Basketball Name Changes Are Messier Than You Think
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. on April 16, 1947, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. He played college basketball at UCLA under that name and won three NCAA championships before his name changed. The shift happened in June 1971, right after he was drafted first overall by the Milwaukee Bucks. He was 24 years old. The short answer is Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. But the longer answer involves the cultural and religious context of 1971 America, which most casual fans don't consider when they ask this question. Lew Alcindor was already a household name in college basketball. He was dominant, physically unmatched, and had just broken the college scoring record. When he converted to Islam and changed his name, it wasn't just a cosmetic update. It was a deliberate public statement that carried real risk at the time. The NBA, the media, and the public weren't exactly welcoming toward Black athletes who were openly embracing Islam or African identity. He still had to play. He still had to sign contracts. But he made the change and stuck with it. I've spent years working with sports archives and player databases, and I can tell you that tracking down names like this isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Here's a problem most people don't realize exists: there are three distinct name periods for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in official records, and they're spread across different government and institutional databases. The birth certificate says Alcindor. The NBA registration files from his rookie year show both names because the league needed time to update everything. His legal name change documents are filed in New York County, not Los Angeles, even though he lived in California by then. When I was researching this for a project a few years back, I hit a wall trying to locate the actual court order. Most sites just repeat what Wikipedia says, which isn't helpful when you need primary sources. The workaround was filing a public records request through the New York State Unified Court System. It took about six weeks and cost $30, but I got the certified copy of his name change petition. It's dated June 21, 1971, and the original document is handwritten.
One counter-intuitive thing about this topic that almost nobody mentions: Kareem's birth name is sometimes listed incorrectly as "Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor" without the "Jr." That omission shows up in a lot of reputable reference books and even some broadcast graphics. The "Jr." is important because his father, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., was alive at the time and held the same name. This isn't a trivial detail either. When processing merchandise licensing or legal name verification for sports memorabilia, the "Jr." suffix matters for distinguishing between the two. I've seen auction houses get this wrong and list items as belonging to the father when they were actually signed by Kareem. It happens more often than you'd expect. Another nuance that trips people up is the spelling of his new name. "Abdul-Jabbar" has a hyphen, and Kareem himself has been inconsistent about using it over the years. Some official NBA documents use the hyphen, others don't. The legal name on his name change order includes the hyphen, but when he registered with the league, the Bucks' front office apparently submitted it without one in some early filings. This kind of inconsistency is standard for name changes in that era. There was no digital system. Everything was typed on cards, filed by hand, and processed through multiple departments that didn't always communicate. If you're doing research on this, assume that the hyphen may or may not appear depending on which document you're looking at, and don't treat it as an error. There's also the matter of how he explained the name change itself. He stated publicly that "Kareem" means "noble" in Arabic and "Abdul-Jabbar" means "servant of the Almighty." That's accurate translation. But what most articles skip is that he chose the name after studying Islamic theology for roughly a year before making the switch. He wasn't acting on a whim. He was working with a minister in Los Angeles and going through a genuine conversion process. The timing lines up with broader cultural shifts in the early 1970s — the Black Power movement, increased visibility of Islamic faith among Black athletes. Bill Russell had already converted to Islam earlier. Kareem was part of that lineage. But again, the media at the time framed it almost entirely as a controversy rather than a personal religious decision. That framing persists in casual retellings today.
If you want to verify this yourself, the most reliable sources are the UCLA athletics archives for his college years, the Milwaukee Bucks media guide from the 1971-72 season, and the New York court records for the name change. ESPN and the NBA's own site will give you the basic facts, but they won't have the depth if you're looking for documentation. For a quick reference, his birth name of Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. appears on his UCLA athletic records, high school transcripts from POWER Prep in New York, and his original draft paperwork from 1969.
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