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.
Index of Terms
The Reserve Clause
A major league baseball policy that prevented players from becoming free agents. Curt Flood challenged this policy, and eventually free agency was born.
Title IX
A law in collegiate sports that requires universities to allocate the same amount of money to men’s and women’s athletic departments.
The Great White Hope
Both a metaphor and a reality, this concept imagines a white athlete who will compete—and win—against a black opponent, or compete on a team with mostly black players. The term is largely reserved for pugilists.
The Jockey Syndrome
The system by which white ownership and management changes the rules of sports and employment to the disadvantage of African American athletes.
Black Style
A combination of gestures and vocalizations used by black athletes to show unity and as symbolic resistance to the constraints of the white gaze.
The Conveyor Belt System
The system by which young black talent is groomed to fit in to white power structures by pulling those athletes out of their communities, inuring them to their own exploitation, and discarding them once they are no longer of use.
