Michael Jordan revs up black Nascar racing team

America’s most famous black sportsman is targeting its whitest sport, with an explicit focus on promoting black drivers.

Basketball great Michael Jordan and Nascar driver Bubba Wallace

America’s most famous black sportsman has taken a stake in one of its whitest sports, forming a Nascar racing team with an explicit focus on boosting opportunities for black drivers.

Michael Jordan will be the first black principal owner of a full-time Nascar team since the 1970s and has hired Bubba Wallace, the only black man at the elite level of the sport, as his driver.

The intervention of the former basketball star comes during a tumultuous reckoning on racial justice in the United States, 30 years after he notoriously refused to take a stand against racism in another election year, joking that “Republicans buy sneakers too”.

Jordan, 57, a billionaire who is also the majority owner of the Charlotte Hornets basketball team, said the racing venture was “a chance to educate a new audience and open more opportunities for black people in racing”, adding that while “Nascar has struggled with diversity” it was “embracing social change more and more”.

British Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton. Picture: Getty Images

This year Wallace, 26, persuaded the sport’s authorities to ban the display of Confederate flags at its events.

“Michael and Bubba can be a powerful voice together, not only in our sport but also well beyond it,” said Denny Hamlin, one of the top drivers, who will also be a minority owner of the team.

Jordan won six National Basketball Association championships with the Chicago Bulls and is often described as the finest player in the history of basketball.

However, unlike Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson and other prominent African-American athletes who embraced activism, he has until recently shied away from politics.

For many black sports fans his legacy was tainted by a Senate election in his home state of North Carolina in 1990 when he rejected entreaties to endorse Harvey Gantt, a black Democrat who was trying to unseat Jesse Helms, the white Republican incumbent. Mr Helms, who had called the 1964 Civil Rights Act “the single most dangerous piece of legislation introduced in the Congress,” won by about 100,000 votes.

“I was focused on my craft,” Jordan said in The Last Dance, a recent documentary about his career and legacy. “Was that selfish? Probably.”

“Knowing what Jesse Helms stood for, you would’ve wanted to see Michael push harder on that,” President Obama told the series.

Racial justice protests have spread since George Floyd, a black man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May.

This week the Department of Justice reclassified Portland, New York and Seattle as “anarchist jurisdictions” for allegedly hobbling police efforts to regain the streets.

The Times