Woody Strode
Woody Strode was one of two of Black men to play in major college programs and later the modern National Football League. Born Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode, in Los Angeles, he was first of the star football athletes to become a successful film actor. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School in South East Los Angeles and college at UCLA, where he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Strode, Kenny Washington, and Jackie Robinson starred on the 1939 UCLA Bruins football team, in which they made up three of the four backfield players. They became famous nationally as “the Gold Dust gang.
Strode and Washington, an All-American in 1939, linked up the following year with the Hollywood Bears of the minor Pacific Coast Professional Football League. He was drafted at age 27 and soon joined the United States Army Air Corps. After the war, he worked at serving subpoenas and escorting prisoners for the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office. He and Kenny Washington re-integrated the National Football League (NFL), playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. No Black man had played in the NFL from 1933 to 1946.
Racial discrimination slowed their progress in the game. A handful of Black players suited up in the NFL in the league’s earliest seasons, but franchise owners at the behest of George Preston Marshall, the racist founder of the Washington Redskins, conspired to exclude them from 1934 to 1946. Woody Strode and teammate Kenny Washington signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. Strode played 10 games with the Rams in 1946, but failed to make the team the following year. Strode decided to pursue other career paths, citing issues such as a lack of playing time and constant racial abuse as contributing factors to his quick departure.
Signed in 1948 by the AAFC Brooklyn (football) Dodgers, he was released prior to the season and joined the Calgary Stampeders at age 34. He was part of the CFL’s only undefeated team in 1948 (12-0), a member of Calgary’s 1948 Grey Cup Championship team before retiring due to injury in 1949. He made the all-star team in his first year. In 1941, Strode had dabbled for several months in professional wrestling. Following the end of his football career in 1949, he returned to wrestling part-time between acting jobs until 1962, wrestling the likes of Gorgeous George.
In 1952, Strode wrestled almost every week from August 12, 1952, to December 10, 1952, in different cities in California. Although he played just the one year with the Rams, Woody Strode is still considered as one of the four men who re-integrated the NFL. Woody Strode made a successful transition from sports hero to the movie screen, though Hollywood seemed more predisposed to his magnificent physique and gallant stride than his acting ability. Strode gave the Hollywood establishment what they demanded and appeared in some of the best and the worst of what they offered him. Strode also made numerous guest television appearances later in his life.