33 pages • 1 hour read
William C. RhodenForty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 10-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10: “The $40 Million Slave: The Dilemma of Wealth Without Control”
This chapter chronicles the lives of two influential athletes: Curt Flood, of baseball, and Larry Johnson, an NBA star.
Flood, Rhoden maintains, was not only the probable inventor of the planation metaphor but a superior athlete in his own right. He replaced Willie Mays as the “greatest centerfielder in baseball,” Rhoden writes. “Flood, like Mays, wasn’t just great—he was cool and great” (231). Regardless of his success, Flood was traded, as athletes commonly were (and are); but Flood, at the risk of losing his $92,000 salary, was the first to simply refuse to be traded. Rhoden credits Flood with writing an unprecedented letter to the baseball commissioner in which he insisted that he was not “a piece of property to be bought and sold” (232).
Flood, and other athletes, were victims of Major League Baseball’s Reserve Clause, a government-sanctioned exception to fair play in business that kept players from testing the market. Flood would eventually sue, despite the warning that his filing would end his career in baseball. Though his case reached the Supreme Court in 1972, he lost, due in part to the fact that, Rhoden argues, “no active players showed support” (236). Finally, in 1975, two white players successfully challenged the previous ruling against Flood; finally, all players could bargain on their own behalf.
Rhoden offers Larry Johnson as another black sports figure who would not be content with just his salary as long as black people were still facing injustice. Rebuking the media’s league-mandated insistence on doing interviews and press conferences, Johnson “cursed the media and a league official for hampering his ability to practice” (238). Finally, he succumbed to pressure from the league and spoke to the media; in doing so, he contended that he was, metaphorically, a slave.
Johnson would soon be labeled as ungrateful, and Rhoden weighs in on what would become an ongoing theme: How could a multi-millionaire athlete think of himself as a slave? In answer, Rhoden writes that Johnson, with all of his financial success, “saw himself as still being heavily policed and clearly owned” (244).
Chapter 11: “The One Who Got Away? The Dilemma of Ownership”
This final chapter follows Robert Johnson, the first black owner of a major sports franchise. As Rhoden is ambivalent in celebrating Johnson’s success, he simultaneously questions Johnson’s character and his motives. In fact, while the black community was demanding black ownership, Rhoden claims that Johnson’s breakthrough was compromised by his questionable business practices: “The story of Johnson and BET, the television network he founded that became the source of his enormous wealth, is a cautionary tale about how the forces of race, capitalism, and entertainment converge in unexpected ways” (248).
Rhoden bemoans the fact that, while Johnson was raised by a humble, hard-working family, he “transformed his blackness into phenomenal wealth” (249). While Johnson purported to use the television channel BET (or Black Entertainment Television) as a means of uplifting black society, his programming exploited cheap talent, while, at the same time, airing dubious but financially gainful infomercials during 50% of its airtime. Rhoden contends: “Black America was bamboozled by Black Entertainment Television” (251).
Eventually selling his stake in BET to white ownership, Johnson used the equity from the sale to buy a professional basketball franchise, the Charlotte Bobcats. In this endeavor, Johnson comes once more under Rhoden’s scrutiny. He expects an advantage in recruiting black athletes, while at the same time insisting on level playing fields. Finally, Rhoden admits that Johnson has had a hand in promoting black coaches; the question, however, for Rhoden, is phrased as such: “Now that he’s entered into the arena of sports, how will he respond to the debt? How will he repay a history of struggle?” (258).
Epilogue Summary: “Making the Open Shot”
In closing out his book, Rhoden credits black athletes for making sincere contributions to communities that were been devasted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He concludes, “What was needed at this moment of crisis was a galvanizing figure who could lead athletes to mobilize, rally, and execute a collective plan of action” (265). Unfortunately, for Rhoden, no such figure existed. While there were donations, contributions, and good deeds, “black athletes have failed to produce a leader who understood the potential of this black athletic nation to join in the larger push for freedom” (265).
Despite this seemingly pessimistic closing, Rhoden offers some tangible hope and recommends specific means of action to rescue young black athletes from their current dilemmas. First, Rhoden writes, African American athletes should form a professional association to network, set agendas, and harness power.
Rhoden concludes by saying, “There is hope that a new generation of athletes will use its popularity, wealth, and influence to help create a desperately needed economy for the vast majority of African Americans who sit on the periphery of society” (270).
Chapter 10-Epilogue Analysis
Rhoden, narrowing to his basic premise, at last provides details of the ongoing irony faced by black athletes in today’s era. He uses comparison and striking imagery in discussing two dynamic figures, takes advantage of his sports-writing credibility to conduct interviews, and asks some difficult questions while offering hope.
In considering Curt Flood and Larry Johnson, Rhoden paints a bleak picture of Flood’s life following his unofficial banishment from baseball. Suffering from personal problems, Rhoden explains, Flood relocated to Spain, then Sweden, all the while struggling with alcoholism. In Johnson’s case, the portrait is even bleaker. Despite Johnson’s wealth, his old neighborhood remained impoverished, plagued by “poorly stocked grocery stores, the bad schools, and the easily available drugs and guns” (242). Rhoden concludes that the two athletes “used the same language, speaking not about material poverty but the ultimate powerlessness of their condition” (240).
In interviewing Robert Johnson, Rhoden asks the tough questions; Johnson tends, in Rhoden’s journalistic view, to deflect them. The irony is not lost on Rhoden. In wondering if a wealthy black businessman like Johnson owes anything to those athletes and owners of the past, Rhoden concludes that “the answer is yes and no” (254).
Relying again on first-person reportage and imagery, Rhoden, in the Epilogue, describes the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of Gulfport:
The entire coast had been reconfigured. Casinos that had sat on barges had been lifted out of the water and slammed to shore. The back of one casino had been ripped off and blown two blocks away, and now sat in the middle of a highway (263).
These powerful images are followed, however, by suggestions of hope, as Rhoden concludes that “as long as you struggle, as long as you keep up the fight, no victory is impossible” (270).
