It has been over a year since athletes kneeling during the National Anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality was sweeping the sports world. But this changed on Saturday when eight college basketball players at the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, took a knee prior to their game against Georgia.

The players stated the reasoning was a march assembled in Oxford, Michigan of people defending the Confederate history and monuments in the state. The last stop of the march was the Ole Miss campus due to the school distancing themselves from the state’s Confederate past.

The university has done a good job in recent years to distance themselves from racially insensitive fixtures, something that plagued the school for decades. The team’s original mascot was Colonel Reb, who had the appearance of an old white man that resembled a slave owner. But in reality, this strayed far from the inspiration of the mascot.

The real inspiration was an African-American man named James Ivy, or more famously known as “Blind Jim.” Blind Jim was a blind vendor at Ole Miss games in the late 19th century, and his loud and emphatic cheering made him a staple around the university. It was incredibly insensitive to portray what was inspired by an African-American as a white slave master, though it was par for the course for the time.

Though the school began to distance themselves from Colonel Reb in 2003, it was still officially the school’s mascot until 2010.

This change was allegedly part of the reason these Confederate groups were demonstrating on Saturday. Specifically, there is still a group of people that wish to reinstate Colonel Reb as the mascot.

Though – somehow – debatable, Confederate monuments and symbols such as Colonel Reb are highly offensive and indefensible.

These young men have every right to exercise their constitutional rights to peacefully protest against this racism.

But the funny thing remains is that these athletes peacefully protesting has been deemed more offensive than these racist symbols.

Colin Kaepernick, the first athlete to take a knee in 2016, sued the NFL for colluding against him, leading to his longstanding unemployment. Shockingly, the league settled with Kaepernick and Carolina Panthers safety, Eric Reid. It was a confidential settlement, though it was believed to be many millions of dollars.

Had the league believed they would have won the case and not colluded, they would not have paid off Kaepernick while allowing no details to be released. This entails that they did, in fact, collude and would have looked far worse in the public eye and possibly had to shell out an even bigger settlement to Kaepernick and Reid.

While these Ole Miss players are not paid professional athletes, they still may face public criticism, possibly as high as the White House, as President Donald Trump has shown he is not afraid to speak out against kneeling.

Despite this, they should continue to peacefully protest and perhaps inspire others to do so.