What’s on the agenda for the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition? A new book they hope will spark conversations

Nearly 30 years later, the picture Caron Butler paints of his time in solitary confinement is still vivid.

“No sunlight or human interaction, other than the occasional pat-down,” the former NBA veteran writes. “Completely isolated from the rest of the world, you begin to lose track of time. Your sense of reality begins to blur. You become anxious and paranoid. You are plagued by hallucinations and nightmares. You endure the humiliation of having every biological need—eating, sleeping, showering, peeing, pooping—occur in the same few square feet. Like an animal in a zoo. Imagine what that does to your mind. Imagine what that does to a 15-year-old.”

Butler was arrested as a teenager in his hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, after cocaine and a gun were found in his school locker. (Butler, who admits he was dealing drugs at the time to help his family financially, says it was a set-up.) He spent two weeks in solitary confinement at the Racine Correctional Institute, an adult facility. After two months, he was transferred to a juvenile detention center and a juvenile hall. There, he took stock of his life and decided to do things differently.

He became a star hooper at Washington Park High School, where he played against a Burlington High star scorer named Tony Romo. He went on to play for Jim Calhoun at Connecticut College and began a 14-year NBA career, making two All-Stars with the Washington Wizards and winning a ring with the Dallas Mavericks. Now an assistant coach with the Miami Heat, Butler has made the issue of juvenile justice reform, including intervention, mentoring, diversion and reducing the use of solitary confinement among inmates, a priority in his adulthood. He has spoken and written openly about his early life.

He does so again in “The Power of Basketball,” a forthcoming collection of essays from the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition, formed by the league and the National Basketball Players Association amid the maelstrom of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the wrenching public protests and debates around the world in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. The book will be published next month by The New Press.

Since 2020, the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition, comprised of five active players, five team executives, Commissioner Adam Silver and Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum, has focused on advocating and building public support for legislation to reform criminal justice, voting rights, policing and community safety.

The Coalition says it has publicly supported 27 bills in federal or state legislatures between 2021 and 2024. Of those bills, 18 have advanced to a full vote, and nine have been passed into law.

The book was edited by James Cadogan, executive director of the coalition, and Ed Chung, vice president of initiatives for the Vera Institute, which aims to end mass incarceration in America’s prisons.

It features essays from players, including New Orleans Pelicans guard C.J. McCollum, the president of the players’ union, Wizards guard Malcolm Brogdon, Atlanta Hawks forward Larry Nance, Jr., coaches including Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff, Milwaukee’s Doc Rivers and Orlando’s Jamahl Mosley, and governors Steve Ballmer (LA Clippers), Vivek Ranadive (Sacramento Kings) and Clara Wu Tsai (Brooklyn Nets). Former WNBA guard Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, a founding member of the WNBA’s Social Justice Coalition, also contributed an essay, “The Time is Now.”

The intention was that the composition of the staff for the book would roughly match that of the coalition.

“That’s one of the things we think is most important for people to understand, especially now, when there’s so much disagreement, partisanship and fractures in the public dialogue,” Cadogan said by phone Wednesday.

“When the coalition first started, we knew that we were building an organization where people can have really different perspectives and really different positions. Over the course of, we’re now in season five of the coalition’s existence, that’s proven to be true, not surprisingly. But it’s a really important fact. If we can show and continue to show that people with good intentions can come together at the table, even if they think differently about a lot of different things, but find a path forward on important issues, that’s a good thing and something we should lean on.”

San Antonio Spurs guard Tre Jones writes about his affiliation with the Tree City Spurs, a 9-11 year-old girls basketball team in Uvalde, Texas, the site of the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Two players from the Tree City team were among the 19 students killed; other players were wounded.

After the shooting, Jones writes in the book, he became aware of the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, founded in 1997 and now based in San Antonio, which helps children who have recently lost loved ones and are suddenly dealing with grief and subsequent trauma. Some survivors of the Uvalde shooting sought counseling at the Bereavement Center and attended a “grief education camp” conducted there.

“They cried, laughed and healed,” Jones writes.

Brogdon, who was acquired by Washington from Portland on draft night in June in the Deni Avdija trade, writes about his grandfather, John Hurst Adams, a key figure in the civil rights movement as a pastor, college president (Paul Quinn College, an HBCU in Dallas) and activist during stints in Seattle, Los Angeles, South Carolina and D.C.

“To me, he embodied so much more than civil rights,” Brogdon said last week during a panel discussion about the book at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C.

“He embodied perseverance. He embodied bravery. He embodied, I think, the most important thing for me, he embodied sacrifice. When I talk to my mother, my mother is one of three sisters. She talks about all the late nights they had, all the early mornings — very similar to my job, but much more impactful, much more important. I just understand the sacrifice that they made. Growing up in that family, I understood that it didn’t matter if I was going to be a professor, a doctor, a lawyer, an NBA player, I knew that I would have a purpose, to not only help people of color like me, but everyone, to try to help the country, to try to help the world.”

Four years ago, when people’s attention was more available because COVID restrictions kept most people at home and in front of their screens, the issues were easier to center in the public’s mind. The country was shocked to watch Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer through the smartphone footage of witnesses. It was angry over the death of Breonna Taylor in her Kentucky home by Louisville police officers. The need for greater diversity, equity and inclusion in all walks of American life was centered and supported in marches across the country and around the world.

And the NBA players, who participated in the Orlando Bubble to finish the 2019-20 season, had the attention of much of the sports world. The Milwaukee Bucks led a player boycott of playoff games after the shooting of Jacob Blake during a traffic stop in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that reverberated, with most sports shutting down for several days, while players in other sports followed the NBA’s lead.

But in the intervening four years, DEI programs across the country have been phased out in corporate and academic settings. The news cycle gradually pushed Floyd and Taylor’s deaths off the front pages and digital platforms. The coalition’s work inevitably shifted from the macro to the micro, though the players’ desire to use their platforms has not wavered. (The book’s original working title was “Why We Care.”)

“One of the key questions we have is how do we continue to talk about the work that’s happening, and how do we continue to tell the stories that need to be told when the headlines are different,” Cadogan said.

“You know as well as I do that 2024 is not 2020 or 2021 in terms of public attention for equity. But the needs are there. And there’s so much incredible work, certainly in the NBA community, but more importantly in NBA markets, and community organizations, activists and leaders, people who are still doing the work on all of our issues. We thought one of the ways that we can do things a little bit differently, and make sure that we’re trying to reach new audiences and continue to tell the equity story, is by writing a book and having these collections. Having a tangible thing that you can pick up and hold is different when we spend so much of our time in the digital space.”

Brogdon, while with the Boston Celtics, was a champion, along with current Finals MVP Jaylen Brown, of the “Raise the Age” initiative, a program backed by Citizens for Juvenile Justice in Massachusetts that sought to prevent some 18- to 20-year-olds from being tried as adults for certain crimes in the state’s criminal justice system. The initiative diverts juvenile offenders into rehabilitation programs instead of incarceration. The Massachusetts Senate passed the legislation last July.

The Timberwolves’ Karl-Anthony Towns won the NBA’s 2024 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award for his work supporting Restore the Vote, a Minnesota initiative signed in 2023 by Gov. Tim Walz, now the Democratic vice presidential nominee, that restored voting rights to an estimated 55,000 people in the state serving felony sentences.

The Philadelphia 76ers and the Social Justice Coalition supported “Clean Slate 3.0,” a Pennsylvania initiative signed into law by Governor Josh Shapiro last December that would seal the criminal records of former felons for minor drug and property offenses after 10 years, provided they have no further misdemeanor or felony convictions.

When training camps begin in a few weeks, the players will once again find themselves in spaces where they fit in any NBA city. They won’t be replacing those who have worked in these spaces their entire lives, but they will help raise awareness for causes, publicly advocate for legislative proposals and, when necessary, raise money.

“Fortunately, we have a group of people who work across all of the coalition’s issue areas — community safety, criminal justice, informed voting,” Cadogan said. “We have some reach. I think showing breadth matters in people’s understanding of how they can get involved and get involved.

“And ultimately that’s the reason for the book. It’s not just to tell the story; it’s to tell the story to inspire, and hopefully connect people to what the work is in a different way. The question we get asked a lot is ‘What’s next?’ This is part of the answer.”

(Photo by Alencia Johnson, Malcolm Brogdon and James Cadogan: David Aldridge / The Athletics)