Ray Allen on the athlete's voice, recalls Heat bringing awareness to Trayvon Martin

The 18-year NBA veteran spoke with Yahoo Sports senior NBA insider Chris Haynes as part of Verizon's Next20 series about the next generation of sports activism.

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RAY ALLEN: My voice, Renee's, and Jrue's voice, and every athlete's voice, they're so important, because we play basketball, we play a sport. So many people support us, and they're cheering for us, and they're big fans of ours.

What's fascinating is when we go out to the court, it's OK to do what we do on the court, but in the same token, if we use our voices to speak up against something that aren't particularly in their interests, then they want us to shut up and just play basketball.

We haven't had to speak out in such a long time. We have small little issues that take place here and there. You think about what Muhammad Ali did, going to jail, just going against everything that the US government stood for, and trying to draft meant to the military, and him not having rights in our own country, that's always stood with me.

You know, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, playing a sport, where they couldn't stay in a hotel with their teammates, so as a Black athlete in this country, those times were just a few short years ago. So I always remembered that and said, you know, I stand on their shoulders. I'm able to do what I can do because of men like that.

And so we have to make sure we continue to hold that message and fight for those young people, because there's people that are trying to get to where we are. But we have to continue to create a level playing field for them. And we have to make sure we use our platforms to voice our feelings. And most importantly, we're speaking for other people.

Don't judge me or be mad at me because I speak out against something unjust in my community or in a government. I'm speaking not just for myself. I'm fine. I'm speaking for people who aren't fine. We know marginalized people in our families and in our communities. And we speak for them using our voices and our platform because they do support us.

CHRIS HAYNES: Ray, I want to ask you, you know, I brought up the Miami Heat. That incident back then, that was after the Trayvon Martin murder. Like I said, that was one of the first of its kind where athletes and the NBA, I would to say, took a stand. Was there any conversations before you guys did that, posted those pictures? Were there any conversations on potential backlash or just going over the pros and cons of speaking out on this issue?

RAY ALLEN: The Donald Sterling situation in LA was kind of the first time where we were dealing with something that we had to say, we don't stand for this. We can't have somebody a part of our game that thinks of us as unequal to them, similar to how Renee felt with her owner down in Atlanta.

You can't have people when the majority of sport is African-American, and they don't fight for you, don't believe in what you believe in, don't stand for you. We can't have people associated with our product that way. Their mission has to be our mission. Our mission has to be their mission. And so any time that something goes on, everybody has to understand, we move together. And that's how we create real change.