William Rhoden, a sports columnist for The New York Times, spoke to a packed John Hope Franklin Center Wednesday about the power relationship between black athletes and their predominantly white coaches and owners.
Rhoden's recent book "Forty Million Dollar Slaves" dealt with the same topic and ignited a firestorm of controversy when it was published.
The columnist and author began the talk, which was attended by more than 100 people, by addressing his book's controversial title.
In 1999, Larry Johnson, a black player for the New York Knicks, told reporters that he and his teammates "were a bunch of rebellious slaves," Rhoden said. The next season, when Johnson was playing in Los Angeles, a spectator stood up and shouted, "Johnson, you're nothing but a 40 million dollar slave!"
Rhoden said he found it interesting that Johnson would use the slave metaphor in describing his relationship to powerful figures in the Knicks organization and that the spectator would remember his comment a year later.
Rhoden went on to discuss the history of African-American athletics and the link between black athletes and slavery.
"On the plantation, they had a tremendous sporting culture," he said, "One plantation's slaves competed against another plantation's slaves."
Before the emergence of sports like football and basketball, athletics were confined to events like boxing and horse racing, and the vast majority of participants were black, he said.
Saying that the "roots of sports are on the plantation," Rhoden recounted the story of Tom Molineaux, an American slave who first got into boxing when his owner bet the farm that he could defeat a slave from a rival plantation. Molineaux won the fight and later became famous by defying racial stereotypes and holding his own in a 60-round fight against English boxing champion Tom Cribb in 1810, Rhoden said.
Today, the number of black athletes has increased, but the power relationship between them and their owners has not, he said. "It's the same story," Rhoden said, referring to the NCAA's power football and basketball schools. "Black labor, white wealth."
"Individually, blacks are doing better than ever before. Collectively, we're doing worse than ever before," he added. "We still have more black men in jail than in college. Star athletes are the exception that proves the rule."
Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor and director of undergraduate and graduate studies in the Department of African and African-American Studies, said he was offering students in his Introduction to African and African-American Studies course extra credit for attending the speech and writing a short summary.
"The book, like his speech today, is provocative," Neal said. "This was a good opportunity for journalists and scholars to meet."
The program's sponsors said they were pleased with the high turnout. "It's good anytime we have the opportunity to bring the community together like this. We had Durham folks, Duke folks, students and faculty here," said Karen Jean Hunt, director of the John Hope Franklin Collection of African and African-American Documentation, which co-sponsored the speech.
Christina Chia, assistant director for programs and communications at the Franklin Humanities Institute, said she hoped the discussion would enliven the academic conversation about race on campus. "The issues he talked about are so relevant to our times in terms of college sports, professional sports and academics," she said.
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