Michael Jordan, while growing up in North Carolina, says in a new book that he experienced so much racism that he considered himself a racist when he was a teenager and was “against all white people.”
The book, “Michael Jordan: The Life,” by Ronald Lazenby goes into detail about the basketball legend’s upbringing in Wilmington, N.C. Jordan said the Ku Klux Klan was dominant in North Carolina in the mid-1970s, buying uniforms for sports teams and Bibles for schools–and it made him angry.
Jordan took up baseball before basketball and was one of only two Black children on the team. He says he was often told he was inferior.
In 1977, he remembers a girl at school calling him a n****r. “So I threw a soda at her,” he says. “I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people.”
He was suspended for the incident. It was at that time that his mother convinced him that he could not go through life consumed by racial hatred.
Jordan says it was after watching the television miniseries “Roots,” about the suffering of his African-American ancestors, that he began to understand more about race relations.
