A town hall featuring 100 black men in Baltimore, some prominent and familiar—others less often heard, but no less compelling and thoughtful—discuss everything from President Donald Trump and Colin Kaepernick to fatherhood, police reform, and the challenges facing black boys in the first episode of new series Take on America, airing tonight from OZY Media.

“Black Men in Baltimore,” hosted by award-winning journalist and OZY Media co-founder Carlos Watson and including Jemele Hill, formerly of ESPN and now of The Atlantic, is the first of four televised town halls that “take on America” through the lens of race.

Upcoming episodes include “White Women in Nashville” (airing October 25), “Latino Families in New York City” (airing November 1), and “Asian-American Millennials in San Francisco” (airing November 8). The series—which debuts tonight at 8 p.m. on YouTube, OZY.com, and a variety of PBS stations around the country—aims to generate dialogue that can help Americans understand each other better, and foster “greater insight and understanding at a critical time.”

Among the panelists in the Baltimore episode, filmed earlier this month at the War Memorial building, are Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous, Republican U.S. Senate candidate and Towson University professor Tony Campbell, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, The Wire actor Lawrence Gillard Jr., journalist and author D. Watkins and T.J. Smith, who recently resigned from the Baltimore Police Department after expressing his frustration with the struggling department.

It also features a good number of men most Baltimoreans likely don’t know—local business leaders, nonprofit directors, scholars, organizers, artists, and barbers among them—who care no less deeply about their state of their city and country.

The debut episode features candid, and at times emotional, conversations around the ongoing challenges facing black men in the U.S. today as well as revealing personal stories. Smith, for example, admits that even as a police officer he’s been the target of racial profiling and wrongfully stopped while driving and shopping.

The most moving segments of the episode, not surprisingly, come when the men talk about the obstacles their own fathers and mothers encountered in raising them and the twin trauma of poverty and violence all too common today in many Baltimore neighborhoods.

Politics and pressing issues, such as the continued War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, and voter suppression efforts—all of which disproportionately affect minority communities—are never far from the discussion, however. Nor are wide-ranging opinions on the best way forward.

With racial tensions running high in the era of President Trump and the run up to the mid-term elections, the aim of the town hall, and the series, according to OZY Media, “is to see how, in today’s incredibly tense political climate, we’re actually more alike than different in our strive for progress, and for outsiders to get an inside look at the conversations these minority groups are really having.”

“I feel passionately that we are at pivotal moment in our nation’s history,” said Watson, the series host in a statement. “We are living in one of the most racially charged eras since the Civil Rights movement, and the world is both more connected technologically, and disconnected interpersonally, than it’s ever-been before. We hope that we will create a forum for substantive dialogue and ultimately inform and inspire action.”

Not for nothing, but being a backup quarterback in the NFL is a dream job. A team pays you at least a million dollars a year to maybe play in a game. Fans scream in support of you when your superior struggles, and nobody expects anything if you happen to see the field and have responsibility thrust upon you.
 

Well, perhaps Baltimore’s best job, which has been open for a few months, has been filled again. The Ravens on Tuesday agreed in principle to a one-year contract with former Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, the idea being that he will be Joe Flacco’s backup. The deal is reportedly worth $1 million, plus a small signing bonus, and will become official next week.
 

Griffin, 28, is a bit of a headliner, but he hasn’t played in the NFL in more than a year. Known as RGIII since he first made national headlines in college at Baylor, when he won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s top player as a junior, the Redskins selected him No. 2 overall in the 2012 NFL Draft. He was the league’s rookie of the year, showing off a strong arm and trademark brand of electric playmaking ability, throwing for over 3,200 yards and rushing for 815. But he sprained his knee that season in a December game against the Ravens, of all teams, and his career never fully recovered.  

The Redskins released Griffin in 2015 and the Browns did the same in 2016 after a not-so-great year of play, and Griffin was out of the league completely until impressing the Ravens in a workout in Owings Mills last week. Flacco’s previous backup, Ryan Mallett, is currently a free agent. “You look at the quarterbacks out there and, where we’re at right now, I’m pretty excited about this player,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said of Griffin during a press conference Wednesday. “I’m really feeling like we got a steal. . . . I felt like he really wanted to be here, really wanted to be a Raven, felt like this was the place for him.”
 

Indeed . . .

Almost immediately after the signing was announced, social media commenters and sports writers wondered why the Ravens decided to take a shot on Griffin to be the No. 2 QB and not, let’s say, Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback who faced the Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII, who is still available. Many observers think Kaepernick is being blackballed for starting the league-wide social justice protest of kneeling for the national anthem last year.  

It didn’t seem the Ravens wanted to touch the hot-button issue with 10-foot pole after Harbaugh floated the possibility of signing Kaepernick last preseason. (At the time, the team sought more reinforcement for Flacco, who’s endured some injuries in recent years, including a herniated disk last season.) Plus, Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti said in December that several Ravens players kneeling for the anthem before the team’s Week 3 game in London and fans’ reactions to that was a factor for low attendance numbers at M&T Bank Stadium last season.
 

So, the RGIII experiment begins.  

A bit of internet snooping reveals that Griffin, also known for a gregarious personality and charm, was recently married, in March in Miami, to Grete Sadeiko, an Estonian heptathlete (that’s the crazy track and field competition with seven different events). Check out their wedding highlight video:

So, there’s some good karma around this signing. Griffin’s honeymoon period is still going strong, and he just landed a cushy new job. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some stayed in the locker room, and one even stretched for the National Anthem during Sunday’s NFL games. Following comments made by President Donald Trump at a political rally in Alabama on Friday calling on NFL owners to fire any player who “disrespects our flag,” multiple teams in the organization came together on Sunday in one of the biggest displays of open protest.

The Ravens and Jaguars kicked off a long string of protests in London Sunday morning with 10 Ravens players—including Terrell Suggs, C.J. Mosley, and Lardarius Webb—either taking a knee or standing with locked arms in solidarity in response to the president’s remarks.

“That’s a total disrespect of our heritage,” President Trump told supporters on Friday in Huntsville, Alabama. “That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for. Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.’”

This was the first time any Ravens player protested—just as quarterback Colin Kaepernick did back in 2016 in protest against the treatment of African Americans in the United States.

Following the Ravens early game, a number of other NFL players followed suit by staying in the locker room during the Anthem, including members of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Seattle Seahawks, and Tennessee Titans. Trump responded to the series of protest on Twitter Sunday.

Supporters of the protests insist the act is less about the American flag and National Anthem, and more about the right to exercise free speech and speak up about racial injustice. 

“In nearly 25 years as a sports executive, and a lifetime spent as an American citizen, I have never been so appalled by the abusive blood lust of my country’s highest governmental office, to defile my country’s constitutional guarantees,” president of MASN Sports, John P. Angelos, wrote on Twitter. “Anti-American and anti-citizen abuse of [the Trump administration’s] power should be repudiated, protested, and legally opposed on every front.” 

However, opponents of the athletic protests believe their actions are unpatriotic and disrespectful to those who have served or are serving in the military. Locally, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler took to Facebook to express his anger with the Ravens franchise.

“The embarrassment that is the NFL continues and people wonder why I am on strike,” Gahler wrote. “Ravens join the nonsense of taking knee [sic] while on the soil of the country we gained our independence from. Will be doing a housecleaning of any Ravens merchandise later today and getting it all ready for the burn.”

There are many people in Baltimore that have mixed feelings about the protests that happened on the field Sunday, wondering if there is a way to simultaneously respect the right to free speech while also honoring the country and its veterans.

“Just a thought . . . what if every past, current, and future American military person chose to take a knee instead of fighting to keep our country safe and free?” Bar Liquorice owner Jeff Cahill posted on Facebook. “I do respect anyone’s right to peacefully protest, but it has to be tempered with the respect for those who fought and lost their lives [my family included] in service to this country, which is what our flag and National Anthem symbolizes.”

The protests have also gone beyond the NFL, with Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry declining an invitation to visit The White House. President Trump then rescinded the invitation and Lebron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers sounded off on Instagram. The ripple effect continued into the MLB when Oakland Athletics’ catcher Bruce Maxwell, who is from a military family, became the first baseball player in history to kneel during the National Anthem on Saturday.

The weekend of protesting has caused a firestorm on a local level with a mixed bag of protests, support, boycotting, and championing. For Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti himself, he sees all of the dialogue as a reflection of democracy.

“We recognize our players’ influence,” he said. “We respect their demonstration and support them 100 percent. All voices need to be heard. That’s democracy in its highest form.”