Prometheus 6

Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete author: William C. Rhoden asin: 0609601202 binding: Hardcover list price: $23.95 USD amazon price: $20.00 USD

Rhoden's tender evocation of his childhood and college years — and his love for the history of sports — make this book a powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.

Otherwise, he writes, the system wins. "[T]he heart of the dilemma, I eventually came to understand, is the quest for power, power as illustrated by on-the-field representation, power as demonstrated in off-the-field control, power as symbolized by physical domination, power articulated as political revolution. The plantation is the enduring metaphor because that quest for power began with the attempt to assert control over our individual lives and freedom in the hellish years of literal bondage."

'Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete'
William C. Rhoden
By Susan Straight
July 9, 2006

BACK in 1978, after graduating from high school, about 20 of my friends went off to be college athletes. Some went with full scholarships, some went as walk-ins. Almost all were black. That fall, I visited two of my best friends, who were playing football for a Riverside County junior college. They'd been recruited by a celebrated coach and promised that they would be part of a great team.

It was cold the night they played and won. Afterward we went back to their place, a drafty wood-frame farmhouse in a fallow field. My friends shared it with three recruits from Florida. All they had to eat was powdered soup stirred into hot water in mugs. The guys from Florida could barely read or write. Two of them shared a single pair of dress shoes — only one guy could go out at a time. But they helped their team win. They were fast and powerful, desperate and cold.

I've seen this scenario repeated over and over with my African American friends from childhood, from college; even now, I watch my friends' children place all their hopes for the future in the hands of athletic directors and their sports scholarships.

So it was with great curiosity that I picked up William C. Rhoden's "Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete." But the African American sportswriter's new book is an enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes sentimental look at black males in sports from the early 1700s to the present. His thesis is that black athletes for hundreds of years have used superior physical ability as well as "soul and style" not only to thrill and entertain their fellow Americans but also to make money for white owners, yet they have been unable to control their own destinies.