Michael Jordan Says He Used To Be A Racist And Hate All White People

(Source) Per an excerpt from the book, Jordan told Lazenby that he was suspended from school in 1977 after throwing a soda at a girl who called him the N-word. “So I threw a soda at her,” Jordan’s quoted as saying. “I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people.”

Lazenby told Sports Illustrated that it appeared that the root of Jordan’s animosity came from growing up in an area of North Carolina where the Ku Klux Klan once had a large presence. “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.”

Jordan’s story is “an economic story,” Lazenby continued. “It’s a black power story. It doesn’t come from politics or protests, it comes right off the Coastal Plain of North Carolina and out of the African-American experience.”