In 2020, during the widespread protests following the death of George Floyd, athletes were politically active in a way that was nearly unprecedented: At one point, the Milwaukee Bucks, responding to the Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooting of Jacob Blake, actually refused to play an NBA playoff game. But there were antecedents, as Edwards, a sociologist, shows in this book. The Bucks’ strike recalled, among other things, a 1961 NBA boycott by Bill Russell and other players. And it echoed the 1968 Olympic protests, in which two Black athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, gave the Black Power salute on the Olympic podium. The Revolt of the Black Athlete tells the story of that action: the circumstances that led to it and the blowback that would follow. It was an unofficial text of the mid-century athletic-activist movement; Edwards himself even advised players (both the book and Edwards show up in High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh’s 2019 movie about athlete empowerment). At a moment when American politics are more enmeshed with sports than ever, as the U.S. prepares to host the World Cup and the Olympics, this look at athletes’ political power is crucial.