How Did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Get His Name?

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, per ESPN, the future basketball player was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1947. In his late teens, Alcindor struggled with the racism he encountered as a Black man, particularly at a time -โ€“ the late 1960s โ€“- during which the United States underwent a social and cultural upheaval. The Vietnam War was raging on, the Civil Rights Movement was going strong, and the Sexual Revolution was beginning to flourish. 

For Alcindor, the divide between Black and white Americans became increasingly apparent. This all came to a head for the future athlete, who was a senior in high school when his basketball coach called him the n-word โ€” less than a year after the 1965 assassination of activist Malcolm X.

Years later, this, along with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., influenced Alcindor's decision to decline to represent the United States in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, as he recalled in his 2017 memoir "Coach Wooden and Me" (via The TODAY Show). "I seemed to permanently reside in the exclusive neighborhood of Between a Rock and a Hard Place," the former Lakers legend wrote of his decision. "I tried to make the point that true patriotism is about acknowledging problems and, rather than running away from them, joining together to fix them."

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