William C. Rhoden is an American sports journalist and author of “Forty Million Dollar Slaves,” who formerly worked as a columnist for the New York Times from 1983 until his retirement in 2016. He is now a writer-at-large for the ESPN web site “The Undefeated.”

Before joining The Times, he spent more than three years with The Baltimore Sun as a columnist. Before that, he was associate editor of Ebony magazine from 1974 to 1978.

In 2006, he published his first book, the Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, an analysis of the racist history and current reality of professional sports in the US.