Our next guest is not only an NBA legend.
He's a New York Times best selling author
and a political activist.
Please welcome the incredible Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Hi, there.
How are you doing, Ellen?
I'm OK.
Thanks for taking the time to talk.
We met at the White House.
We were both receiving our presidential medal of freedom
at the same time.
Yes.
And that was quite an honor.
It was a wonderful time, and I thought
it was well thought out.
Yeah, it was a great day, and to receive it from Obama
was like the best the best thing ever.
And boy, do we miss him right now.
Tell me about it.
Yeah, I know.
What question do you think is not being asked in the media
right now?
What's missing?
How do we move forward from here?
We have to figure out a way, Ellen, to deal with bad cops.
There needs to be a legal solution to that, I think.
And the sooner that we can get the political will
to make that happen, it'll reduce
a lot of these instances.
Yeah, and it's also--
you know, people bring this up that Colin Kaepernick protested
this for this exact same reason.
Yes.
And he was ostracized.
He lost his job, and he was just trying to point this out.
Yeah, it goes to show you how culturally we are.
We're conditioned not to want to talk about that, because it's
such a difficult problem.
And we have to talk about that problem,
if we're going to solve it.
So maybe now, you know, with this horrible incident
with Mr. Floyd, we can find the political will
to talk about these issues and work for the elimination
of these circumstances.
And we'll move many steps forward, if we can do that.
Yeah, we're all hoping for that.
You wrote a powerful op-ed called
Don't Understand The Protests, and what you're seeing
is people have just been pushed to the edge.
This is what you're saying.
Absolutely.
People that have no means to call attention
to their problems, so they've been pushed too far.
And one of the things that is really galling and just
is so tiresome that black citizens end up
dead for no good reason.
It started in my life when I was eight years old when
Emmett Till got killed.
That was 1955, and it still happens on a regular basis.
We've got to figure out a way to change that dynamic.
You met Dr. King.
Yeah.
What do you remember about meeting him?
Well, I was working at a journalism workshop,
and I got a chance to cover Dr. King speaking
to a group of kids that were being mentored.
It was wonderful to hear him say that he thought a great job was
being done, because we already were thinking about how to make
our community a better place.
And you know, that's what needs to take place
across black communities across the nation,
and it was really inspiring.
And it really helped me get a better grip
on what Dr. King was doing and why.
What a great thing to have that memory to have met him
and to have that.