Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode, born on July 25, 1914, was an American athlete, actor, and author whose life story is one of groundbreaking achievements and remarkable versatility. He passed away on December 31, 1994, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire.
Strode was not just an athlete on a scholarship at UCLA, he was an academic. 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. "I got a cultural education-majored in history and education," he said in a 1971 interview.
Woody Strode was a Black Indian (his grandmother was Black Cherokee and his grandfather was Black Muscogee) and an outstanding athlete. Strode's family came from New Orleans and he was Black Indian - many Southern Native American tribes had welcomed slaves and free folk into their communities in the 1800s.
Strode was noted for film roles that contrasted with the stereotypes of his time. He is probably best remembered for his brief Golden Globe-nominated role in Spartacus (1960) as the Ethiopian gladiator Draba, in which he fights Kirk Douglas to the death.
By the time he died on New Year’s Eve, 1994, he had worked with such legendary directors as Cecil B. Strode was an Alpha Man and an Alpha male. Nothing could stop him and he did whatever he put his mind to.
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His first wife was Princess Luukialuana Kalaeloa (a.k.a. Luana Strode), a distant relative of Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii. With her he had two children: a son, television director Kalai (a.k.a. Kalaeloa, 1946-2014), and a daughter, June.
Strode's athletic physique was so appealing that a nude portrait of him was featured in Hubert Stowitts’s acclaimed exhibition of athletic portraits shown at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1941, Strode married a real life princess.
Early Athletic Career
A Los Angeles native, he excelled in athletics at UCLA in the late 1930s, where he was explosive as a decathlete as well as part of the college football team that also included Jackie Robinson - he, Robinson, and future NFL star Kenny Washington made up three of the four backfields and were dubbed “the Gold Dust Gang” by the press.
Along with Ray Bartlett, there were four Black Americans playing for the Bruins, when only a few dozen at all played on other college football teams. They played eventual conference and Helms national champion USC to a scoreless tie with those championships and 1940 Rose Bowl on the line.
Around the year 1939, Strode, Washington and Robinson provided the UCLA with one of its best seasons in American Football. This had given the three a boost in fame, with fans referring to them as "The Gold Dust Gang". Woody Strode was one of the end position players while Kenny was a running back.
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While in college, Strode joined UCLA’s Alpha Phi Alpha chapter. His world-class decathlon capabilities were spearheaded by a 50 ft (15 m) plus shot put (when the world record was 57 ft (17 m)) and a 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) high jump (the world record at time was 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m)).
When out on the road with the team, Strode had his first experience with racism, something he wasn't aware of growing up in Los Angeles.
"We were unconscious of color. We used to sit in the best seats at the Coconut Grove (a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel) listening to Donald Novis sing. If someone said, 'there's a Negro over there,' I was just as apt as anyone to turn around and say 'Where?'"
He also said, "On the Pacific Coast there wasn't anything we couldn't do. As we got out of the L.A. area we found these racial tensions.
When World War II broke out, Strode was playing for the Hollywood Bears in the Pacific Coast Professional Football League. After the war, he worked at serving subpoenas and escorting prisoners for the L.A. County District Attorney's Office.
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Breaking Barriers in Professional Football
Strode and Kenny Washington were two of the first African Americans to play in major college programs and later the modern National Football League (along with Marion Motley and Bill Willis, who signed with the contemporary rival All-America Football Conference), playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946.
Strode played as an End with the Rams in 1946, playing in 10 games that season. He would retire from pro football after that first season. His fellow Gold Dust Gang member Jackie Robinson would break the color barrier in Major League Baseball a year later in 1947.
In 1948, he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the AAFC, but was released before the season started, whereupon he joined the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union in Canada, where he was a member of Calgary's 1948 Grey Cup Championship team before retiring due to injury in 1949. He broke two ribs and a shoulder.
That year, the Calgary Stampeders etched themselves in Canadian Football League history by completing a 12-0 regular season and winning the Grey Cup Championship.
In the Grey Cup game, Strode grabbed a misplayed lateral pass by Ottawa quarterback Peter Karpuk off the ground, and lumbered almost to the end zone. Pete Thodos would score shortly thereafter to seal a 12-7 Calgary win.
“That was one of the great days in my life and I can remember it very clearly,” Strode told the Toronto Star‘s George Gamester in 1977. “Never had so much fun as I did in Canada. When we won, we all got drunk. And when we lost, we cried like babies.”
Besides marking Calgary’s first Grey Cup championship, the 1948 game proved to be a turning point in Grey Cup lore as well. The Stampeder supporters invaded Toronto and a national party was created. (He never forgot Calgary, however, and returned to the city in 1986 to aid fundraising for the financially-ailing team.)
It was shortly following his military service discharge that Strode was included amongst the original crop of players who collectively broke the National Football League’s color barrier.
“In Canadian ball then, the running halfback was the big target,” explained Strode. “You had to get free on your own because the blocking just wasn’t there. Every time you’d get about five yards, six gigantic defenders would hit you.
“We used to drink rum and scotch before practice just to stay warm. In fact, we used to have rum in our coffee at halftime.
Professional Wrestling Career
In 1941, he began working as a professional wrestler, and in 1946, he and Washington became the first two African-American football players to play in the NFL, when they signed with the Los Angeles Rams.
Wrestling was next on his resume. “Actually, I had been rassling in the off-season anyhow,” Strode told the late, great Canadian newspaper columnist Jim Proudfoot. “I just started to do it full-time in 1951.”
His wrestling career lasted until 1960, but by 1952, Strode had started getting movie parts. (A small role in 1941’s Sundown marked his actual debut.) The fame he had built through football and movies helped open up wrestling as well, and Strode wrestled white grapplers in Texas in the early ’50s.
He wrestled for NWA Los Angeles and Stu Hart throughout the 1950s and even wrestled arguably the top draw in pro wrestling in the 1950s, Gorgeous George.
From the vantage point of wrestling fans, the relevant part of the story began when Strode made his in-ring debut in February of 1940. wrote Lawrence F.
The same year he broke into pro wrestling, he also got his start in Hollywood, making his debut in the 1941 film Sundown. That year, he would head to Canada to work for Stu Hart in his Klondike Wrestling promotion in Calgary, Alberta (later renamed Stampede Wrestling), before returning to the US to work for his hometown NWA Los Angeles.
In other locales, Woody Strode the wrestler was still hailed as a special attraction.
In 1952, Strode wrestled almost every week from August 12, 1952, to December 10, 1952, in different cities in California.
“The long-striding Calgary Stampeder end appeared on a special event of a mat card at Olympia Auditorium and beat Rocca Toma before a crowd of 7,500. Stampeders fans probably had little to be concerned about, at least at that moment.
“Strode took the first go in 10:28 minutes with an arm lock while Menacker threw the Negro after a series of body slams that left the fans paralyzed along with the courageous colored boy.
“Woody Strode, the long-fingered end with a build that would rate at least a runner-up in a ‘Mr.
Hollywood Career
All the while, he continued to work in often uncredited roles in Hollywood films in minor roles, before landing the role of the King of Ethiopia in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments featuring Charleton Heston.
Strode made his first film appearance in Sundown (1941), playing a native policeman. Strode's acting career was re-activated when producer Walter Mirisch spotted him wrestling and cast him as an African warrior in The Lion Hunters (1951), one of the Bomba the Jungle Boy series.
“But then they told me the acting job would pay $500. In the summer of 1951, The Lion Hunters was released, and Strode received his first credited role in a Hollywood film.
They wanted him to shave his head. He was reluctant until they offered him $500 a week. "I said, 'All right, where are the pluckers?'" Then Strode realised: "I was out in the world market with a bald head. Trapped for life.
Strode was in City Beneath the Sea (1953) with Robert Ryan and Anthony Quinn, directed by Budd Boetticher, and The Royal African Rifles. Additionally, he appeared in several episodes of the 1952-1954 television series Ramar of the Jungle, where he portrayed an African warrior.
Strode was a gladiator in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and was in Jungle Man-Eaters (1954), a Jungle Jim film. He could be seen in The Gambler from Natchez (1954), Jungle Gents (1954) a Bowery Boys movie set in Africa, and The Silver Chalice (1954). He was in a TV adaptation of Mandrake the Magician (1954), a pilot for a series not picked up, and had small parts in Son of Sinbad (1955), Soldiers of Fortune (1955), and Buruuba (1956) a Japanese film set in Africa.
Woody Strode's Most Popular Movies
Cecil B. DeMille cast him in The Ten Commandments (1956) as a slave at $500 a week for five weeks. He had a support role in Tarzan's Fight for Life (1958) and a small part in The Buccaneer (1958).
Strode was next cast in Spartacus (1960) as the Ethiopian gladiator Draba, in which he has to fight Spartacus (played by Kirk Douglas) to the death. Draba wins the contest, but instead of killing Spartacus, he attacks the Roman military commander who paid for the fight.
While making Pork Chop Hill he became a close friend of director John Ford. "The big studios wanted an actor like Sidney [Poitier] or [Harry] Belafonte," recalled Strode. "And this is not being facetious, but Mr. Ford defended me; and I don't know that this is going on.
Strode praised Ford in a 1960 interview. “I was lucky enough this time to have John Ford as my director. That means everything, working with a man like that.” Ford and Strode would also work together on Two Rode Together, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
"That was a classic," he later said. "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 the screen. And I did it myself.
He was in The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961) and guest starred twice on Rawhide, playing an Australian aboriginal in one episode and a buffalo soldier in the other. Ford used him again in Two Rode Together (1962) but it was only a small part, as an Indian. He had a bigger role in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) for Ford, playing Pompey, John Wayne's hired hand.
In 1963, he was cast opposite Jock Mahoney's Tarzan as both the dying leader of an unnamed Asian country and that leader's unsavory brother, Khan, in Tarzan's Three Challenges. He guest starred on The Lieutenant, The Farmer's Daughter and Daniel Boone and had roles in the features Genghis Khan (1965) and 7 Women (1966), the latter the last film he made for Ford.
Strode was very close to the director. "He treated me like a son," said Strode. In the late 1960s, he appeared in several episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan television series.
Strode landed a major starring role as a Bounty Hunter and soldier of fortune in the 1966 Western The Professionals.