Serena Williams spoke out against police brutality in a Facebook post, writing: “As Dr Martin Luther King said ‘There comes a time when silence is betrayal’. I won’t be silent.”
The tennis champion, who just celebrated her 35th birthday, wrote that she was in a car being driven by her nephew when she saw a police car on the side of the road on Tuesday.
“I remembered that horrible video of the woman in the car when a cop shot her boyfriend,” she wrote, referencing Diamond Reynold's broadcast of the death of Philando Castile. “I even regretted not driving myself. I would never forgive myself if something happened to my nephew. He’s so innocent. So were all ‘the others’”.
“Why did I have to think about this in 2016?” she wrote. “Have we not gone through enough, opened so many doors, impacted billions of lives? But I realized we must stride on – for it’s not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go.”
In her Facebook post, however, Williams appeared to promise more vocal activism around racism in policing.
“I had to take a look at me,” she wrote. “What about my nephews? What if I have a son and what about my daughters?”
Williams has had to face racism throughout her career.
