Looking Back On Florida State’s Absolutely Unhinged Martin Luther King Day Graphic Five Years Later

Florida State University‘s famed football program is in a pretty good place these days.

The Seminoles are coming off a 13-1 season that included an ACC Championship, and they just inked head coach Mike Norvell to a massive eight-year contract extension.

But that wasn’t always the case. Only recently, FSU was one of the biggest laughing stocks in college football, highlighted by one fateful Martin Luther King Jr. Day post on January 21, 2019.

Five years later, we take a look back at one of the truly unforgettable moments in college football twitter history.

Let’s start with how the Seminoles got there.

It’s not uncommon for college football teams to post tributes or messages on MLK Day. In fact, almost every (if not every) Division I FBS program will do so on Monday.

Florida State decided to take things to the next level. Someone from social media department felt it a smart idea to post an image of King, a legendary civil rights leader, with head coach Willie Taggart’s “Do Something” mantra attached.

But that’s where it gets bad. Real bad. Not only did they post the image of King, but they posted a picture of him with a Florida State football glove on his hand doing what appears to be the legendary Seminole “chop”, which in and of itself its problematic.

The original photo of King comes from the March on Washington in 1963, where King gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech in front of the National Mall.

In that photo, King’s arm is extended. But his hand is also up. So someone deliberately altered the direction of his hand specifically to do the chop.

But let’s dig in a little further. Getting back to Taggart. The Florida native made history when he became the first black head football coach in FSU history just one year prior.

In November of 2018, after a 5-7 season, someone Photoshopped Taggart’s face onto a picture of multiple people being lynched and posted it to Facebook. Florida State president John Thrasher quickly spoke out against the image and defended Taggart.

So you’d think FSU wold be particularly thoughtful when it came to handling potentially sensitive topics of race.

And yet!

Instead they opted for a meme, with a big ol’ Nike swoosh tacked on it.

Oh yeah, and Taggart was fired less than a year later.

Thankfully for Florida State, things have turned around since then.

But the infamous MLK Day graphic marks a truly low point for the program.