If I hadn't become a professional basketball player, I would have become a history teacher. There's so much to learn from history.
Kareem Abdul-JabbarPride was his life force; for us it was a live nerve that he could teach us to brush. One stroke, a good practice, and we could tingle for days ... First, he found the pride in each of us, then he taught us how good it could feel. What he was ultimately after was for every one of us to learn to light our own fires and glow our brightest.
Kareem Abdul-JabbarIn January of 1969, after a meeting to discuss the leadership of UCLA's new Afro-American Program, [Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins, Jr.] were murdered on campus by a rival black nationalist group, the United Slaves Organization. This shook up all the students, black and white, and made us all realize that what we were doing wasn't just an academic exercise, but had repercussions in the real world.
Kareem Abdul-JabbarI feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar