Bruce Maxwell, right, became the first MLB player to take a knee in September. (Getty Images)

Last month Oakland Athletics rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell became the first Major League Baseball player to take a knee during the National Anthem. Now that he’s back home in Alabama, he’s seeing first-hand how much some people are upset with him for that.

Maxwell, 26, told TMZ Sports that he’d been home in Harvest, Ala., for all of four hours when a waiter at a local restaurant refused to serve him because he chose to take a knee in pursuit of racial equality and in protest of President Donald Trump calling kneeling NFL players “sons of bitches.” Maxwell says he was out to eat with a friend from high school who is now a city councilman.

Maxwell described the encounter with the waiter to TMZ thusly:

“He was like, ‘You’re the guy who took the knee? I voted for Trump and I stand for everything he stands for.'”

As a reminder: Maxwell comes from a military family and considers himself very patriotic. When he took a knee, he also put his hand over his heart. The next day he told Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan: “This is beyond race. This is about our president speaking out in a vulgar, negative way against people exercising their rights in a peaceful manner. It’s about mankind.”

After the waiter refused to serve Maxwell and his friend, they asked the manager of the restaurant for a different server and got one. Maxwell further told TMZ in a video:

That’s where I’m from. Unless you’re subject to it, you won’t understand it, you won’t feel it. I’m 26 years old. I’m very respectful. I’m very educated. And it still happens to this day. That’s the reason that I’m kneeling — stuff like that.

If you’re wondering what Maxwell has been up to since Oakland’s season ended, he was recently volunteering with a food bank in Sonoma County after wildfires ravaged the area:





He also met, played catch with and gave his jersey to the young A’s fan who earned national attention when he wrote a letter to the team about losing all his baseball memorabilia in the fires.





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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz

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