Almost on the same day the media was celebrating the centenary of Jackie Robinson’s birth, one of the cable television outlets that feature classic shows broadcast the 1977 TV series “How the West Was Won.” What the two events had in common was the actor Woody Strode who was in the show’s cast and who was on the same football team as Jackie at UCLA.
Robinson, as we all know, is an American icon, while only a few film fans that recall the many movies where Strode’s presence was almost as athletic and challenging as his days on the gridiron perhaps know Strode.
Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode was born on July 28, 1914, in Los Angeles. His parents were from New Orleans; his grandmother was a Black Cherokee and his grandfather was a Black Creek. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School and UCLA where he was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. As a decathlete, he excelled at the shot put and the high jump, establishing a world record leap at that time of 6 feet, 10 inches.
Along with his athletic skills, Strode was an outstanding student who majored in education and history.
But it was on the football field that he acquired an enviable reputation playing alongside Robinson and Kenny Washington. For their feats in 1939, they were known as the “Gold Dust gang.” Actually, two other African-Americans—Tom Bradley and Ray Bartlett—were on the team, and the book “The Black Bruins” by James Johnson (2018) captures their exploits and challenges.
Strode’s first brush with Hollywood came during his work as a porter for Bette Davis and Errol Flynn at the Warner Brother’s studio. In 1941, he made his screen debut in “Sundown,” portraying a native policeman, which may have warmed his indigenous heart. A year later he had a small role in “Star Spangled Banner,” this time as a chauffeur and a year later a cameo appearance in “No Time For Love.”
With the outbreak of World War II, Strode, at 27, was drafted into service, which interrupted his professional football stint with the Hollywood Bears in the Pacific Coast league. He spent his military days unloading bombs in Guam and the Marianas, as well as playing on the Army football team at March Field in Riverside, Calif.
He continued his football career after military duty with the Los Angeles Rams where he, along with Washington, became the first African-Americans to play in the National Football League. Strode may not have received the relentless insults and abuse Robinson endured entering Major League Baseball, but he was by no means free of the racism so pervasive in American society. The racial epithets may not have rained down as furiously in Los Angeles but on the road he heard his share of name-calling, slights and discrimination.
Strode was no longer in the NFL after he moved his prowess north to the Western Interprovincial Football Union and became a member of the Calgary Stampeders. He helped them win a Grey Cup in 1948. A year later, after suffering broken ribs and a shoulder injury, he put the pigskin aside and donned wrestling togs again, something he had done for a while in 1941. Between acting jobs, wrestling was another form of make-believe, according to some critics, where he took on such contestants as the flamboyant Gorgeous George. He was often billed as the Pacific Coast Heavyweight Wrestling Champion and by the early ’60s had teamed up with Bobo Brazil.
Football and wrestling were soon in the rearview mirror after Strode was signed by producer Walter Mirisch, who admired his ability in the ring and cast him as an African warrior in the “Bomba the Jungle Boy”-themed film “The Lion Hunters” (1951) starring Johnny Sheffield. When Strode was asked to shave his head for the role he resisted, but finally gave in when he was offered $500 a week. “All right where are the pluckers,” Strode reportedly said. In consenting, he realized, “I was out in the world market with a bald head. Trapped for life. Finally, it became a way of life.”
Besides the Bomba films, Strode had roles in “Caribbean” and “Androcles and the Lion” both from 1952; “Beneath the City” (1953); and he appeared as an African warrior in several episodes of “Ramar of the Jungle,” a television series which aired from 1952 through 1954. In 1956, the director Cecil B. DeMille cast Strode as a slave in “The Ten Commandments,” and once more he was earning $500 a week, and taking on an additional role as an Ethiopian king.
He acquired critical acclaim in 1959 in “Pork Chop Kill” as a conflicted private with some hesitation for battle. As he saw it, the role “was the first dramatic thing I had done.”
Strode’s portrayal of Private Franklin was a steppingstone and endeared him in a friendship with director John Ford who would later hire him to play the lead role in “Sergeant Rutledge” in 1960. It was a far cry from his experience as a slave gladiator who defeated Kirk Douglas in “Spartacus,” but no less inglorious. Strode said his role as Sergeant Rutledge was classic: “It had dignity. John Ford put classic words in my mouth. You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne before. I had the greatest Glory hallelujah ride across the Pecos River that any Black man ever had on screen. And I did it myself. I carried the whole Black race across the river.”
Ford also cast him in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), where he portrayed Pompey, John Wayne’s hired hand. In the film his character recited the Declaration of Independence but apologized for forgetting the lines “all men are created equal.” His relationship with Ford extended beyond the screen, and during the director’s declining years Strode spent four months on Ford’s floor as his caretaker and was present at Ford’s funeral.
Strode landed another major role in 1966 as a soldier of fortune in “The Professionals,” and this boosted his career and even gave him the impetus to produce his own film on the famed Tenth Cavalry, but it never happened.
There is no way to chronicle Strode’s 80 some odd films, but right down to the last ones, including “Storyville” and “Posse” in 1992, and “The Quick and the Dead” in 1995, his image was immediately recognizable. At the end of “The Quick and the Dead” the film was dedicated to Strode, who died in 1994 in Glendora, Calif.
Woody Strode was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1980.