When we talk about athlete activism—real activism, not just hashtag awareness—it’s hard not to start the conversation with Craig Hodges.
The two-time NBA champion and former Chicago Bulls sharpshooter isn’t just remembered for his three-point stroke or his back-to-back-to-back Three-Point Contest wins. He’s remembered, too, for what he wore and what he carried when the Bulls visited the White House in 1991 after winning their first championship.
A dashiki.
And a letter.
A letter to President George H.W. Bush calling out injustice, inequality, and the need for economic opportunities for Black Americans.
And what happened next? Silence. Exile. Hodges never played another NBA game.
More than three decades later, he’s not bitter. He’s clear.
“Well first of all for me, I look at my situation for me and then I look at and I also ask, How would’ve it have been for Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, you know what I’m sayin’?” Hodges tells me, reflecting on the cost of political expression as an athlete. “To me, his being able to say his prayers (Salah/Salat) during the National Anthem—which should not have been a means by which to say that, ‘You can’t play anymore.’”
He draws a thorough line—from the 1968 Olympics to 1991 to now.
John Carlos, the former Olympian who raised a gloved fist alongside Tommie Smith on the medal stand in Mexico City, once told Hodges that the White House moment wasn’t random. It was the continuation of a movement. “The lessons that they learned in ‘68, was something whereas it was a thing where they knew they were planting seeds,” Hodges says. “When they saw me at the White House, they knew that was one of the seeds that were planted in 1968.”
That seed, for Hodges, was deeply personal. “That was a mark in the sand for me as something that should I get a chance to represent… it was a chance for me [to] represent not only myself, but all those people who were for Freedom, Justice and Equality in America whether they’d be Red, Black, White, Yellow or Brown, you know?”
Back then, speaking out didn’t come with hashtags or viral tweets. There was no trending topic to bring attention to injustice. There was just silence—and the risk of being silenced.
“Being in this social media period, Colin [Kaepernick] can get an instantaneous following and an instantaneous backlash against the NFL; against the injustices by the police and all others,” Hodges says. “And it was a different time.”
Different, yes. But Hodges sees the parallels. Where Carlos and Smith in ’68 had the Olympic stage, and Hodges had the White House, Kaepernick had the 49ers sideline. Still, he says, there’s a key distinction: movement.
“What Dr. Carlos taught me was that during 1968, they were caught up into a movement. So it wasn’t just him alone,” Hodges explains. “So when you look at Mahmoud and myself we were caught into a time vacuum… from 1968 until 1991 when I delivered the letter to President Bush, it wasn’t anything happening from a social aspect… other than that we were trying to get our bread.”
But Hodges wasn’t built for silence.
Born into it. Raised in it. “It was a blessing because I was taught this from birth, you know? My mom, Lord rest her soul, was a secretary for the Civil Rights Movement where we grew up.”
And later, shaped by academic firepower.
“I had a chance to go to Long Beach State with Tex Winter who put me down on a scholarship and then get a chance to study under the most potent Black minds in America at the Black Studies Department at Long Beach State.”
Hodges isn’t bitter because he knows what his stand meant. He knows the lineage he belongs to. Carlos. Smith. Abdul-Rauf. Kaepernick.
That mark in the sand? It didn’t disappear. It echoes. It planted.
And it still grows.
