Johnny Smith

Johnny Smith is a historian of the twentieth century United States, specializing in race, sports, and popular culture.

His newest book, Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (written with Randy Roberts), illuminates the pivotal relationship between the famous boxer and the Muslim minister. Blood Brothers reveals how Malcolm X awakened Cassius Clay’s political consciousness.  This dynamic brotherhood, fused together by racial pride and self-determination, transformed the new heavyweight champion—Muhammad Ali—into an international symbol of Black Power.

His first book, The Sons of Westwood: John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty That Changed College Basketball explores the emergence of college basketball as a national pastime and the political conflicts in college athletics during the 1960s and 1970s. 

Most recently, he published “The Job Is Football: The Myth of the Student-Athlete” in The American Historian (August 2016).