IN OCTOBER 1991, the legendary Chicago Bulls were invited to the White House to meet president George Bush, having just won the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals.

Shooting guard Craig Hodges, with years of experience in the NBA players’ union, civil activism in the causes of employment rights, brutal poverty and racial discrimination, used the opportunity to personally hand Bush a letter calling for greater governmental effort to tackle those burning issues.

Hodges wore a dashiki, they shot hoops and Bush promised to reply. He never did. But eight months later, after winning the second NBA final in July 1992, Hodges was unceremoniously let go. Despite still being at a peak of his powers he would never play for an NBA team again.

Months earlier, he had tried to organise an NBA boycott in solidarity with Rodney King, who’d been thugishly beaten by Los Angeles policemen, but his appeal fell on deaf ears. Now nobody stood by him either.

In his book Long Shot, Hodges charts the evolution of his own black consciousness and his political activism on issues of racism, segregation, poverty and disenfranchisement and his firm belief in race and class education as a preamble to political organisation as an elementary tool for change.

He grew up on the “wrong” side of the Chicago Heights race divide but his persona was shaped politically by his activist mother Ada, assorted aunts and grandmother Dorothy — all well-read and principled women — who set the tone for the whole family and many visitors by nurturing wide-ranging debates on women’s rights, housing, unemployment, along with racism and black history. Sunday lunches were a legend and nobody was ever turned away.

In August 1967, aged five, Hodges attended his first march with Ada when Martin Luther King was in town and the Chicago Freedom Movement got thousands out to protest against rampant poverty and discrimination.

Not a religious man, Hodges always drew inspiration from the dignified demeanour and composure of Arthur Ashe, the only black tennis player to win the US and Australian Opens as well as Wimbledon.

Hodges’s own “ideology” borrows imaginatively from eclectic sources but he’s clear that lasting change will only come when the forces for it are multitudinous and coherently organised.

When Nelson Mandela, a basketball fanatic, visited Chicago in July 1993 he asked specifically to meet Hodges who was sat next to him at a celebratory dinner.

This riveting and affirmative read offers a revealing and pertinent insight into the odious nature of corporate-driven politics in the US and the consequences of racism, poverty, homelessness and despair it engenders.

And, as a candid glimpse behind the scenes of the US basketball industry, it’s an eye-opener and many a nugget make it a diverting read.

A singular lesson of history in the making.

Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter by Craig Hodges with Rory Fanning is published by Haymarket Books, £11.45.