The recent recordings of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling admitting to being racist against black people has shone a light on other owners in the NBA. There’s been whisperings that Sterling is not alone and there are others in high power who share his sentiments but this revelation is a reverse.
The often quiet, politically correct Jordan, opened up about his life growing up in North Carolina in Roland Lazenby’s new book, Michael Jordan: The Life.
He even tells about a time in 1977 the year he turned 14 years-old. He was suspended from school when he responded to a white girl who called him the n-word.
“I threw a soda at her,” he recalled. “It was a very tough year. I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at that time. Basically, I was against all white people.”
Lazenby described to Sports Illustrated how much hatred and racism was there when Jordan grew up.
“I’ve been to North Carolina hundreds of times and enjoy it tremendously, but North Carolina was a state that had more Klan members than the rest of the Southern states combined,” the author said. “As I started looking at newspapers back in this era when I was putting together [Michael’s great-grandfather] Dawson Jordan’s life, the Klan was like a chamber of commerce. It bought the uniforms for ball teams, it put Bibles in all the schools. It may well have ended up being a chamber of commerce if not for all the violence it was perpetrating, too. A lot of the context just wasn’t possible to put it in a basketball book. A lot of it ended up being cut.”
– Shaina Auxilly (@Shay_Marie)
