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The Wizards’ Bradley Beal shared a disturbing story about being pulled over by police on 495

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Washington Wizards and Washington Mystics players participated in a Juneteenth march Friday morning spanning Capital One Arena to the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial. Wearing Black Lives Matter shirts and holding a Together We Stand banner, the players, including John Wall and Natasha Cloud, chanted things like No justice. No peace. No racist police. as a throng of supporters marched behind them.

Before the march began, the Wizards’ Bradley Beal, the team’s superstar shooting guard, took a mic and shared a scary interaction he had with DC police where he was racially profiled.

Video

“I’ve been pulled over with four hoopers before and we’ve all been taken out and searched because we were black riding in a white neighborhood,” Beal, wearing a black University City hat, said. “I went to an all-white high school. Another thing happened here, two years ago. I got pulled over on 495 and the officer asked me to step out of the vehicle. We’re literally on the side of the highway – my wife, me and one of my friends. He comes up to me and says, ‘What if I f*ck up your Monday and put you on a headlock and arrest you right now?’ I didn’t do anything, but because I was a black athlete driving a nice vehicle, that’s what he came up with. How am I supposed to respond to that? I would just be waking up on Monday morning with an ESPN headline ‘Bradley Beal arrested because of interaction with police.'”

Beal added some more context in a one-on-one interview with The Undefeated.

“I got pulled over while I was in the league here because of my tints,” Beal said. “That caused reason for me to get out of the car and sit on the side of the highway. Then for him to tell me ‘I can f up your Monday headline on ESPN by arresting you right now.’

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I didn’t cause for him to say that. But, that was just an eye-opener for me that it can happen to anybody at any time.”

The Wizards and Mystics have shown exceptional leadership since the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd due to police brutality. Wizards players shared an exceptionally powerful statement after Floyd’s murder saying, “We will no longer shut up and dribble.”

Natasha Cloud also penned a Players’ Tribune article entitled Your Silence Is A Knee On My Neck.

The march comes a day after Monumental Sports & Entertainment announced several initiatives including Juneteenth being a paid holiday for all employees.

Here are some other sights and scenes from today’s march.

Headline photo: Miranda Rosenfelt/RMNB

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