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Jaylen Brown is very good at basketball. Ever since the Boston Celtics drafted him in 2016, he has become one of the NBA’s most accomplished players. He just finished the best season of his career, a season that earned him a spot on the All-NBA second team and his second NBA All-Star game appearance. In fact, the only season in the past three years where he did not make an All-Star team was in 2022. He only made the NBA Finals that year.
But Brown is conscious of his success. He understands how much power he has in his community and the massive platform he accrued over the past decade. He knows that his auspicious basketball career has given him opportunities that most Black Americans have never had.
Because of that basketball career, Brown earned the richest contract in basketball history on Sunday. With that new money, he vows to help make Boston a prosperous city for Black people.
“I want to launch a project to bring Black Wall Street here to Boston,” Brown said on Wednesday. “I want to attack the wealth disparity here.”
Black Wall Street alludes to the name given to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, one of America’s most affluent Black communities in the early 20th century. Brown wants to use the money toward his extension to help Black Americans prosper in Boston the way they did in Tulsa a century ago.
“With the biggest financial deal in NBA history,” Brown said, “It makes sense to talk about, one, your investment in the community, but two, also, the wealth disparity here that nobody wants to talk about.”
