"The power and the glory of Dusty Rhodes"
Great piece by Chauncey Devega at Salon:
The character Dusty Rhodes was in fact the man Virgil Runnels Jr. Born in rural Texas, Runnels’ father was a plumber and the family lived in poverty. The man who would later become “The American Dream” came of age in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood. He also attended services at a local black Southern Baptist Church, absorbing the cadence and verbal style of its preachers.
I first saw Dusty Rhodes on television during the early 1980s. My grandmother, a fan of roller derby and professional wrestling, would sit me down to watch the latter late at night and on the weekends. She, a black woman from rural North Carolina, had grown up watching all of the great wrestling in the Mid-Atlantic and National Wrestling Alliance “territories” (an industry term for the regional promotions that existed before the juggernaut now called the World Wrestling Entertainment gobbled them up). Watching with me then, my grandmother was extremely animated. She would yell at the television: “Look at that! That man Dusty Rhodes! He is a white soul brother! Beat up that Ric Flair and his phonies for the people, Dusty!”