Renee Montgomery, a WNBA Do-Gooder

When the WNBA announced it was restarting its season, Montgomery had a choice to make. She could report to the league’s “wubble”—its Covid-free bubble—or she could skip the season and devote herself to Atlanta’s reeling Black community. On June 18 she tweeted that she’d sit it out. The next day, Juneteenth, she threw a party to feed Black Lives Matter protesters and homeless people in the city’s Centennial Olympic Park. “My mom was telling me when people don’t feel that their voices are heard, they have to make it felt,” she says. “I started to think about what ‘make it felt’ meant to me. It doesn’t mean just raising your voice but having action behind it.”

Montgomery used her season off to work on a voter registration campaign in Georgia and to give speeches about activism to student athletes at her alma mater, the University of Connecticut, as well as Morehouse College and Georgia Tech. And she focused hard on saving a lesser-known school, Morris Brown. Founded in 1881, it was the first college in Georgia established by members of the Black community. But in 2002 prosecutors charged its then-president with defrauding the government and students, and the school lost accreditation. The president pleaded guilty to embezzlement in 2006 and got probation.