Forty Million Dollar Slaves by William C. Rhoden

Author:William C. Rhoden [Rhoden, William C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56574-7
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2006-03-29T05:00:00+00:00

From the 1880s, when the first African Americans played at predominately white schools, to the early 1960s, the majority of black athletes who aspired to play at the top level of college football had few options. Although they could play at mainstream schools in the West, Midwest, or East, they faced unwritten quotas that limited the number of black players on a school’s roster. In the South, integration came late to the mainstream schools, giving Southern HBCUs the pick of the recruiting litter. Well into the 1960s, Jake Gaither, the legendary coach of Florida A&M, had the first crack at black athletes in the entire state of Florida. Eddie Robinson, the Grambling coach, had the same access in Louisiana; Marino Casem of Alcorn State and W. C. Gordon of Jackson State shared Mississippi.

The general feeling of black officials may have been that white racist attitudes in the South were so deeply entrenched that black colleges would have indefinite access to a rich pool of African American athletes for decades to come.

This unchecked access to black talent fostered a lack of foresight and vision and led to complacency. Why upgrade athletic facilities? Why beef up the athletics department budgets? Why expand? Why instrumentalize athletic programs in ways that so-called mainstream colleges had done for decades—using sports to add revenue and boost the reputation of the school—and then invest in upgrading not just the athletic facilities, but the national reputations of entire universities? Presidents, coaches, and athletic directors at the HBCUs would pay a steep price for taking their resources for granted and not maximizing their facilities and competitiveness when they had the chance. The problem was that black coaches, on some level, liked the segregation arrangement.

The Achilles’ heel of those Africans who became entrenched in the slave trade, since their initial confrontation with the West, was often the failure to plan and predict. Similarly, the failure of black institutions to anticipate and plan came back to haunt them. Apparently none of the head coaches, athletic directors, or presidents at HBCUs considered what might happen when predominantly white schools in the South “got religion” and began recruiting black athletes en masse.

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