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The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
Crown
July 2006
304 pages ISBN: 0609601202 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe,
African American athletes have been at the center of modern
culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and
stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money,
fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William
C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the
periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry
their talent built. Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves
weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the
United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in
nineteenth-century boxing rings and at the first Kentucky
Derby to the history-making accomplishments of notable
figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays.
Rhoden makes the cogent argument that black athletes’
“evolution” has merely been a journey from literal
plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to
quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in
the form of collegiate and professional sports programs.
Weaving in his own experiences growing up on Chicago’s South
Side, playing college football for an all-black university,
and his decades as a sportswriter, Rhoden contends that
black athletes’ exercise of true power is as limited today
as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The
primary difference is, today’s shackles are often of their
own making. Every advance made by black athletes, Rhoden explains, has
been met with a knee-jerk backlash—one example being Major
League Baseball’s integration of the sport, which stripped
the black-controlled Negro League of its talent and left it
to founder. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids
from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs,
where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team
owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his
sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have
abdicated their responsibility to the community with an
apathy that borders on treason. Sweeping and meticulously detailed, $40 Million Slaves is an
eye-opening exploration of a metaphor we only thought we knew.
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