Woody Strode - Goal Dust: The Warm and Candid Memoirs of a Pioneer Black Athlete and Actor

My daddy smoked cigars and when hed step off the street car, I could smell him coming a block away. Thats how clean the air was in the City of Los Angeles when I was growing up. I was born there in 1914. They named me Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode. My daddy admired the President and Woolwine, who was the District Attorney of Los Angeles. Well, I had to get rid of that title. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode! It was like a goddamned announcement. So I cut it down to Woody Strode.

My great-grandfather was the first of my line to reach freedom in this country. His heritage was in Africa, but those people were captured and sold into slavery. He was a warrior, a rebellious person, and this made him dangerous to his owners. But he was too good an African to kill, so they decided to teach him something. They taught him how to drive the sugarcane train through the fields of the big plantation. His rebellious nature led him to escape, and he reached safety with a wild tribe of Creek Indians. He married one of their squaws, and they had a son. Their son, my grandfather, eventually took off and married a full-blood Blackfoot Indian.

I forget the exact age I found out I was a mixed breed. I thought we were all colored and everybody was similar. Nobody looked at your skin to see if you were a little bit brown or a little bit black. I looked like a Blackfoot and didnt know it. Ive got the Plains Indian look from my high cheek bones. I have a picture of John Grass, the Blackfoot Chief; I look just like him. But as strange as I looked, I never thought I was different from any other Negro. My daddy said I looked like an uncle who was six-feet-five and weighed 230 pounds. He worked on the wharf in New Orleans and could buck 300-pound bales of cotton.