Morgan State Alumni and sports columnist for The New York Times, William Rhoden took a in depth look at the current state of the black athlete and how this current position came to be in his best seller Forty Million Dollar Slaves. What if, in 1945, Jackie Robinson hadn't signed a contract to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and had stayed instead with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League? In this book Rhoden concludes that the black community and most black athletes would have been better off. Rhoden himself was a defensive back at Morgan during the heyday of black college athletics. He was on the roster for Morgan States's historic game at Yankee Stadium against Grambling which was and still is considered the biggest black college football game ever. The book chronicles how the rise of salaries and visibility ultimately resulted in the silence of the black athlete voices on anything other then what they can do on the playing field or sell us.