"Famous Negro Athletes" was emblazoned as a graffiti mural in downtown New York when it was discovered by legendary art critic Glenn O'Brien in the early 1980s.

O'Brien befriended the then-unknown Basquiat, who went by the moniker SAMO, after covering his graffiti work for High Times magazine.

"I had seen SAMO written on walls and doors all over the place, and I was doing a piece about graffiti art and graffiti for High Times, so I interviewed him. It was early 1979 I think. I had already talked to Ali and Lee and Fred and various so-called [graffiti] writers, but I wanted to talk to SAMO, because what he was doing was different. It wasn't just a tag; it had content," the late art critic said.

"One day, I walked by the tire store near my apartment and there was a huge mural with three angry Black faces and the legend 'FAMOUS NEGRO ATHLETES'. When I saw him later, I said: 'That's the best thing I've ever seen.' The next day he brought me one on paper," he recalled.

Although one of Basquiat's early pieces, "Famous Negro Athletes" features several culturally significant signs and motifs that would become key conceptual anchors in his oeuvre.

Many of his early paintings and works on paper make visual and textual reference to famous African-American athletes of the time, such as Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron.

The four intensely scrawled faces of "Famous Negro Athletes" comment on the interplay between race and professional sports in the US, gesturing to the fact that it was one of the only fields in which African-Americans were permitted to excel.

"The piece was political in the sense that it presented so simply how society expected black people to be athletes and not painters," O'Brien noted.

"Famous Negro Athletes," which has been in O'Brien's personal art collection since its execution, is expected to sell for between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.

This pre-sale estimate is far from Basquiat's mindblowing auction record of $110.5 million for "Untitled" (1982), which sold in May 2017 at Sotheby's New York.

Though "Famous Negro Athletes" is not expected to be one of Basquiat's most expensive sales, it has been featured in several international exhibitions over the years. Most recently, it was on view as part of "Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks" at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015.

"Famous Negro Athletes" will hit the auction block on November 14 at the Sotheby's Contemporary Art evening sale in New York City, alongside masterpieces by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still.