Kareem plays D for Obama.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Barack Obama - Column

Who would have thunk that one of the most intelligent comments on Jeremiah Wright would come from a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame? The man is six-time MVP Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Writing for The Huffington Post , Abdul-Jabbar made very plain what Obama and the Democratic Party have refused to do: elucidate why Wright's angry sermons connect on the South Side of Chicago and beyond.

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"Reverend Wright suggested in one of his sermons that AIDS was intentionally allowed to infect people because it would probably do most of its damage in the black community. White Americans see this viewpoint as racist paranoia," Abdul-Jabbar wrote. "But black Americans remember the Tuskegee experiment when black men who had syphilis were left untreated intentionally so the progress of the disease could be studied by government doctors. This actually happened and its memory has caused a collective distrust of doctors in the black community for which white Americans cannot see any rational basis. Again we are stuck with dealing with the evil deeds that were done before many of us were born."

Kareem isn't spending his days trading on his name, or opening a Starbucks in Harlem. He writes books such as his latest, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance . He also has a radical personal history well worth remembering, particularly this year, the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Most people remember those games as the backdrop for Tommie Smith and John Carlos's black-glove-fisted salute. But Kareem, then known as Lew Alcindor, was a player in that drama, as well. He was a proud member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an organization that threatened an African American boycott of the games.

Unlike the other OPHR members, largely a collection of little known track and field stars, "Big Lew" was the most prominent college athlete in the United States and played center for John Wooden's dynastic UCLA. He was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four for an...