SALT LAKE CITY — Kamaal Ahmad was planting his vegetable garden when his wife came out to show him a picture of a police car protesters had set on fire in downtown Salt Lake City.
He dropped what he was doing, ran to his car and rushed to where the cop car was burning.
It would have been easy to assume Kamaal, a proud African American man who is also a Muslim — not to mention a former D-1 college football player and champion heavyweight boxer — was running to join the revolt.
But that would have been profiling.
Kamaal wanted to see if he could calm everybody down.
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You do not have to explain what it means to be a minority to Kamaal Ahmad. He was born and raised in Oklahoma, where his ancestors settled not long after the Civil War freed them from slaving on plantations in the deep South.
In the turbulent ’60s his parents joined the Nation of Islam and changed their names. When he came along in 1981 he was named Kamaal, which in Arabic means “perfection.”
Growing up, he wanted to be perfect in sports. He played linebacker first at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, arguably the top junior college football school in the nation, and then at the University of Kentucky, where he also boxed, winning the collegiate Midwest regional championship and the Kentucky state Golden Gloves heavyweight title.
Kamaal’s linebacker coach at Kentucky was Ron McBride, the venerable University of Utah coach who spent two years at Kentucky after being let go by the Utes. In 2005, Weber State lured McBride back to Utah to be its head coach. McBride, in turn, invited Kamaal to join his staff as a graduate assistant.
The term “culture shock” doesn’t do justice to Kamaal’s reaction when he first moved to Ogden.
“I’m used to places with large African American communities,” he said. “Here there really wasn’t one.
“I told Coach Mac, ‘I’m only here for a year, then I’m leaving.’”
That was 14 years ago.
Utah grew on Kamaal. Kamaal grew on Utah. When McBride retired in 2011 and his coaching staff disbanded, Kamaal set out in a different direction, career-wise, this time as an educator. He moved to Salt Lake City, “fell in love” with teaching, taught special education for seven years and then branched into school administration. This year he will be assistant principal at Granite Park Junior High School.
Along the way, Kamaal got to know the minority communities of the Salt Lake Valley intimately well. Which brings us back to the afternoon of Saturday, May 30.
“I was home, I’d planted my vegetable garden, now I’m working my way over to get my flower bed done, which I’m looking forward to, because school just got out so this is my vacation time,” he explained. “Then my wife shows me a picture of a police car getting burned and I’m like, ‘I’m going down there. This isn’t right. Who are these people? Who’s so upset they’re burning police cars?’ I’m going to see if there’s any youth I know to talk to them and convince them to leave and help defuse the situation.”
But when he arrived, “I looked around and didn’t know anyone there, and I know a lot of local youth. I’m a schoolteacher and on top of that I’m involved in various minority communities. I know them very, very well.”
What he saw instead were “opportunists who saw a moment.”
“I would bet a million dollars these were people who get in trouble every day. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that. In all honesty my 4-year-old daughter could have figured that out.
“The protest that happened from 10 to 3 from my expectations was phenomenal, it was peaceful. After that it was people who saw an opportunity to cause damage.
“I got there as it was escalating. I saw people attacking policemen who weren’t fighting back, policemen who were standing their ground and taking it. I don’t know how they did it. They’re better than me, ’cause there would have been a lot of punching on my end. I don’t know if you could do a better job that they did.”
Nothing in Kamaal’s experience suggested that Salt Lake police deserved such abuse. He’d never personally felt mistreated; never felt profiled.
“When you talk to the African American community here that’s the thing you’re going to notice,” he said. “It’s pretty much the same. No issues, no targeting. In my view the police here have a great relationship with the minority.”
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As he left downtown with the fires still burning, the 6-foot-2, 240-pound Kamaal reached for his phone. He needed to get his frustration off his chest and posting a video on Twitter was the only way he could think to do it.
“I’m just leaving the protest,” he tweeted, “and I have no idea what in the world was going on there, but that wasn’t about George Floyd, that wasn’t about racial equality in our country, that was about people who want to cause harm and conflict. We owe it to our city to help our law enforcement. This isn’t Chicago, this isn’t New York. Our police department has a great reputation. They are good people.”
Within days, Kamaal’s video had 20,000 retweets. His posts on Facebook and Instagram were viewed more than 100,000 times.
“It’s crazy, it went viral,” he said.
Ever since, everyone’s wanting to talk to Kamaal. All last week he did media interviews (including this one). Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and Police Chief Mike Brown invited him to a strategy meeting at the city offices (he brought along Coach Mac). He organized a rally to promote peace and progress that was held this past Saturday not far from where the police car burned the week before.
In one of his media interviews, Kamaal heard someone in the crowd exclaim, “You’re protesting the protest!”
“I had to kinda stop and say, ‘Yeah, isn’t that beautiful? You should be able to protest. That’s what makes America America, that’s what makes us great. It’s the violence I don’t agree with.’”
Going forward, his plan is to lead a movement to “show how Salt Lake City is unique and how we can be the model for others to come and observe how we’re going to move forward with race relations to make a positive environment and culture that is sustainable.”
He still hasn’t made it back to plant his flowers.