why Kapler, a White millionaire from the San Fernando Valley, placed his knee firmly on a major-league baseball diamond to protest systemic racism, one must trace a line back more than 50 years, back to a bustling office in New York, where two self-described hippies met while planning anti-war marches for $60 a week.
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Judy and Michael Kapler spent the 1960s attending, or in some cases helping to organize, some of the seminal civil rights demonstrations of the decade. They were among the 250,000 people at the nation’s capital on the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” on Aug. 28, 1963.
The thundering voice they heard that day echoes still. Judy felt the tremors again last week when Kapler became the first head coach or manager in major North American professional sports to kneel during the anthem.
“Peaceful protests were something that were really, really important in my house. It’s something I saw growing up all the time,” the Giants manager said by phone Monday. “It’s something that I saw growing up as a child all the time, something that was encouraged by mom and dad.Something I witnessed first hand.”
In a way, this is what his parents wanted, far more so than raising a professional athlete. Michael used to teach his youngest boy to question authority, to never follow blindly. The lessons were hardly subtle. When Gabe was in elementary school, his father guided him through the pledge of allegiance, asking him to scrutinize every word, especially the final six: “… with liberty and justice for all.” Was that really true?
“And this is how it all ended,” Judy Kapler said by phone on Saturday. “With Gabe really deciding he had an opportunity to make a difference. That’s what he did and I couldn’t be prouder of him.”
Kapler’s profile on Twitter features the image of Martin Luther King Jr. His statement explaining why he took a knee last week, first against the A’s during an exhibition game and then at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day, quotes from King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
That wasn’t something he needed to Google. His parents have been there all along, and they have stories to tell.
Judy Kapler, on the phone line now, laments the fractured nature of modern activism. The climate change crowd tends to focus on climate change, she said, while those associated with the Black Lives Matter movement hardly overlap with the people trying to raise awareness about COVID-19.
“I think that in the ’60s and ’70s, they were more combined, and one could see how one issue was really very connected to the other,’’ she said. “There really wasn’t a separation between personal and political.
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“And I think that right now, the judgment would be that it’s different. I think that young people today are much too quiet. But it’s hard for me to know because I’m not in the middle.”
Judy Kapler could have added anymore. She’s not in the middle anymore. Because for much of early life, she was in the heart of the action.
— gabe kapler (@gabekapler) July 23, 2020
Judy grew up in what she called “a very mixed neighborhood in Brooklyn.” Her first teaching job was at an elementary school in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, where in the early 1960s there was a large Black community and mounting complaints about the disparity in educational opportunities.
“And I developed, at a very young age, very, very strong feelings about how unfair our society was,’’ Judy said. “I don’t think that the phrase ‘systemic racism’ existed at that time, but it was very clear that everything was not equal.”
So, Judy joined the fight. She got a job with the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, which coordinated anti-war parades. That’s where she met Michael, idealistic and freshly arrived from Los Angeles, and the two enjoyed a courtship with a distinctly ’60s bent.
“We went to demonstrations. We connected,’’ said Judy, who spoke for the two of them in this interview. “And don’t forget, it was the late ’60s. The women’s movement was happening, and everything was happening. Stokely Carmichael was happening. Malcolm X was happening. The Black Panthers were happening.
“So there was a lot of peaceful and non-peaceful stuff going on. I aligned myself, as did Michael, with peaceful protests and the right to stand up for things we thought were important and valid.”
As a result, Judy bore witness to some of the biggest events of a tumultuous decade.
There was King’s landmark speech.
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“It was amazing. It was beyond amazing,’’ she said. “It was moving and it was everything you probably feel when you hear it now. … It was just being there and being amongst the hundreds of thousands of people who really were understanding the terrible inequality that existed in the country and how people had to come together to make a difference.”
There was the March on Washington to end the Vietnam War in 1965.
“I organized all the transportation that went from New York to Washington,’’ Judy said. “I was in charge of all the buses and all the trains and all the cars. That was my job. Thousands and thousands and thousands (of people) … I was young and had a lot of energy.”
There was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where thousands of protestors rallied against the Vietnam War and the political status quo.
“What I was doing there, interestingly enough, was working for the National Lawyers Guild, volunteering,’’ Judy said. “I was bailing people out of jail. The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, was arresting them and beating on them. And I was sitting in a courtroom and bailing them out of jail.”
By 1971, Michael and Judy decided to drive back west, to Southern California, where they got involved in the anti-nuclear movement.
Another reason for the move? They had a family to raise.
Living in Reseda, even baseball became a political football. The Kaplers were so intent on practicing what they preached that they kept Gabe away from the socioeconomic minefield of their local Little League.
“We chose for him to play at the park,’’ Judy said of her youngest, who would spend 12 seasons in the majors and win a World Series with the Red Sox in 2004. “(Gabe) played park ball until he was 12 because Little League was very competitive amongst the parents, and it was all very wealthy people.
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“We didn’t feel like that was the kind of sport we wanted him to be involved in, one where you got to play shortstop if your father coached the team, and your father only coached because he made a big contribution to the Little League area.”
The Kaplers were not rich and lived in a working-class area of the San Fernando Valley. They were both educators. Judy focused on early childhood while Michael, a classical pianist, taught music.
But they lived in the shadow of wealth, so they made school choices that ensured their children would have friends from different cultures and economic backgrounds.
Jeremy, who is three years older than Gabe, initially attended a local private school before spending second through sixth grade making the long haul to West Hollywood.
“We decided we needed to put our money where our mouths were,” Judy said, “and when busing started to become an issue, we took him out of that school and sent him to an integrated public school where he had to ride for an hour each way to go to school. Everything that we did was about equality and understanding that we live in a society that discriminated against people of color.”
Gabe Kapler cherishes growing up in what he calls “a very socially aware family.” Dinner conversation was lively and driven by the latest headlines. Television was limited mostly to PBS. Food was organic — no junk food and minimal sugar.
The kids were forbidden from owning toy guns, not even a water gun.
Even running out for errands could come with a whiff of the counterculture. In an interview shortly after he was hired in November, Gabe Kapler recalled that on more than one occasion his father would hop out of the car and spray paint a political message on a freeway overpass.
Judy, all these years later, was surprised to hear that.
“I’ll assume it happened if Gabe said it happened, but I probably would have been rather distressed, if only because I wouldn’t have wanted anybody to have been caught,’’ Judy said. “But also, I don’t necessarily believe in destroying property, and neither does Michael.
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“We were really much more pacifists than we were involved in wanting to stir up riots and violence, etc. I can definitely say that. We were pacifists.”
Instead, they armed their children with information. They gave Jeremy and Gabe carefully selected reading material, books that did not gloss over troubling moments from the nation’s past.
“We made sure that the history books that our kids read were Noam Chomsky books and Howard Zinn books,” Judy said. “There’s a history book for children called, ‘The Real History of the United States,’ where the picture wasn’t painted that we were wonderful to the Native Americans and that Columbus didn’t do all of these wonderful things.
“We just talked openly and honestly about what our beliefs were. And we had the research to back it up.”
In the early evening last Monday, the phone started buzzing in the home where Gabe Kapler grew up. There were texts. There were phone calls.
“That’s when I found out,’’ Judy said of Gabe’s decision to kneel during the anthem. “I started getting phone calls and my social media light went on. And people said, ‘Congratulations on having raised such a wonderful son,’ and on and on and on and on.
“I got nothing but positive feedback from people — people I hadn’t heard from for years.”
Kapler, two of his coaches and several Giants players, including Jaylin Davis, Mike Yastrzemski, Austin Slater and Chadwick Tromp, took a knee during the anthem. They joined their standing teammates as a recorded choral performance played over the Coliseum speakers prior to an exhibition game against the A’s.
Kapler hadn’t alerted his mom with what he was about to do. Then again, he hardly needed to. When Kapler explained his decision later, saying, “I will call out injustice when I see it. I rejected hatred and bigotry in all forms,’’ he might as well have been reading from the family charter.
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Before Monday, only one major-league player had kneeled for the anthem and it happened on the same field. That was in 2017, when then-A’s catcher Bruce Maxwell followed the example set by Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players and took a knee for the anthem. Maxwell’s silent protest resulted in death threats, bitterness and a feeling that baseball abandoned him.
Judy was asked how Gabe might deal with the backlash from such a politically combustible decision.
“Do you know Gabe? Have you talked to him?” she said, only semi-rhetorically. “Because he’s very controlled. … He thinks before he speaks. I don’t think that, since he’s been a grown-up, I’ve seen him lose his temper. He’s very thoughtful before he reacts and he’s very successful about not getting into heated arguments with people when he happens to disagree with them.”
Indeed, Kapler has said he respected reliever Sam Coonrod’s decision to stand and be unwavering in his beliefs.
Judy Kapler, meanwhile, still envisions a better future. As she heard King say, back in 1963, she dreams that one day people of this nation will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
“And here we are, I don’t know how many years later, and we’re still fighting the same fight,’’ Judy said. “I am extremely proud of my son.”
(Photo: Katelyn Mulcahy / Getty Images)
