Doc Rivers, Malcolm Brogdon describe their paths to advocacy in new book

One of the seminal moments of Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers’ life happened on April 4, 1968.

Rivers, then 6, was returning to his grandparents’ house in Maywood, Illinois, that day when he encountered his family in a somber mood. As they crowded around the television, Rivers noticed everyone shaking their head and in tears. His grandparents. His uncle. His mother, and more surprisingly, his father. Grady Rivers was both an officer with the Maywood Police Department and a proud Black man of his day.

“My father was a cop, and he didn’t cry,” Rivers told Andscape. “Honestly, I had never seen him emotional.”

What was on the TV screen was the news of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. And while at the time Rivers wasn’t too familiar with him (“The day he was killed I’d never heard of Martin Luther King”), he witnessed the impact King’s death had on his loved ones. And with that, the future NBA champion coach was committed to learning about the movement and how he could one day make change, too.

“And from that point on,” Rivers said, “I was involved in this cause.”

Rivers’ path to advocacy is one of many stories told in the new book from the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, The Power of Basketball: NBA players, coaches, and team governors on the fight to make a better America, written in partnership with the Vera Institute of Justice, an anti-mass incarceration organization. The book, a collection of personal essays, is meant to highlight the coalition’s work on social justice reform since its creation in the wake of the anti-Black racism movement in 2020.

The coalition, a joint partnership between the NBA, the National Basketball Players Association, and the NBA Coaches Association, was created in November 2020 in response to high-profile police shootings and/or killings of Black people that year, including Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Jacob Blake in Wisconsin and George Floyd in Minneapolis. The objective of the coalition was to use the platforms of the three organizations to promote social justice legislation and policy.

In the nearly four years, the coalition said it has publicly supported 27 bills in federal or state legislatures and that nine have been passed into law, including the restoration of voting rights for returning citizens in Minnesota and the expansion of sealed records for drug- and property-related felony convictions in Pennsylvania.

Contributors for The Power of Basketball include LA Clippers governor Steve Ballmer, former WNBA player Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, and new Washington Wizards guard Malcolm Brogdon. A joint forward was written by NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NBPA executive director Andre Iguodala.

Brogdon, the 2016-17 Rookie of the Year who played for the Portland Trail Blazers in 2023, wrote about how his family history (Brogdon is the grandson of a civil rights-era activist) influences his advocacy for Black people of all backgrounds. After Brogdon and other players marched in protests following the murder of Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, his mother, an associate vice president at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta, asked him, “What now?”

Brogdon comes from a long line of Black people who faced insurmountable odds and yet had the courage to stand up for the greater cause. His mother’s question was meant to push him down the path he was destined for.

“She intended to unsettle me: stirring the lessons of my family’s past to motivate me in charting a path forward,” Brogdon wrote in The Power of Basketball. “A path that might contribute to real progress in America.”

Brogdon’s great-grandfather, Eugene Avery Adams, was an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister in South Carolina and the president of the local NAACP chapter, where he protested against police brutality. Adams’ son, John Hurst Adams, is Brogdon’s grandfather, whom Brogdon called “Poppo,” and was also involved in the civil rights movement.

John Hurst Adams was president of Paul Quinn College, an AME-affiliated historically Black college in Waco, Texas. Adams, a close friend of King’s, organized freedom patrols in Seattle to monitor police conduct toward Black residents. Brogdon writes that his grandfather also helped create the Congress of National Black Churches, a coalition of leaders of historically Black religious denominations committed to civil rights for Black Americans.

Brogdon, who was named after Muslim leader and human rights activist Malcolm X, was molded by his family’s actions and bravery. His grandparents and great-grandparents taught him the importance of standing up for what’s right, even in the face of danger. Crosses were burned by the Ku Klux Klan on his grandparents’ home lawn multiple times.

“My grandfather exemplified how to live a courageous life,” Brogdon wrote in the book. “… He stood up for justice his entire life. He never stayed still and never stayed silent.”

Brogdon’s parents made sure he knew his family history and how to apply the lessons of his ancestors to his own community. When Brogdon was a small child, the family moved to Atlanta, living in a home just a block away from King’s family home on Auburn Avenue. The future University of Virginia star guard grew up on the campus of Morehouse, where his mother worked. “I never really considered an HBCU,” Brogdon told Andscape. “But looking back, if I didn’t play basketball, I would have gone to an HBCU.”

Brogdon was taught that no matter someone’s circumstances in life they deserve their dignity, that we’re all put on this earth to help each other even for those who’ve strayed from their path.

“That’s the mindset I have in life, helping people even the people that don’t have as much as me,” Brogdon said. “Those are the people who need even more help.”

So as he wrote in The Power of Basketball, Brogdon uses his position as an NBA player to fight for a more fair criminal justice system. While a player with Boston Celtics during the 2022-23 season, he advocated for a bill in Massachusetts that raises the age of juvenile court supervision from 18 to 21 to address the recidivism among teenagers caught up in the court system. He’s advocated for clean water in various African nations. He helps high school students in the Indianapolis area consider HBCUs (Brogdon played for the Indiana Pacers from 2019 to 2022) through the John Hurst Adams Education Project.

Brogdon doesn’t believe he has to live up to who his grandfather and great-grandfather were. Instead, he says, “there’s a standard of excellence, and a standard of representing your people and your family well that I do have to live up to.

“That’s what I have to live up to, not become the next Martin Luther King or my grandfather, not become the next one of them, but sort of do it in a different light, do it in whatever light is your passion and what you want to follow.”

While Brogdon’s advocacy stems from second-generation activism and experiences, Rivers lived through protests and race riots in the 1960s.

Maywood was the location of one of the country’s many race riots during the time Rivers was a young child in the 1960s. Proviso East High School, where Rivers would become a McDonald’s All-American guard in 1980, was the site of a student brawl in 1967 that led to more than 100 state troopers descending on the school and dozens of arrests. The Rivers family lived six blocks from Proviso East, so close that, on his way home from grade school, Rivers could see the state police cars lined up for 15 blocks.

“You could literally sit on your porch and see people yelling the N-word, things being thrown back and forth,” Rivers told Andscape. “It was nasty.”

Rivers recognizes his current privilege (“I live a life full of joy and good fortune,” he wrote in The Power of Basketball) but understands the darker side of this country being born a Black man in 1961. In the book, Rivers revisits the personal racist moments that have affected his outlook on race in America. While a freshman guard at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Rivers dated a white woman who would later become his wife, Kristen Campion. Those opposed to their relationship slashed the tires on Campion’s car and wrote a racist message on the sidewalk in front of her parents’ home.

Years later, after Rivers had retired from a 13-year NBA career, his and Campion’s home in San Antonio was burned to the ground. Then there was the case, as the coach of the LA Clippers in 2014, when team governor Donald Sterling was recorded on tape telling his mistress “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with Black people.”

“Wealthy or poor, educated or not, if you are Black or brown in America, you will likely be treated differently at some point in your life,” Rivers wrote in The Power of Basketball.

Rivers said that progress has been made since he was a child, but, he told Andscape, “there’s no Black person on earth that’ll tell you we’re there.” So to that end, Rivers advocates for voting, which impacts the policies — whether in policing or the judicial system — that negatively affect Black Americans.

He wrote in the book that “participating in the democratic process is our right and also necessary to make a difference in our nation,” which can fall on deaf ears for those who don’t find a value in voting. For Rivers, the long fight to secure voting rights for Black people should be enough encouragement but he also points to the impediments politicians have placed on voting rights both now and in the past meant to keep Black people from voting.

“You used to have to take literacy tests,” Rivers told Andscape. “There used to be cops standing at polls not allowing you to vote.”

While sins of the past are eventually absolved, the pain of those experiences stick with the victims. Rivers wrote in the book that “racism isn’t something people just brush off. You may carry on as normal outwardly; but those kinds of experiences stay with you for a lifetime.”

We can learn from those experiences and become better people for it, Rivers said, because we’re aware of what the world is and how to operate in it. He added that working toward social and racial justice is as important to him as his job as an NBA coach. But as education and diversity initiatives are being dismantled by conservatives and Black history is being erased in public schools, there needs to be a reminder of that pain to build a more equitable future.

“When you have a painful experience in life,” Rivers told Andscape, “that’s just not going to go away.”