Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the 1964 Harlem Uprising

“Everybody knows me. I’m the big basketball star, the weekend hero, everybody’s All-American,” 20-year-old UCLA star Lew Alcindor, known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar after 1971, told a packed conference of 200 attendees in November 1967. He explained his reasons for boycotting the 1968 Olympics.

“Last summer I was almost killed by a racist cop shooting at a Bl…