Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete

From Publishers Weekly New York Times columnist Rhoden offers a charged assessment of the state of black athletes in America, using the pervasive metaphor of the plantation to describe a modern sports industry defined by white ownership and black labor. The title and the notion behind it are sure to raise eyebrows, and Rhoden admits that his original title of Lost Tribe Wandering , for all its symbolic elegance, lacked punch. And Rhoden isn't pulling any of his. Rather than seeing rags-to-riches stories where underprivileged athletes reach the Promised Land by way of their skills, he casts the system as one in which those athletes are isolated from their backgrounds, used to maximize profit and instilled with a mindset "whereby money does not necessarily alter one's status as 'slave,' as long as the 'owner' is the one who controls the rules that allow that money to be made." Rhoden's writing is intelligent and cogent, and his book's tone is hardly as inflammatory as its name. It's possible that his title and working metaphor will turn off readers who will simply refuse to consider young men making millions of dollars playing a game to be disenfranchised. Nevertheless, this is an insightful look at the role of blacks in sports they dominate but hardly control. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library Journal Adult/High School–Rhoden's provocative thesis is that today's black athletes are akin to pre-Civil War plantation slaves, because slavery had as much to do with power and control as it had to do with wealth. The big-money sports in America–football, baseball, basketball–are owned and controlled almost exclusively by white men, and yet each has a disproportionately large percentage of black athletes. They are well paid, but they have no direct power over the current and future direction of these sports. More than that, they lack any real control over their roles within these sports. The author supports his position with a well-researched and thoughtfully rendered survey of the history of the black athlete. From plantation-born jockeys and boxers of the early 19th century, to the NBA of Michael Jordan and Larry Johnson, Rhoden remains focused on prevailing structures of racism. He notes the accomplishments and frustrations of several well-known figures, including Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens, and Willie Mays, as well as others who have faded from our collective memory. In doing so, he examines the damaging effects of what he calls the conveyor belt in the contemporary sports world, where children as young as 11 and 12 are pegged as prospects and viewed as potential sources of income through middle school, high school, and college. This book will no doubt spark controversy, but will also prove to be a lasting contribution to the history of race relations in America. –Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist New York Times sports columnist Rhoden tackles the challenging issue of the status of the black athlete in contemporary America. His comparison of star athletes, with their celebrity and high salaries, to slaves is certain to provoke controversy, but Rhoden provides strong historic context. He traces the history of athleticism and race from slaves securing privilege, or even freedom, through athletic prowess through the early stages of racial integration of athletics at major colleges through the huge compensation paid to athletes today. He describes the isolation, if not alienation, of black athletes from the broader black community, heightening the distance between those who continue to be oppressed by racism and those whose material well-being may have desensitized them to the plight of the less-privileged. Rhoden is critical of Michael Jordan and Bob Johnson, the first black owner of a major sports franchise, for failing to somehow contribute to the uplift of the broader black community. This work sheds light on contemporary sports and race issues. Vernon Ford Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Rhoden scores heavily with this Muhammad Ali of a book, one that blends autobiography with history, clarity of insight with passion. . . . A series of invaluable and irrefutable history lessons and contemporary cameos to illustrate Rhoden’s thesis that even the best paid of black American athletes live a double life—highly compensated, but in a state not unlike bondage.” —Arnold Rampersad, author of Jackie Robinson: A Biography and Days of Grace: A Memoir (with Arthur Ashe)“Powerful and prophetic . . . Rhoden courageously lays bare painful truths about a fundamental reality in American life: the centrality of the excellence and exploitation of black athletes.” —Cornel West, author of Race Matters “A book that touches the soul . . . Cuts to the heart of the matter, delivering a penetrating slice of the long and often painful journey to success taken by black athletes.” —Neil Amdur, former sports editor, New York Times “Reading this work is an emotional experience. . . . Once I started I couldn’t stop. Informative, engaging, and extremely provocative, $40 Million Slaves caused me to alternately shake my head in violent disagreement one moment only to find myself nodding the next.” —Calvin Hill, former NFL All-Star and father of NBA All-Star Grant Hill“A provocative contribution to the literature on race and sports . . . For anyone who cares about America’s future and sport in America, it’s well worth reading.” —Paul Tagliabue, commissioner, National Football League“Breathtaking in scope . . . If you want to honestly view race in America, $40 Million Slaves will give you the prism of sports as a vehicle to see how far we still have to go to really achieve equality in America. It’s a must read.” —Richard Lapchick, director emeritus, Center for the Study of Sport in Society; columnist, ESPN.com; and author of Smashing Barriers “This is the best contemporary writing—and best fuel for debate—on the large role black athletes hold in American culture. Bill Rhoden is playing hardball with stars from Michael Jordan to Mike Tyson on the issue of blacks and sports by bringing history, politics, and race on the field.” —Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize “Provocative and distressing—just the right combination for beginning an important conversation.” —Kirkus Reviews William C. Rhoden has been a sportswriter for the New York Times since 1983, and has written the “Sports of the Times” column for more than a decade. He also serves as a consultant for ESPN’s SportsCentury series, and occasionally appears as a guest on their show The Sports Reporters . In 1996, Rhoden won a Peabody Award for Broadcasting as writer of the HBO documentary Journey of the African-American Athlete . A graduate of Morgan State University in Baltimore, he lives in New York City’s Harlem with his wife and daughter. From The Washington Post "A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave." So declared Curt Flood during an interview with Howard Cosell on Jan. 3, 1970. The Gold Glove centerfielder had appeared on ABC television to discuss his grievances with Major League Baseball. Flood uttered his memorable reply when Cosell questioned his description of baseball players as "indentured servants" and "slaves," pointing out that $90,000 per year wasn't exactly "slave wages." Decades and many millions of dollars later, notable sports figures have continued to second Flood's bold notion. For example, former pro basketball player Larry Johnson once described his fellow members of the New York Knicks as a group of "rebellious slaves," a term similarly used by basketball star Rasheed Wallace and and football All-Pro Warren Sapp. William Rhoden, in his brilliant Forty Million Dollar Slaves, chronicles the saga of Flood, Johnson and numerous other black male athletes who have toiled on America's athletic plantations. Along the way, he shows how their promise as athletes, leaders and agents of social change has long been restricted by the forces of racism on and off the field. Like Flood, he disputes the widespread belief that athletes (and black male athletes in particular) with seven-figure contracts and commercial appeal cannot be slaves. While recognizing that today's athletes are immensely wealthy, Rhoden links the absence of black ownership, the institutionalization of rules to regulate black athletic styles, and the common description of black athletes as "hot dogs" or "showboats" as evidence of black athletes' subservience to white interests. He makes clear that the absence of power leaves black athletes in a continuously precarious position, still hampered by a history of being "kept out, persecuted, and eased out when white owners and management decided they weren't needed or wanted." As evidence of black athletes' continuing vulnerability, Rhoden writes about Michael Jordan, often cited as evidence of black male athletic success and the powerful ways in which sports have facilitated colorblindness in post-civil-rights era America. "Flying too high to notice" that he was on the plantation, Jordan was fired by Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin. Like Curt Flood before him, the superstar was "used for his muscle, then discarded." "As long as black people don't take control of the industry that feeds them, they will always work at the pleasure of the white power structure," writes Rhoden, "a structure that would like nothing more than to wean itself from its dependence on black muscle." Linking the NBA's efforts to create an international (and less black) talent pool to the horseracing industry's exclusion of once-dominant black jockeys at the turn of the 20th century, Rhoden argues, "the story of the black athlete seemed to go from plantation to plantation, from [Tom] Molineaux [a boxer who competed in England during the slavery era] fighting his way to freedom, to pampered millionaires still fighting to own their own labor." Presenting a history that is neither an "inspirational reel" nor an indictment of today's black athletes, Rhoden offers a "complicated tale of continuous struggle, a narrative of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, the story of an inspiring rise, an unnecessary fall, and uncertain future." He rightly challenges the conventional American notion of sports as a model of integration and meritocracy, where talent and athleticism trump bigotry. For example, Rhoden examines the distinctive styles that Willie Mays and R.C. Owens brought to baseball and basketball, respectively. He reveals how fans and media alike demonized them for violating the values of the game and for merely "having attitude." Persuasively, he finds echoes of their harsh treatment in the condemnation of flashy modern competitors such as the University of Miami football team of the '90s. Through each historic step, forward and back, Rhoden argues that black athletes, like blacks in general, have always been "largely feared and despised," relegated to the "periphery of true power" despite their talents and contributions to sporting life in America. Forty Million Dollar Slaves is a beautifully written, complex and rich narrative. Rhoden offers a wonderful balance between the often-forgotten histories of great black athletes, such as bicyclist Major Taylor, Negro League entrepreneur Rube Foster and college football great Sam Cunningham, and nuanced social commentaries on the commercial exploitation of blackness, white control of the sporting world, and the devastating effects of integration on the Negro Leagues and the sports teams at historically black colleges and universities. He describes the recruitment of black male high school athletes as a conveyor belt, a system that goes to every length to "extract those bodies from where they primarily reside -- in the black neighborhoods of rural and urban America -- and put them to work. . . . the ultimate effect of the Conveyor Belt is not so much to deliver young black athletes to the pros, but to deliver them with the correct mentality: They learn not to rock the boat, to get along, they learn by inference about the benevolent superiority of the white man and enter into a tacit agreement to let the system operate without comment." As much as Rhoden indicts American racism, he also critiques black athletes. He writes, "by the time they reach the NBA, the NFL, or Major League Baseball, black athletes have put themselves on an intellectual self-check: You don't even have to guard them, they'll miss the shot." To recover from their stasis and help their fellow African-Americans "convert all our accumulated wealth and presence into power," black athletes must join with black agents, sportswriters and sports executives to extend their influence "beyond the courts, fields, and diamonds." Greater power, through various types of ownership and collective action, would elevate blacks as a whole, enabling black athletes to "play a pivotal role" in shaping society while reestablishing institutions and community power lost during the era of integration. Although at times he misses the opportunity to celebrate athletes such as Etan Thomas (a pro basketball player who has spoken out against the war in Iraq) and Toni Smith (a former college basketball player who protested the war by turning her back to the American flag during the national anthem), who have carried on the traditions of those rebellious athletes whom he rightly celebrates, Rhoden avoids the worst qualities found in so much of today's sports commentary on black athletes: contempt and doubt. Instead he provides optimism and the possibility, alongside ample historical context, to illustrate how the exploitation of African American athletes has had far-reaching effects on the communities from which they emerged. Reviewed by David J. Leonard Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The Race Begins: The Dilemma of Illusion Long before there was race and even before there was politics, there were Saturday mornings in the playground. Every summer, on Saturday mornings my father and I would greet the dawn. We’d have our breakfast, put on shorts and sneakers, walk across the street to the Martha Ruggles Elementary School playground, and practice basketball. My father was my first coach. He was a mathematics teacher by training, and his penchant for teaching extended to sports. He taught me how to catch a football and run a sprint. I played Biddy Basketball at the Chatham branch of the YMCA; my dad was the coach. An astute judge of talent, he recognized that his oldest son needed tutoring. And that’s how those joyous Saturday morning sessions evolved. I was eight years old, my shots barely reached the rim, but my dad constantly reminded me that there was a lot more to the game than shooting. He said that by the time I was able to hit the rim consistently, I’d have an idea of how to play the game. So we worked on fundamentals: dribbling, passing, catching. Now and then we’d play a game of one-on-one. He always won. For a change of pace, we’d run a foot race. He won that, too. But what I loved most about Saturday morning was the bonding. Those practice sessions gave me an opportunity to be with my father, and be with him on a relatively equal playing field. At every turn, I measured my physical prowess against my father’s. At every picnic, on every long walk, I’d challenge him to a race, keeping mental notes all along, noting how long he had to run hard before easing up and letting me win. He was still father, I was son, but I knew that one day, if I became strong enough, quick enough, big enough, competent enough, the dynamics of our athletic relationship would change. Those memories, carefully tucked away in my heart, are what make sports reverberate in my soul. Not covering the big games, interviewing celebrities and superstars, but childhood recollections of a boy trying to please his parents. The deepest, most ancient pull of sports for me has always been emotional. “Race” was something you did on the sidewalk or on a dusty road on the way home from school. In the beginning, speed and quickness didn’t have a color. My father tried to shield his three children from the brutality of the racial struggles that swirled about us in the 1950s. Every now and then he’d talk about some slight or indignity he’d suffered at the hands of a white person. Mostly he insulated us from the unfolding drama of the Civil Rights movement. Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball three years before I was born, but my father wasn’t much of a baseball fan, so I wasn’t shellacked in Jackie’s legend of black Americans in the United States. My mother was not an avid sports fan, but she was the lion in my soul. Her brother, my uncle Eddie, was a prizefighter in his younger days (my father called him the Canvas Kid). One day, when I complained about Billy Boy, our next-door neighbor, my mother didn’t advise me to turn the other cheek, or to ignore him, or to tell his mother. She essentially told me to go back and kick his ass. I remember the two of us standing in our kitchen, my mother giving me an impromptu boxing clinic. I can still hear her voice as she showed me how to throw a combination: “Bop, bop—just like that,” she said, showing me how to deck Billy Boy. I never did fight Billy Boy. I faced him in the yard soon after my mother’s tutorial but couldn’t bring myself to throw the first punch. This was my first lesson in combat: Power without heart and strategy is meaningless. My mother laid out the racial facts of life for me. She burst my bubble in our kitchen one afternoon when she said casually that there were more white people than black people in the United States. I was stunned. In my segregated world on Chicago’s South Side, black and brown were the dominant colors. In my world, white people were there, but they weren’t there. Invisible. The stores, the Laundromat, the record shops, my schools. If whites were the majority, where were they? Why didn’t I ever see any? Of course, the answers to these questions flowed into the larger ocean of segregation and racism. That, in turn, flowed back to the ritual my dad and I enacted when we watched sports. I learned about race and racism in front of the TV set. My father and I watched football games upstairs, in our bungalow on 78th and Calumet. We sat and cheered on the red leather seat my dad had pulled out of our ’56 Mercury station wagon. Televised football didn’t make a lot of sense to me back then. The images were too crowded, too small, too gray. The fun of it was cheering; and cheering interests were simple in our house. We rooted for the team with the most black players. We cheered for the hometown clubs, the Bears and White Sox, but aside from that, the general rule of thumb was that we cheered for the team with the most colorful presence. In those days, when black faces were few and far between, we cheered for the color of the skin. We had some variations to the general rule: If the team was from the South and had just one Brother, his team was our team; he was our man. Didn’t matter who the athlete was underneath his uniform or his skin—his true character was less significant than his presence. Out there on the field, he became the torchbearer for the race. Content of character mattered only to the extent that we prayed these pioneers wouldn’t embarrass The Race. The ritual my dad and I engaged in was one that took place among black sports fans and non-fans throughout the United States. The ritual went further back than Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, or Jesse Owens. It probably went all the way back to the heavyweight prizefighter Jack Johnson in 1910, when the telegram runners passed through black neighborhoods calling out round-by-round progress of Johnson’s historic fight with Jim Jeffries, the first Great White Hope. When Johnson defeated Jeffries on July 4, 1910, black communities across the country exploded in celebration. Other parts of the nation exploded with violence. As news of Johnson’s victory spread, mobs of angry whites beat up and, in some instances, murdered blacks. Many whites feared that the black community might be emboldened by Johnson’s victory over a white man. And they were not mistaken. Those early symbolic victories were soul food. Symbolic representation was the rule of the day, part of a timeless ritual throughout the United States’ melting pot of ethnicity: Jews cheered for Jews, Irish for Irish, Italians for Italians. But the predicament of black Americans was more complex, precarious, and sometimes seemed even hopeless. African Americans were so disconnected from the American dream that sports often seemed the only venue where the battle for self-respect could be vigorously waged. My parents and their parents sat around their radios listening to Joe Louis fights, living and dying with every punch. Louis was fighting for himself and his country, but he was also fighting for a black nation within a nation. Every time Jackie Robinson went to bat, he did so for that elusive, ever-evolving state of mind called “Black America.” In those days of suffocating, uncompromising segregation, we cheered black muscle with a vengeance. The fate of black civilization seemed to rest on every round, every at bat. “Knock his white ass out,” or “Outrun his white ass,” or “Block that white boy’s shot.” Or, worst of all: “You let that white boy beat you?” Each group has had its cross to bear, but although Jews and Italians and Irish and all the other mingling European races could look forward to assimilating, assimilation was practically impossible for African Americans. The indelible marking of skin color made it so. Early in the formation of the United States, blacks became the designated drivers of the Scapegoat Express. We were the “outside others.” The nation needed a permanent workforce and a permanent pariah. African Americans, by virtue of some seventeenth-century decree, got the job. No amount of education, no amount of wealth, could remove the stigma of race. The paradox and dilemma of virulent racism is that our exclusion became the basis of our unity. The next two hundred years of our existence were defined by reacting to racism. So our cheering assumed a deeper meaning: we were cheering for our very survival. Black athletes became our psychological armor, markers of our progress, tangible proof of our worth, evidence of our collective Soul. Our athletes threw punches we couldn’t throw, won races we couldn’t run. Any competition or public showing involving an African American was seen as a test for us all; the job of the athlete was to represent The Race. This was a heavy burden on one hand, but at the same time it represented a noble, time-worn responsibility. You always represented. Paul Robeson—All-American football player, activist, orator, singer, actor—never forgot his first day as a freshman football player at Rutgers when white teammates tried to kill him—and nearly succeeded. Robeson never forgot his father’s angry reaction when informed that his son was thinking about quitting the team—and Rutgers. His father told him that quitting was not an option, regardless of how trying conditions became. “When I was out on the football field or in the classroom or anywhere else, I was not t... Read more