ATLANTA

Negative images of law-breaking Black athletes stem from societal issues, not something inherent to the athletes, according to a star-studded panel on the Black athlete at Morehouse College Monday.

“We have not stood up and taken ownership of ourselves,” said National Football League Hall of Fame running back, actor and activist Jim Brown. “We have a Willie Lynch concept. Whose responsibility is it to change that? It’s ours.”

Brown was part of an A-list group on a panel about the Black athlete, a forum put together by filmmaker and Morehouse graduate Spike Lee. The panel included Rutgers University women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer, Miami Heat center Alonzo Mourning, and Kansas City Star and AOL Black Voices sports columnist Jason Whitlock.

The panel discussion, held Monday evening before a standing room crowd of more than 300 students and sports luminaries, was part of the school’s introduction of long-time sports journalist Ron Thomas as head of Morehouse’s new sports journalism program — a program Thomas said will intensely focus on research, writing and interviewing techniques with the goal of increasing the number of minority sports journalists.

“All of those ingredients will prepare Morehouse students to go into the newsroom, and be able to go into any department in the newsroom,” Thomas says. “Many believe that increasing the number of Black sports writers, particularly those covering sports like football and basketball where Blacks athletes are in the majority, will help increase the understanding of those players and more positively affect how they are depicted.”

Several years ago, Lee and the late author Ralph Wiley conceived the idea for a sports journalism program as a way of increasing Black representation among the nation’s sports writers.

“It always amazed me when Ralph would tell me he’d be one of the only brothers in the press box,” Lee said. “It’s taken awhile. But we felt tonight would be a good way to kick off the program.”