He has tried, repeatedly, to register his side of the story by writing. In high school, Abdul-Jabbar took a summer job with a Harlem-based black newspaper and covered the 1964 Harlem riots. His literary ambitions never abated. In the mid-1970s, the writer Gay Talese, while doing research for his book ‘‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife,’’ ran into Abdul-Jabbar at the Playboy Mansion. Abdul-Jabbar told Talese that when he retired, he wanted to become a sportswriter. ‘‘It seemed like such a strange thing to admit,’’ Talese told me. ‘‘It almost felt like he wanted to be anyone else. He was caught in this huge body, but his aspiration was to be diminished in terms of ambition: He wanted to be the man in the press box. You don’t expect a person with stardom in every muscle to want to become a writer.’’

Much later, on a trip back to New York City, Abdul-Jabbar accompanied Talese to Elaine’s, an Upper East Side restaurant that catered to the city’s literary elite. ‘‘He wanted to go be with writers,’’ Talese said. ‘‘He wanted to see Styron and Mailer. Again, I found it very unusual. It just seemed like there was a part of him that didn’t want to be a man of the body.’’

In 1983, Abdul-Jabbar published ‘‘Giant Steps,’’ the first of two engrossing autobiographies. He writes about growing up in the ’50s and ’60s in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, the only child of a Juilliard-trained trombone player turned transit cop and a stylish woman from North Carolina who demanded that her son receive a proper education. As a boy, Abdul-Jabbar — whose birth name was Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. — ran around with a diverse, middle-class crew. This innocence was shattered when his best friend, a white boy named Johnny, ultimately betrayed him in the seventh grade by calling him a ‘‘jungle bunny’’ and a ‘‘nigger.’’ ‘‘I just laughed at him,’’ Abdul-Jabbar writes. ‘‘ ‘[Expletive] you, you ... milk bottle.’ It was the only white thing I could think of.’’

When he started at Power Memorial, Abdul-Jabbar was already known around the city as an up-and-coming basketball star. He was written up in sports dailies and accosted on the subway. A few weeks after his 16th birthday, Richard Avedon shot his portrait. His coach, with whom he became very close and who shielded him from reporters, was an irascible Irishman named Jack Donohue. The older man would talk to his star about the racism he saw while stationed at Fort Knox in Kentucky. On a trip to North Carolina in 1962, his first time alone in the South, Abdul-Jabbar got to see Jim Crow for himself. ‘‘So I knew a little of what Mr. Donohue was talking about,’’ he writes. ‘‘He was certain that racism wouldn’t die until the racists did, and so was I. What I didn’t tell him was that I hoped it would be soon and that if I could help them along, I would be delighted. I wasn’t quite ready to pick up the gun, but I was intimate with the impulse.’’ (His close relationship with Donohue was damaged when the coach told his protégé that he was behaving like a “nigger” during a halftime rant.)

The next year, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed, killing four young black girls and partially blinding another. Abdul-Jabbar’s impulse hardened into something stronger. ‘‘As I watched the ineffectual moral outrage of the black southern preachers,’’ he writes, ‘‘the cold coverage of the white media and the posturings of the John F. Kennedy White House, my whole view of the world fell into place. My faith was exploded like church rubble, my anger was shrapnel. I would gladly have killed whoever killed those girls by myself.’’

After being recruited by nearly all the major college basketball programs in the country, Abdul-Jabbar landed at U.C.L.A., where he studied history and English, dropped acid and became entranced by ‘‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’’ After his first season on the court, the N.C.A.A. rules committee outlawed dunking when Abdul-Jabbar netted an average of 29.5 points a game and a 67 percent field-goal percentage. Other players dunked, but none as frequently and as ferociously as he did. The rule change, as a result, was informally known as ‘‘the Alcindor rule.’’ ‘‘Clearly, they did it to undermine my dominance in the game,’’ Abdul-Jabbar writes in ‘‘Giant Steps.’’ ‘‘Equally clearly, if I’d been white they never would have done it. The dunk is one of basketball’s great crowd pleasers, and there was no good reason to give it up except that this and other niggers were running away with the sport.’’ Abdul-Jabbar’s U.C.L.A. team won the national championship again when he was a junior.

That year, Abdul-Jabbar refused to play in the 1968 Olympics because he did not want to represent a country that did not treat him as an equal. The press pilloried him for it. In a much-publicized spot on the ‘‘Today’’ show, Joe Garagiola, a baseball player turned TV personality, asked Abdul-Jabbar why he wouldn’t play for his country.