Recently I’ve been reading Brad Snyder’s interesting book A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports. Until the mid-1970s baseball’s reserve clause bound one player to his team throughout his career, leaving him no negotiating power and no say in his future. Flood, a good outfielder with the St. Louis Cardinals during the 1960s, was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season. He refused to go, and decided instead to challenge the constitutionality of the reserve clause. Flood wrote the following letter to Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, asserting his right to negotiate freely:

"After twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several States.

"It is my desire to play baseball in 1970, and I am capable of playing. I have received a contract offer from the Philadelphia club, but I believe I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decision. I, therefore, request that you make known to all Major League clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season."

Flood fought the case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. A few years later the reserve clause was greatly weakened as a result of legal action by the baseball players’ union. Though Flood's lawsuit failed, he helped generate a lot of sympathy and publicity over the issue, which later helped the players.

The phrase “Well-Paid Slave” derives from an interview with Flood at the time of his lawsuit. A TV commentator that Flood was paid pretty well for a “slave,” and Flood said “A well paid slave is still a slave.” (As an aside, I wouldn’t call the reserve clause “slavery”—it was unjust and unfair, but it wasn’t slavery).

Though Flood’s challenge to the reserve clause is interesting, perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is its description of what one might call “The Other Drive to Integrate Baseball.”  Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball in 1947, and while things certainly were rough, within a few years there were dozens of blacks playing in the major leagues, and overt racism dissipated. There were also some very honorable stands--some big, some small--made by some high profile figures to help Robinson and to dissipate the hostility.

One of them is described in Teammates, my daughter’s favorite book from elementary school. Teammates, a children’s book, concerns an incident in 1947 when Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a Southerner and a future Hall of Famer, got angry over the racist abuse directed at second baseman Jackie Robinson by a crowd in Cincinnati. Reese shut the crowd up by putting his arm around Robinson’s shoulder.

Perhaps the most direct stand was an obscenity-laced tirade by Leo Durocher, Jackie Robinson’s then-manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Durocher was a scoundrel in general, but played an honorable role here. When Robinson first came to the Dodgers’ spring training camp, a bunch of Dodger players gave Durocher a petition protesting Robinson’s presence on the team. When handed the petition Durocher blew up, saying:

“I don't care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fucking zebra. If I say he plays, he plays. He can put a lot of fucking money in our pockets. Take your petition and shove it up your ass. This guy can take us to the World Series, and so far we haven’t won dick.”

Now that’s a leader…

More covert racism—such as baseball dragging its feet in hiring black managers—survived for a long time after that. There were no black managers until Frank Robinson in the mid-1970s, and even long after that there were few black managers.

The “other” drive to integrate baseball I referred to is the experiences of black players in the minor leagues in the South during the 1950s and early 1960s. This is an area which in some ways has largely been ignored, and the most interesting part of Snyder’s book is his description of Flood’s experiences playing in the South during the1950s. Below is an excerpt from A Well-Paid Slave:

“Just because Jackie Robinson had integrated the major leagues in 1947 did not mean that small that small southern towns were going to accept black players on their major league teams. The Carolina League’s first black player, Percy Miller, lasted just two unhappy weeks with Danville, Virginia, in August 1951. Two years later, Flood’s future Cardinals teammate Bill White, who also played for Danville, was the first black player to survive a full Carolina League team until 1955, just a year before Flood’s arrival. Racism plagued the Southern minor leagues well into the 1960s, and by 1956 had reached a fever pitch in the Carolina League…

“Games at High Point-Thomasville’s Finch Field generally drew between 500 and 1,000 people, and Flood could hear every heckler in the 3,500-seat ballpark. He internalized all the insults he heard in the stands. “One of my first and most enduring memories is of a large, loud cracker who installed himself and his four little boys in a front-row box and started yelling ‘black bastard’ at me,” he said.

”During the first few weeks of the season, Flood could not wait to get home to his room at a black boardinghouse, where every night he would break down and cry. ‘It’s hell down here,’ he wrote home. ‘I didn’t know that people could act like this. The home fans are swell to me, but on the road they are on me all the time…. I don’t know how long I can take it.’

”He called his sister, Barbara, and told her that he wanted to come home. ‘I felt too young for the ordeal,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be home. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted to be free of these animals whose fifty-cent bleacher ticket was a license to curse my color and deny my humanity. I wanted to be free of the imbeciles on my ball team’...
 
”[Yet] Flood understood the stakes. ‘What had started as a chance to test my baseball ability in a professional setting had become an obligation to measure myself as a man,’ he said. ‘As such, it was a matter of life and death. These brutes were trying to destroy me. If they could make me collapse and quit, it would verify their preconceptions. And it would wreck my life.’

”With the Hi-Toms (the name of the High Point-Thomasville team), Flood wore a stealth shield on its back, number 42, the number worn by Jackie Robinson. The number honored his hero, reminded him of what Robinson had gone through, and pushed him to go forward. It was like wearing Superman’s cape.

”Robinson had experienced the South, but not for a whole season. At the start of spring training in 1946, he had to leave Sanford, Florida, in the middle of the night because of threats on his life if he continued to stay there. Two other Florida cities, Jacksonville and DeLand, canceled spring training games in 1946 rather than allow him to play there with the Triple-A Montreal Royals. Later that season he played in two southern border cities, Baltimore and Louisville. The Dodgers tried to insulate him from future spring accidents by training in Havana in 1947 and later purchasing their own spring facilities and housing in Vero Beach, Florida. Robinson and his family, however, still experienced the Jim Crow South outside the walls of the Vero Beach training complex, at spring training games in other Florida towns and during a few exhibition games each spring on the Dodgers’ annual trek north to Brooklyn.

”Flood and other black players of his generation survived entire minor league seasons in the South. ‘We were Jackie’s disciples,’ said Ed Charles, a member of the 1969 World Champion New York Mets who spent one of his eight minor league seasons in the South with Flood. ‘We were and extension of Jackie. We were the early Trailblazers, on the heels of his trailblazing. He was up North. He assigned us to break the barriers in the South…. We had to complete the job that he had started, and that means we had to comport ourselves the way that he did…. We were on a tightrope all the time.’

”Fans in other Carolina League towns tested Flood’s resolve. Greensboro was bad. Smaller, southeastern North Carolina towns such as Wilson, Kinston, and Fayetteville were worse. In Wilson, during one of the league’s two midseason all-star games, a High Point Enterprise columnist noticed the ‘considerable amount of cat-calls directed at the all-Negro outfield.’ In Fayetteville, a military town, one fan called out upon seeing Flood: ‘There’s a goddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with them white boys! I’m leaving.’ In Durham, Flood hit a ball into the left-center-field gap, and his cap flew off as he rounded first base. A man sitting in a wheelchair halfway up the stands behind the Hi-Toms’ dugout yelled: ‘Run, nigger, run’…

”The worst part of life in the Carolina League for Flood was the travel. While teammates saw Flood’s shoulders drop as they got off the bus to eat while he was forced to stay on the bus and wait for them to bring him food. Sometimes he was told to go to the back of the restaurant. He once ate a hamburger in the yard of a diner among barking dogs while his teammates sat inside…

“Like the Carolina League’s dozen other black players, Flood learned an important early lesson: how to duck. As the league’s best hitter, Flood saw more than his share of beanballs and knockdown pitches. Johnny Pesky, the former Red Sox infielder who managed the Durham Bulls that season, praised Flood’s 'attitude' and 'courage.' 'They keep throwing at Flood to keep him loose up there at the plate and he continues to dig in,' Pesky said…

"In a Carolina League game that year in Greensboro, Danville outfielder Leon Wagner mysteriously dropped an easy fly ball. His manager began to yell at him between innings until Wagner explained the situation. '[A] guy was hiding out behind the left-field stands,' Wagner said. 'He pointed a shotgun at me and yelled, ‘Nigger, I’m going to fill you with shot if you catch one ball out here'...

“Flood...thrived despite the torrent of racial abuse... He led the league with a .340 batting average, set a league record with 133 runs, tied for the league lead with 190 hits, finished second to Wagner with 128 home runs. He dazzled teammates with his catches in the outfield and led the league with 388 putouts.

“Pesky proclaimed Flood the league’s best prospect. The Carolina League named him its player of the year. ‘I lit up that league-I carried my ballclub, and if that sounds like bragging, I don’t care,’ Flood said. ‘I played like I was on fire to prove to myself that you can always overcome anything from the outside’…

"After the season’s final game, Flood was excluded from the team party at an all-white establishment until owner Tom Finch…intervened.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Baseball/Sports, African-American Issues, Racism. You can trackback from your own site.