ABSTRACT
In 1996, with a definite nod toward John Kennedy, whose courage during the Cuban missile crisis he greatly admired, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar published Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement. In this, his third book, "dedicated to all Americans who seek to embrace their heritage ... [but] especially dedicated to young Americans, who most need a heritage to embrace," 1 Kareem tells the stories of a group of black Americans, some better known than others, ''whose sacrifices," as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in the Foreword, ''were for the common good, whose will was unbending ... [in] the triumph over slavery and over antiblack racist segregation ... [in short] in the triumph of the human spirit over seemingly insurmountable odds" (pp. xii-xiii).
