a week after the Bucks refused to play in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake—just how striking it was when LeBron James first started to speak out, in various ways, about racist violence and police brutality. The N.B.A. was arguably still living in the shadow of Michael Jordan, who had adopted a publicly apolitical posture; the league’s most popular superstar in the early two-thousands was Kobe Bryant, a Jordan acolyte who often talked about winning as if it were the only referendum that counted. But after Trayvon Martin was killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman who was suspicious of his hoodie, in 2012, James and his Miami Heat teammates put on hoodies and took a team photo to show solidarity with those angered by the killing. “From that point on,” James said later, “I knew that my voice and my platform had to be used for more than just sports.”